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This calculator vs. a flat 10¢ a square foot price
“Ten cents a square foot” is not a price for a wash job — it is a price for one surface, quietly reused the moment the customer asks to add the siding while the crew is already there.
What a flat price per square foot is
A flat rate per square foot is the fastest way to quote a wash: multiply the total area by a number and read off a price. It is the number a homeowner holding a mailbox flyer or a search-result special will call and ask you to match, whatever surfaces their job actually adds up to.
The number behind it was set for one surface — usually the concrete driveway advertised on the flyer — and then reused for whatever else gets folded into the square footage, whether or not the rest of the job washes anywhere near as fast as concrete does.
What this calculator is
This page keeps no account and sends nothing to a server. You enter each surface — driveway, walkway, siding, fence, roof — with its own square footage and production rate, plus your loaded wage, round-trip drive, setup, water, overhead, and target margin. It prices each surface's hours separately, then returns the walk-away price and a bid price above your target margin — for this job's actual surface mix, not a generic one.
| What a flat price per square foot does | What this calculator does instead |
|---|---|
| Charges the same $/sq ft whether the job is all concrete driveway or mostly siding, even though siding washes at roughly half the driveway's production rate. | Prices each surface at its own production rate, so a siding-heavy job costs more per square foot than a driveway-only job of the same area. |
| Has no line for round-trip drive time or setup, so a rate that happened to clear cost on the job it was fit to can fall short the moment the surface mix changes. | Prices drive time and setup as billed hours on every job, and reports the after-travel hourly rate that number works out to. |
| Gives the estimator a number to quote, not a number to check a quote against. | Reports the walk-away price and the dollar gap against a flat per-square-foot rate, so an add-on job can be scored against real cost before you commit to it. |
Two jobs, the same surface-blind rate
Using this calculator's own shipped starting rates ($22/hr wage, 25% burden, 40-minute round-trip drive, 20-minute setup, $8 water, $15 equipment wear, 15% overhead, a 25% target margin, $175 minimum):
| Job | This calculator's price | The flat $0.1039/sq ft rate | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2,000 sq ft concrete driveway, no other surfaces — the job the rate is set from | $207.77 bid price; $155.82 break-even cost | $207.77 (exactly $0.1039/sq ft — this rate is fit to this job) | No gap on the job the rate was built on. |
| 2,700 sq ft job: a 300 sq ft driveway plus 2,400 sq ft of soft-washed siding — 94% of the wash hours — added while the crew is already on-site | $372.98 bid price; $279.74 break-even cost | $280.48 | The rate clears this job's own break-even cost by just $0.75 — a 0.3% margin instead of the 25% targeted — and quotes $92.50 below the calculator's own bid price. |
The $0.1039/sq ft rate is not invented — it is this calculator's own price on the driveway-only job, divided by that job's own square footage. It fits that one job by construction. Applied to the siding-heavy add-on job, it still charges by total square footage and never sees that siding is washing at half the driveway's rate. Run your own job's numbers in the calculator to see where it falls.
A flat per-square-foot rate is not wrong because it is simple — it is wrong when it is applied outside the one surface mix it was built for, and nothing about a flat number tells you when that has happened. This calculator does not know your local market; it replaces the arithmetic a flat rate skips.
Common questions
Why does a flat price per square foot get a pressure-washing bid wrong?
Because the cost driver is which surfaces are on the job, not the total square footage a homeowner adds up. Concrete washes at roughly 1,000 sq ft an hour with a surface cleaner; soft-washed siding runs closer to 500 sq ft an hour. A flat rate set from a driveway call cannot see that the siding added once the crew is already on-site takes twice the hours per square foot.
What does a flat price per square foot usually leave out entirely?
Which surfaces make up the total. A rate fit to a fast-washing surface like a concrete driveway is quietly reused for slow-washing surfaces like siding, fencing, or a roof, none of which show up separately once everything is folded into one square-footage number.
How big is the pricing gap in practice?
On this calculator's own shipped starting rates: a 2,000 sq ft driveway alone bids at $207.77, or $0.1039 a square foot. Applying that same rate to a 2,700 sq ft job that is mostly a 2,400 sq ft siding wash (94% of the wash hours) prices at $280.48 — just $0.75 above that job's own $279.74 break-even cost, a 0.3% margin instead of the 25% targeted, and $92.50 below the calculator's own $372.98 bid.
Is a flat price per square foot ever the right way to quote?
For a narrow band of near-identical jobs — the same surface mix as the job the rate was set from — a per-square-foot rate can land close, and on this calculator's own driveway-only preset it is exactly the rate that job supports, because it was set from that job. The risk is applying the same rate once the surface mix changes, because the rate does not know how much siding, fencing, or roof is on the next job and neither does the estimator until the surfaces are actually split out.
Does this calculator know what labor or chemicals cost in my market?
No. It has no data on local labor, chemical, or water rates. It takes each surface's square footage and production rate, your wage, burden, drive time, setup, and target margin, and turns that into a price for this job — the arithmetic a flat per-square-foot rate skips, not a market survey.
Open the Pressure Washing Bid Calculator to price your own job, or read how much should I charge for pressure washing.