Pressure Washing Calculator

Enter the surface, the size, and how you price it. You get what the job bills, what it really costs, the hourly rate you are earning once the drive and setup are counted, and the market range a homeowner should expect to be quoted.

Per square foot Per hour Flat price

Surface (sets the published rate band and the default chemical cost)

Square feet (prices the job in per square foot mode; in the other two modes it still powers the homeowner check)

Your price per square foot ($) (blank uses the middle of the published band for the surface above. Driveways run 15 to 30 cents, roofs 35 to 75)

Hours on site (spraying, rinsing, moving the hose. Not the drive, not the setup: those are counted separately below)

Drive miles, round trip (the honest one. This is what quietly turns a good rate into a bad hour)

Chemicals for this job ($) (blank uses our per-surface default: $10 a driveway, $18 a house wash. Sodium hypochlorite plus surfactant)

Setup and teardown (minutes) (unload, connect, mix, then coil and load again. Blank uses 30, our editorial default)

Jobs a week (the dial that turns a good job into a living)

Equipment cost ($, optional) (what the rig cost or would cost. A working setup is $3,000 to $5,000; a commercial rig with a trailer is $8,000 to $15,000)

General liability insurance ($ a month) (blank uses $75, the published average for this trade. Enter 0 if you are uninsured and read the insurance section below)

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Data reviewed: August 2026. Figures here come from published sources and change over time. How we verify

How this pressure washing calculator works

This page has two readers and it is built for both of them at once. If you own the machine, you are here to answer "what should I charge for this driveway, and what do I actually keep?" If you own the driveway, you are here to answer "is $350 reasonable for 1,200 square feet?" Those turn out to be the same arithmetic read from opposite ends, so we built the operator's version and let the homeowner's answer fall out of it. Every result carries a market range line for exactly that reason.

Pick how you price (per square foot, per hour, or flat), enter the job, and the calculator runs the whole waterfall: what the job bills, what the chemicals and the driving and the wear on the machine cost, what self-employment tax takes, and what you keep. Then it does the thing almost no pricing guide does, and shows you the hourly rate you are really earning once the drive and the setup are counted as part of the job. Your results will vary. Rates, chemical prices, and how many jobs a week you can actually book swing hard by market and by season, so treat this as the levers rather than a promise.

The formula

job price = square feet × your rate, or hours × your hourly, or your flat quote
job costs = chemicals + (drive miles × 24.04 cents) + (equipment cost ÷ 1,200 billable hours × hours on site) + insurance share
hours of your day = hours on site + drive miles ÷ 30 mph + setup and teardown
real dollars an hour = (job price - job costs - self-employment tax) ÷ hours of your day
self-employment tax = 15.3% × 92.35% × annual profit (once net earnings reach $400)

The 24.04 cents is AAA's 2025 fuel (13 cents) plus maintenance, repair, and tires (11.04 cents), the honest marginal cost of driving a truck you would own anyway, pinned to the same figure our robotaxi cost calculator uses. The 1,200 billable hours is the denominator the pricing guides themselves use to spread a machine's cost (their worked example puts a $6,000 machine at $5 an hour). The 30 mph is our own estimate for a suburban round trip and is the softest number on this page, so it is stated rather than buried. Self-employment tax is statutory, and our quarterly tax calculator handles the payments.

Worked example

A 1,000 square foot concrete driveway at 22.5 cents a square foot (the middle of the published 15 to 30 cent band), 2.5 hours on site, 20 miles round trip, $10 of chemicals, a $4,000 rig, $75 a month of liability insurance, at 4 jobs a week.

The job bills $225.00. Costs are $10.00 of chemicals, $4.81 of driving, an $8.33 equipment reserve, and $7.03 of insurance, so $194.83 is left before tax and $168.77 after self-employment tax. That is the headline: you keep about $169 on this $225 driveway.

Now the number that decides whether to take it. The job is 2.5 hours of spraying, 40 minutes of driving, and 30 minutes of setup and teardown: 3 hours 40 minutes of your day. Against the spraying alone it looks like $90.00 an hour. Against the whole thing, after every cost and after tax, it is $46.03 an hour. The invoice is not lying. It is just answering a different question than the one your day asked.

A season at this pace: 128 jobs, $21,602.24 net, which is $1,800.19 a month averaged over a full year. Held all 52 weeks it would be $35,586.67, which is what a Sun Belt operator can chase and a Minnesota one cannot.

