How to price roof cleaning jobs

Three pricing models cover almost every roof cleaning business:

1. Per area. A rate per square metre or square foot of roof, adjusted for difficulty. The most defensible model, because the price scales with the work.
2. Flat tiers. Set prices for small / medium / large homes in your service area. Fast to quote and easy for customers to accept, at the cost of some precision on outliers.
3. Hourly. A rate for time on site. Simple — and the one to avoid quoting to customers.

Hourly pricing punishes your own experience: the faster you get, the less you earn, and the quote invites the wrong conversation (“why did it take only two hours?”). Keep an hourly figure internally to sanity-check jobs, but sell the customer an outcome — a clean, treated roof — at a fixed price.

Your rate has to clear your real cost stack, not just your time. Per job, that stack includes:

• labour, at its fully loaded cost (wages, tax, cover);
• chemicals — sodium hypochlorite and surfactant for a soft wash are a real per-job cost, not a rounding error;
• fuel and unpaid travel time;
• insurance, licensing and vehicle costs;
• gear wear — pumps, hoses, harnesses, PPE all have a lifespan;
• an overhead share: phone, software, marketing, quoting time (including every quote that doesn’t close).

A common starting point is direct job costs multiplied by 2.5–3, then rounded to a price that survives the six adjustment factors below. And set a minimum call-out — on a small job, setup and travel are most of the work, which is why experienced operators won’t drop the sprayer for less than roughly $400.

Two roofs with the same footprint can be very different jobs. These are the factors that should move your number:

Quote from a satellite measurement or a proper look, not a glance from the street — under-measuring the roof is the most common self-inflicted discount in this trade.

Treat published ranges as a sanity check, not gospel — your insurance costs, market and competition set the real floor. That said: in the US, residential soft washing commonly runs about $0.20–$0.60 per square foot of roof, which puts a typical single-storey home between roughly $450 and $1,200. In Australia and New Zealand, spray-and-leave moss and mould treatments often sit below that, while full soft washes on larger or steeper homes push well past $1,000.

You will always share a market with a “$99 roof clean” — someone with a pressure washer, no insurance and no idea what soft washing is. You can’t out-price that operator, and you shouldn’t try. You out-explain him: what’s growing on the roof, why blasting it damages the surface, what a proper treatment does, and what happens if it’s left. When the customer understands that, the two quotes stop being comparable.

The same $850 feels expensive as a bare number in a text and fair when it arrives explained: here’s what we found on your roof, here’s the method and why it’s safe for your surface, here’s each line of the job, here’s the guarantee, and we’re licensed and insured. Nothing about the price changed — the context did.

Itemize the quote, name the method, and put your proof (before and afters of similar homes) next to the number. The quote template guide breaks down the nine parts of a quote that closes, and if quotes are going quiet after you send them, the follow-up guide covers reviving them.

This is also the problem Regnumo exists for: every quote goes out as a personalized page with a short video that does this education automatically, so the price is never the only thing the customer sees.

1. Quoting from the street. Measure the roof — satellite tools take a minute and stop you gifting 20% of the area.
2. No minimum call-out. Small jobs eat the same travel, setup and chemical mixing as big ones.
3. Matching the lowest bid. If you can’t explain your difference, you’ve agreed the jobs are identical.
4. Telling customers your hourly rate. You’ve just invited them to time you.
5. One lump sum, zero context. A number with no scope, method or proof attached competes on exactly one thing: being the smallest.