How to price a house wash for profit
House washing is the highest-frequency repeat service in residential exterior cleaning — most homeowners want it done annually, which makes a clean, defensible price the base of a recurring book of work rather than a one-off. In most markets siding prices between $0.25 and $0.35 per square foot of wall area, putting a typical single-story home at $250–$450 and a two-story at $400–$700. Those bands are your market anchor, not your quote: the number you send should come from reconciling that rate against your real cost per job.
Price from the wall, not the footprint. Walk the house and estimate siding square footage — perimeter times wall height, minus nothing for windows on a first pass — then read condition honestly. A north wall furred with green algae is a different job from a lightly-dusted south wall, and it changes both your mix strength and your dwell time. Set a hard minimum charge (a $150 floor is standard) so a small ranch or a detached garage still covers the drive, setup, and mixing time that every job carries regardless of size.
Soft washing vs pressure washing siding
Siding is a soft-wash surface, not a pressure surface. Vinyl, stucco, painted wood, and painted brick all get a low-pressure application of a sodium hypochlorite solution with a surfactant — never a high-pressure tip, which drives water behind the siding and strips paint. Aim for roughly 1–1.5% SH at the wall for maintenance washes, stepping up toward 3–4% only for heavy shaded algae. From 12.5% stock, a downstream injector at about 10:1 lands just under 1% at the surface; a batch mix lets you dial an exact percentage in the tank. Add a surfactant at 1–2 oz per gallon so the solution clings and dwells instead of running off dry. Wet the landscaping before and after, let the mix dwell, then rinse. The SH dilution calculator above sizes the exact gallons and surfactant for your tank or injector.
Estimating labor and chemical cost
Production on siding runs roughly 300–400 square feet of wall per hour in moderate condition, slower on cut-up two-story elevations with a lot of trim and ladder work. Multiply your estimated on-site hours by crew size and your fully-loaded hourly cost to get labor, then add the chemical cost from your mix and the fuel for the round trip. Chemical is real money that quietly disappears if you track it by the quarter instead of by the job — the SH dilution calculator reports the cost of the exact batch you mixed so you can carry it straight into the job profitability calculator and see whether the quote actually cleared your margin, not just your gut.
One-story vs two-story pricing
Two-story homes typically price 30–50% above a single-story of the same footprint, and the gap is not arbitrary. Second-story elevations mean ladder repositioning, more time per square foot, and real safety overhead — the extra minutes and the extra risk are both costs you should be paid for. Don't discount them to win a bid; a two-story wash that prices like a ranch is a job you technically won and financially lost. Use the regional pricing table as a sanity check against your market once verified figures are in place — it tells you whether your number is in the right neighborhood, but it is never the quote itself. The quote comes from your cost and the specific home's access and condition.
Common house-washing pricing mistakes
The mistakes that erode margin on house washing are habits, not arithmetic. Under-mixing SH to save chemical means a callback and a re-wash — the most expensive way to clean a house twice. Forgetting to price the drive turns a distant $300 job into a break-even afternoon once unbilled windshield time and fuel come out. Skipping a minimum charge lets small jobs eat the same setup overhead as large ones with none of the revenue. And quoting from memory ignores that this house is not the last house — condition, siding type, and access all move the number. Mix to a measured percentage, price the drive, hold your minimum, and let the tools do the math on every job instead of every third one.
Keep pricing tight across surfaces
House washing rarely goes out alone. When you bundle it with wood care, run the numbers on the deck cleaning cost calculator, and for a full breakdown of per-surface rates read the pressure washing pricing guide. Ready to send it? Build the itemized estimate with the power washing quote tool.