Paying off the rig: about 20 jobs like this one, roughly 5 weeks at 4 jobs a week. That count uses what the job keeps before the equipment reserve ($203.16), because the reserve is money already earmarked for the same machine and charging both would charge you twice for one washer.

The homeowner check: 1,000 square feet of concrete driveway quotes in the $150 to $300 range at published market rates, so $225 sits comfortably inside it.

Three ways to price, and when each one wins

Per square foot wins on flatwork: driveways, sidewalks, patios, parking lots. You measure the thing you are spraying, the customer can check your arithmetic, and the number scales honestly with the work. Published 2026 guides put residential flatwork between 15 and 75 cents a square foot depending on surface, with concrete at the cheap end (15 to 30 cents) and roof soft washing at the expensive end (35 to 75 cents), because a roof is slower, riskier, and chemical-heavy.

Per hour wins when you genuinely cannot predict the time: heavy oil staining, restoration work, multi-story access, anything where a wall might take one pass or four. Guides put the trade at $60 to $160 an hour. The catch is that hourly pricing quietly punishes you for getting faster, which is the opposite of what a business wants, so most operators use it as a fallback rather than a default.

Flat pricing is what nearly every homeowner is actually quoted, and it is the model that hides the most from the person doing the quoting. A flat number contains no evidence about whether it covers the drive, the chemicals, or the two hours you lost to a hose reel. That is fine as long as you built it from the arithmetic first, which is what this page is for. Notice a detail in the published flat rates: a driveway quotes at $100 to $300 while the square foot math on a typical 400 to 600 square foot driveway produces only $60 to $180. The market's own flat rates sit above its own square foot rates on small jobs, and the reason is the next section.

The drive-time truth, in one piece of arithmetic

Here is the thing every operator learns in year two and no pricing guide puts in a headline. Your drive and your setup cost the same whether the job is a sidewalk or a shopping centre. They are fixed, and fixed costs are brutal on small jobs.

Take the worked example and cut it in half. A 500 square foot driveway at the same 22.5 cents bills $112.50 and takes 1.25 hours of spraying. But the drive is still 40 minutes and the setup is still 30, so it is 2 hours 25 minutes of your day and it keeps $91.49. Now double the original instead: 2,000 square feet bills $450.00, takes 5 hours on site, 6 hours 10 minutes of your day, and keeps $401.49. Same rate, same customer, same truck.

Read those as dollars per hour of your actual day and the three jobs pay $37.86, $53.13, and $65.11. The big job pays 72 percent more per hour than the small one at an identical price per square foot. Nothing about your skill changed; the drive and the setup simply did not get any shorter when the job did.

This is why experienced operators turn down small jobs across town, and why they often sound rude doing it. They are not being precious. They have run this number. It is also why the minimum service charge exists: $100 to $150 at most shops, up to $250 at some, and it is not greed, it is the fixed half of the job wearing a price tag. The practical move is not to refuse small work, it is to route it. Three small jobs on one street share one drive, and the arithmetic stops being ugly immediately.

Soft wash versus high pressure, and the roof you must not blast

This is the safety and liability section, and it is short because the rule is short. High pressure belongs on concrete. It does not belong on a roof, and mostly does not belong on siding.

A pressure washer removes dirt with force. Soft washing removes it with chemistry: a low-pressure application of sodium hypochlorite and surfactant, left to dwell, then rinsed. On an asphalt shingle roof the difference is not stylistic. High pressure strips the protective granules off the shingles, which is the layer standing between the asphalt and the sun, and a roof that loses its granules loses years. The Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association's published guidance is low-pressure chemical cleaning, and most shingle manufacturers explicitly exclude pressure-cleaned roofs from their warranty. So the homeowner who hires the cheapest roof cleaner can end up paying for a roof, and the operator who brings a wand to a roof can end up in the middle of that conversation.

Siding is the same argument with lower stakes. Vinyl, painted wood, and stucco can all be driven full of water or stripped of finish by a wand held too close, and water forced up behind a lap board does not come back out on schedule. That is why a "house wash" in this trade almost always means a soft wash, and it is why the chemical line on a house is the biggest one on this page while the pressure is the smallest.

If you are a homeowner reading a quote, this is your single best question: "is that soft washed or pressure washed?" The answer tells you more about who you are hiring than the price does.

What the chemicals actually cost

Less than most people guess, and more than most beginners budget. Twelve and a half percent sodium hypochlorite runs about $2 to $3 a gallon in bulk from equipment suppliers, and $4 to $6 out west. A typical 2,000 square foot house pulls roughly 4 to 5 gallons of it through a downstream injector to land the standard mix on the wall, plus surfactant at 2 to 4 ounces per gallon of mix, which is another $1 to $3. All in, a house wash is about $14 to $23 of chemicals in a typical market and $9 to $18 in a cheap one. A driveway is less, often around $10 of degreaser, since concrete does most of its work through pressure and a surface cleaner.

