Free Pressure Washing Estimate Calculator

Add up your true direct costs — labor including burden, materials with markup, and job extras like equipment or disposal. Add a contingency for surprises if the job has any. That's your break-even, the floor you never quote below. Then add your profit on top: price = break-even × (1 + profit%). This calculator runs exactly that math as you type, and shows the result both ways — what you added on to your costs, and what share of the final price that leaves you — because the two numbers are easy to confuse and quoting on the wrong one is how a job loses money.

Burden is everything an hour of labor costs beyond the paycheck: payroll taxes (typically 8–10% of wages), workers' compensation (a few percent for low-risk trades, well over 15% for high-risk ones like roofing or concrete), liability insurance, and paid time off. All-in burden commonly lands between 15% and 40% on top of base pay — and forgetting it is one of the most common ways a profitable-looking job loses money. If you're solo and paying yourself, you can leave it at 0%.

Markup is a percentage added on top of your cost; margin is your share of the final price. Adding 100% on top — charging double your costs — is the same thing as a 50% margin. Quoting a markup when you mean a margin is one of the most common ways contractors underprice a job, so this calculator keeps it simple: you enter what you add on top — no cap — and it always shows what share of the final price that leaves you.

Work backward from your own numbers instead of copying competitors: add up what you want to earn in a year plus every cost of being in business, then divide by your realistic billable hours — most pressure washing pros bill far fewer hours than they work. That result is your floor. Local demand, licensing, and skill decide how far above it you can go.

Somewhere between 15% and 50% is common practice across the trades, and it isn't padding: the markup pays for sourcing time, supply runs, returns, warranty callbacks, and the money you float between buying materials and getting paid. If the customer supplies materials, price the labor accordingly — you still carry the workmanship risk.

The first pass tells you what you actually bought. A drive nobody has washed in fifteen years wants a pre-treat, a dwell and then a slow second pass with the surface cleaner, and heavy black algae or lichen halves the speed you quoted against. Rust, tannin and battery acid are separate applications with their own rinse.

Water sets the ceiling more than the machine does, since an old hose bib or a house on a shallow well will not feed eight gallons a minute, so you wash in bursts while the buffer tank catches up. Wind stops you the moment it starts carrying chemical onto cars and beds, sun dries a wall before the mix can dwell so you keep re-wetting it, and cold weakens everything.

Then the equipment. A surface cleaner swivel, an unloader or a burst hose ends the afternoon, and nothing on the truck is a five minute fix. Height adds its own hours: a second storey means ladders, a telescoping wand or a lift, and every setup is time when the wand is not on the wall.

This trade is labour, water and chemical, and there is almost nothing to count. What you carry is consumable: sodium hypochlorite, surfactant, a caustic wood cleaner, oxalic brightener, degreaser, rust remover.

The thing worth knowing is that hypochlorite does not keep. It loses strength on the shelf and loses it faster in heat and daylight, so a drum that washed a house at one ratio in June will not do the same work in August, and a dilution you recorded means nothing without the date the drum was filled. Buy it fresh, store it dark, mix what you will use, because whatever is left in the bucket is waste. Chlorine tightens up through pool season.

Sealer and polymeric sand are the exceptions that behave like real materials, and both go by porosity and joint width, so old exposed aggregate and wide flagstone joints drink far past the label. Everything else you spend is equipment wear: pump oil, nozzles, hose, quick connects and the surface cleaner's bearings, all of which are bought in advance and none of which land on the invoice of the job that finished them.

Free and unlimited, no account needed. The math runs in your browser and your pricing setup saves only on your own device — we never see your numbers. Printing or sending the estimate it makes counts as a document: your first 2 are free, with no account.