Pressure Washing Cost Calculator
Find the real cost of an hour on the truck, your break-even rate, and the price you need to clear a target margin. No login, no paywall, and the math runs in your browser.
Starting points only. Real pay, overhead, and consumables vary by rig and market. Change every field to your own numbers.
The pay you want for yourself, plus any crew, per hour worked.
Billable hours are fewer than hours worked. Driving, setup, quoting, and dump runs do not bill.
Insurance, truck payment, base fuel, phone, software, and marketing. The bills that arrive whether you work or not.
Chemicals, on-site fuel, and equipment wear for each hour of work.
Profit as a share of the price you charge, not a markup on cost.
Enter your current hourly rate to see the profit or loss gap.
What an hour actually costs you
- Break-even rate
- $51 / hr
- Billable hours / month
- 108 hrs
- Overhead / hour
- $18 / hr
Anything under $51 / hr loses money on every job. Add your current rate above to see your gap.
The profile figures are directional starting points, not a standard. Production rates, overhead, and chemical and fuel costs swing widely by rig, route, region, and how a truck is financed. Run the math on your own books and receipts before you set a price.
How the true-cost math works
Bill hours, not worked hours
Fixed overhead does not care how you spend your day. It has to be paid back out of the hours you actually invoice. Bill five hours a day, five days a week, and you have about 108 billable hours a month to carry every fixed bill. Divide your overhead by that number, not by the hours you were awake, and the cost per hour jumps.
Margin is a share of price
A target margin is profit measured against the price you charge, so the rate to hit it is your cost divided by one minus the margin. A 30 percent margin on a $51 cost is about $73 an hour. A 30 percent markup would only reach about $66. Marking up cost and setting a margin are not the same move, and the difference is real money on every job.
Find your real billable hours
- Track one normal week. Log the clock time from leaving the shop to getting home, every day.
- Inside that week, log only the minutes a nozzle is actually moving on a surface you will invoice.
- Divide the billed minutes by the days worked. That is your honest billable hours per day, and it is usually lower than the number in your head.
- Multiply by days per week and by 4.33 weeks to get billable hours per month. Enter that above and the calculator spreads your overhead across it.
This is the number most operators skip. Price off worked hours and your overhead looks cheap per hour, so your rate comes in low and you feel busy while the margin quietly disappears. Bill fewer hours than you work, always, and let the price reflect it.
Questions operators ask
What does it really cost to run a pressure washing business per hour?
Your true cost per hour is labor plus overhead spread across billable hours plus variable cost per hour. Take a solo operator paying themselves $25 an hour, carrying $2,000 a month in fixed overhead, and billing about 108 hours a month. The overhead alone is roughly $18 an hour. Add $8 an hour in chemicals, fuel, and wear and the floor is near $51 an hour before any profit. Your own numbers will differ, so run them, but almost every operator who does this math finds their real cost is higher than they thought.
Why are billable hours fewer than the hours I actually work?
A work day is not all revenue. Driving between jobs, loading and setup, quoting, dump runs, and equipment maintenance all take time you cannot invoice. If you leave the house for nine hours but only five land on a surface, only those five hours carry your overhead. Spreading fixed costs over the hours you work instead of the hours you bill understates your cost per hour, and that gap is where underpricing hides.
What profit margin should a pressure washing business target?
Many operators aim for a net margin somewhere between 30 and 50 percent, but that is a directional range, not a standard. Margin is profit as a share of the price you charge, so a 30 percent margin on a $51 cost means charging about $73. That is different from a 30 percent markup, which would only reach about $66. What you can hold depends on your market, your route density, and how lean your overhead is. Pick a target, price to it, and check it against your books.
Is this calculator free?
Yes. No login, no paywall. It runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere. Some field-service apps charge a monthly fee for the same arithmetic.
Built by the team behind
Pepper’s Pressure Washing’s marketing
We build the websites, local SEO, and lead tracking that turn a pressure washing route into booked jobs. See how we run the pressure washing marketing system, or read the Pepper’s case study. Knowing your real cost per hour is also how you weigh marketing: our guide to getting pressure washing leads ranks every channel by what it costs per booked job.
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