Water is deliberately not on the cost list, and here is the honest note about it: it is the customer's, off the customer's spigot. Your machine at about 4 gallons a minute pulls roughly 600 gallons in a two and a half hour driveway job, which sounds enormous and costs the homeowner a few dollars. The one case where that changes is a buffer tank job where you haul your own water, and then it is a real line item that this page does not price for you.

Insurance, without the scare tactics

General liability for a pressure washing business averages about $75 a month, or $895 a year, for a typical $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate policy with a $500 deductible. A second source puts the band at $500 to $1,500 a year for that level of cover. That is the whole cost, and this page defaults it in rather than leaving it out, because leaving it out is how a business plan quietly becomes fiction.

Here is why the trade specifically needs it, stated plainly and once. Pressure washing is one of the few side businesses where the tool is capable of damaging the customer's property in a way that is visible, expensive, and unarguably yours: etched concrete, stripped paint, water driven behind siding, a shingle roof aged five years in an afternoon, a window seal blown. Add ladders and wet surfaces and there is a bodily-injury exposure too. None of that is likely on any given Saturday. All of it is survivable with a policy and potentially business-ending without one.

The other reason is commercial. Property managers, HOAs, and real estate agents are the customers who book repeatedly and pay on time, and most of them will ask for a certificate of insurance before they will book you at all. At $75 a month, the policy tends to pay for itself in access before it ever pays for itself in claims.

Seasonality, and why the annual number has an asterisk

In most of the country this is a spring and summer business. Freezing weather ends it outright (water in a pump is a broken pump), spring brings the green algae everyone finally notices, and the late-autumn rush is people getting the house presentable before the holidays. This page prices a season at 32 weeks, which is our own estimate of the working window in a mid-latitude market, and it also shows the 52-week figure so you can see the gap. Florida, Texas, and Arizona operators can chase something close to the year-round number; a northern operator cannot, and a business plan built on 52 weeks in Michigan is a business plan built on a warm January.

Two things the good operators do with that. They stack the shoulder seasons deliberately, because March and October are when the phone rings and the competition is still winterised. And they attach a second service to the same truck for the cold months, usually gutter cleaning, holiday lighting, or snow work, so the fixed costs (the insurance, the truck, the phone) have something to sit on when the washer is drained.

If you are the homeowner reading a quote

Run the calculator with your square footage and read the market range line, then use this to interpret the gap. A quote goes up legitimately for: height and access (a second story, a steep roof, a fenced back garden the hose has to reach), the age and severity of the staining (an oil-stained driveway or a north-facing wall of black algae is a slower job), the surface (roofs and decks cost more per square foot than concrete for good reasons), whether the price includes both sides of a fence, whether it includes a sealer afterwards, and whether the company is insured, which you should ask about directly.

A quote goes down legitimately for: a big simple flat area (you are buying the operator's best hour of the day), several jobs booked at once on the same visit, and being on the same street as a job they already have, which is the routing advantage in the section above turned to your benefit.

A quote that is dramatically below the market range is worth one extra question rather than instant delight. On flatwork it is often just a hungry newer operator, which is a fine deal. On a roof or on siding it can mean an uninsured wand, and the arithmetic on that goes badly for the person who owns the roof.

The 15.3 percent nobody withholds

Pressure washing income is self-employment income, so both halves of Social Security and Medicare land on you: 15.3 percent on 92.35 percent of your net profit, owed once net self-employment earnings reach $400 for the year, with nothing withheld by anybody. In the worked example that is $3,335.67 on a season's profit, and federal and state income tax come on top depending on your whole return.

The deduction that matters most here is the one you have to write down as it happens: every business mile. The IRS values them at 76 cents each for the second half of 2026, and this page uses that figure on the tax line even though it charges the honest 24.04 cents on the cost line, because those are two different questions about the same miles. In the worked example the mileage log is worth more than the driving actually costs. Our mileage reimbursement calculator prices the log, and our quarterly tax calculator tells you what the estimated payments should be. Set the money aside the day the customer pays you, not the day the bill arrives.

Sources

Where the numbers on this page come from. We go to the body that publishes the figure, not to another calculator. Figures on this page were checked against these sources in August 2026. See how we verify.

Pressure Washing Pricing Guide: 2026 Rates and Pricing Tips, Housecall Pro. INDUSTRY. The pricing-model backbone: residential flatwork at $0.15 to $0.75 a square foot and commercial flatwork at $0.08 to $0.40, flat rates of $100 to $300 a driveway, $250 to $800 a house, $150 to $500 a deck, minimums between $100 and $250, and target margins of 20 to 40 percent. It also supplies two figures this calculator uses directly: a worked chemical cost of $10 a job (0.25 gallons of a $40 degreaser) and the equipment allocation method, a $6,000 machine spread over 1,200 billable hours to give $5 an hour. Read August 3, 2026.
Pressure Washing Cost: 2026 Prices by Surface, LawnGuru. INDUSTRY. The per-surface bands this page encodes, with the typical job size beside each one: concrete driveway $0.15 to $0.30 (400 to 600 sq ft), sidewalk $0.10 to $0.20 (200 to 400), deck or patio $0.30 to $0.50 (300 to 500), house exterior $0.25 to $0.50 (1,500 to 2,500), fence $0.30 to $0.60 (100 to 200 linear feet), roof soft wash $0.35 to $0.75 (1,200 to 2,000). Flat bands: driveway $100 to $300, house $200 to $600, deck $150 to $400, fence $150 to $400, roof $300 to $700, sidewalk $50 to $150. Minimum service charge $100 to $150 an appointment. Read August 3, 2026.
Pressure Washing Rates 2026: How Much Should You Charge, AirQuote. INDUSTRY. The hourly band this page encodes: $60 to $160 an hour in 2026, alongside $0.20 to $0.50 a square foot and flat-rate projects of $150 to $1,200. Corroborated by a separate hourly guide putting the trade at $50 to $160. This page's blank-field hourly default of $110 is the arithmetic midpoint of the $60 to $160 band, not a published figure.
Sodium Hypochlorite 101: Guide for Soft Washing Professionals, Softwash Technologies. INDUSTRY. The chemical arithmetic: 12.5 percent sodium hypochlorite at $2 to $3 a gallon in bulk from equipment suppliers and $4 to $6 a gallon out west, a typical 2,000 square foot house pulling 4 to 5 gallons through a downstream injector at the standard 1 percent mix on the wall, surfactant at 2 to 4 ounces per gallon of mix adding $1 to $3 a job, and an all-in chemical cost of $14 to $23 a house, falling to $9 to $18 in a cheap-chemical market. The cheap-market band reproduces exactly from the gallon count and the bulk price, which this page's tests assert.
Pressure Washing Insurance Costs, Insureon. INDUSTRY. The insurance default: "Pressure washing companies pay an average of $75 per month, or $895 per year, for general liability insurance," on a representative policy of $1 million per occurrence, $2 million aggregate, $500 deductible. Note the published annual figure of $895 is $5 under twelve times the published monthly figure, which is their rounding, not ours; this page carries both and tests that they agree within $5.
Pressure Washing Business Insurance Cost, MoneyGeek. INDUSTRY, corroborating source. Puts the typical spend at $500 to $1,500 a year for $1 million of general liability cover, a wider band around the $895 average above. Used on the page as the honest range rather than a single number.
Pressure Washing Business Startup Cost in 2026, Mike Vidan. INDUSTRY. The equipment bands: a basic business starting at $3,000 to $5,000, a professional setup with a commercial machine, trailer, and surface cleaner at $8,000 to $15,000, a gas 4 GPM / 3,000 to 4,000 PSI washer at $800 to $4,000, a 20 inch surface cleaner at $100 to $400, 200 feet of 4,000 PSI hose at $150 to $500, and hose reels at $300 to $1,200. This page's entry-rig figure of $1,200 is our own assembly of the low ends of those component prices and is labeled editorial.
Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association guidance on cleaning asphalt shingles, ARMA, as reported by roofing and soft wash trade sources. SAFETY. ARMA recommends low-pressure bleach or detergent assisted washing as the method for cleaning algae and moss from asphalt shingles, specifically to avoid the granule loss that high pressure causes. Most shingle manufacturers exclude pressure-cleaned roofs from warranty coverage. This is the basis for the page's plain statement that high pressure does not belong on a roof; the calculator prices roof work as soft wash only.
Your Driving Costs 2025 brochure, AAA. The driving line: fuel at 13.00 cents a mile plus maintenance, repair, and tires at 11.04 cents = 24.04 cents, the honest marginal charge for driving a truck you would own anyway. Pinned in lockstep with our robotaxi cost calculator, and a test evaluates that page's own code to prove the two have not drifted.
Standard mileage rates, Internal Revenue Service. 76 cents a business mile for July to December 2026, raised mid-year by Announcement 2026-11. Used on the tax line only, because what a mile costs and what a mile deducts are two different questions about the same mile. In lockstep with our mileage reimbursement calculator.
Self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare taxes), Internal Revenue Service. The statutory formula this page computes rather than approximates: 15.3 percent on 92.35 percent of net self-employment profit, owed once net earnings reach $400 for the year, with nothing withheld by anybody.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I charge for pressure washing?

The trade uses three models and each wins somewhere. Per square foot suits flatwork, with published 2026 bands of 15 to 30 cents for a concrete driveway, 25 to 50 cents for a house wash, 30 to 50 cents for a deck, and 35 to 75 cents for a roof soft wash. Per hour suits unpredictable work at $60 to $160 an hour. Flat pricing suits everything you quote in a driveway conversation, at $100 to $300 for a driveway or $200 to $600 for a house. Whichever you pick, set a minimum of $100 to $150 an appointment, because the drive and the setup cost the same on a small job as a large one.

How much do pressure washers make?

It comes down to jobs a week, not rate. In this page's worked example a 1,000 square foot driveway at 22.5 cents a square foot bills $225 and keeps about $169 after chemicals, driving, equipment wear, insurance, and self-employment tax. At 4 jobs a week for a 32 week season that is about $21,602 net, or roughly $35,587 if you could hold the pace all 52 weeks, which a Sun Belt operator can chase and a northern one cannot. Your results will vary with your market, your routing, and how full the calendar gets.

How much does it cost to pressure wash a driveway?

At published 2026 market rates a concrete driveway runs 15 to 30 cents a square foot, so a typical 400 to 600 square foot driveway quotes at roughly $100 to $300 flat. Notice the flat band sits above the square foot math on small driveways, which is not a markup so much as the minimum service charge showing through: most companies will not roll a truck for less than $100 to $150 because the drive and setup are the same either way. If your driveway is stained with oil or has never been cleaned, expect the upper end.

Do I need insurance to pressure wash?

You are not usually required by law, and you are very exposed without it. General liability for this trade averages about $75 a month or $895 a year for $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate, with a second source putting the range at $500 to $1,500 a year. The reason the trade specifically needs it is that the tool can damage a customer's property visibly and expensively: etched concrete, stripped paint, water driven behind siding, a shingle roof aged years in an afternoon. There is a commercial reason too, since property managers and HOAs generally will not book you without a certificate of insurance.

Why do pressure washing companies charge so much for small jobs?

Because the fixed half of a job does not shrink with the job. In this page's worked example the drive is 40 minutes and setup and teardown is 30, on every visit regardless of size. Halve the driveway and the same rate pays $37.86 for every hour of your day; double it and the identical rate pays $65.11. That is a 72 percent swing from nothing but the size of the job, which is why minimums exist and why a company will often quote a small job at a discount if it is on the same street as one they already have.

Is soft washing different from pressure washing?

Yes, and on some surfaces the difference is expensive. Pressure washing removes dirt with force; soft washing removes it with chemistry, applying sodium hypochlorite and a surfactant at low pressure, letting it dwell, then rinsing. Roofs must be soft washed: the Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association recommends low-pressure chemical cleaning, and high pressure strips the protective granules off shingles, which most manufacturers treat as grounds to void the warranty. Siding is the same argument with lower stakes, which is why a house wash in this trade almost always means a soft wash.

How much do chemicals cost per pressure washing job?

Less than most people guess. Twelve and a half percent sodium hypochlorite is about $2 to $3 a gallon in bulk, $4 to $6 out west. A typical 2,000 square foot house pulls 4 to 5 gallons through a downstream injector plus $1 to $3 of surfactant, so a house wash is about $14 to $23 of chemicals in a typical market and $9 to $18 in a cheap one. A driveway is closer to $10 of degreaser, because concrete does most of the work through pressure and a surface cleaner. Water is normally the customer's, off the customer's spigot.

How many jobs does it take to pay off a pressure washer?

Fewer than most beginners expect, which is why the trade attracts them. In this page's worked example a $4,000 working rig comes back after about 20 driveways like the one modeled, roughly five weeks at four jobs a week. Two honesty notes. The payback count uses what a job keeps before the equipment reserve, because the reserve is money already earmarked for the same machine and counting both would charge you twice. And a rig is the cheap part: insurance, fuel, chemicals, and the weeks with no phone calls are what actually decide whether the business works.