SURFACEMEASURE

Pressure washing · contractor tools

Quote pressure washing jobs without a site visit

Trace the driveway, the walk and the patio on satellite imagery, get real square footage, and price the job at your own rate before the lead goes cold.

Start 7-Day Free TrialOr run the numbers by hand first
$0.08–$0.20
Market rate per sq ft, concrete driveway
1,400
Sq ft an hour, 20 inch surface cleaner on smooth concrete
1–3%
Satellite area against a tape measurement

What a residential wash is worth

Pressure washing is sold by the square foot, so the measurement is the quote. These are the bands residential work lands in.

What a residential wash is worth
SurfaceRate per sq ftJob total
Concrete drivewayA two-car driveway is about 600 sq ft. At the bottom of the band you are under the $100 minimum, so the floor sets the price, not the rate.$0.08–$0.20$48–$120
Concrete patioA 300 sq ft patio almost never stands alone. Quote it on the visit you are already making for the driveway.$0.08–$0.18$24–$54
Pool deck, net areaPriced above plain concrete. The 900 sq ft is deck only, with the water taken out of it.$0.10–$0.25$90–$225
Paver driveway or patio600 sq ft again. Joints need lower pressure and more passes, which is what puts the rate above concrete.$0.15–$0.35$90–$210

Bands are commonly reported U.S. residential ranges, held on the contractor pricing reference and reviewed periodically. Use them to sanity-check your own number. Build the number itself from your costs, your minimum and the job in front of you.

One house, measured and priced

A three-surface residential job, quoted from the office. The diagram and the arithmetic below it use the same figures, so nothing here is illustrative.

20 × 30 ft14 × 18 ft4 × 42 ftTOTAL AREA1,020sq ft
Driveway, rear patio and front walk, drawn to their real proportions and traced as three shapes. The tool adds them as you go, so the running total is the number you quote from.

The measurement

Driveway20 × 30 ft
600 sq ft
Front walk4 × 42 ft
168 sq ft
Rear patio14 × 18 ft
252 sq ft
Total washable areaWhat the quote is built on
1,020 sq ft

The quote

RateMid-band concrete, your number goes here
$0.14 / sq ft
1,020 sq ft at $0.14Before rounding
$142.80
Minimum chargeDriveway floor, covers mobilization
$100–$150
QuotedRounded up, clears the floor
$150

Now the time. The driveway and patio are 852 sq ft of open flatwork, which a 20 inch surface cleaner covers at about 1,400 sq ft an hour: 37 minutes. The 4 ft walk turns too often for that rate, so take the 16 inch figure of 1,100 and add 9. Call it 46 minutes with the trigger down.

On a normal residential visit roughly half the clock is drive, unreel, pre-treat and coil-up, so 46 minutes of washing is about 1 hour 27 minutes door to door. At $150 that is a shade over $100 an hour on the clock, and you knew all of it before you left the office.

Guess the driveway at “about 500 square feet” and the same job prices at $128.80 rather than $142.80. A hundred square feet at $0.14 is $14, which sounds like nothing. Do it on four jobs a week and it is $2,900 a year, all of it margin.

Measure a job like this

How the measurement is done

No ladder, no wheel, no second trip. The property is already photographed.

  1. Search the address

    Type the customer's address and the map flies to the roofline. This is the same satellite imagery you would squint at on Google Maps, with a drawing layer on top of it.

  2. Trace each surface

    Tap the corners of the driveway, then the walk, then the patio. Curved edges take more points. Every shape you close adds its area to a running total.

  3. Price it as you draw

    Enter your rate per square foot and the total updates with the area. Export a branded PDF and the quote is out before the customer has called anyone else.

Start to finish that is under 60 seconds for a typical residential property, which is short enough to do on the phone while the customer is still describing the stains.

The drive-out is the real cost

5.5 hrs

A week of windscreen time at six estimate visits, before a single trigger is pulled. Twenty minutes each way plus fifteen on site is fifty-five minutes a lead.

Residential pressure washing is a high-lead, low-ticket trade. The jobs in the table above are $50 to $225 each, and the classic way to quote one is to drive to it. Six leads in a week is most of a working day spent looking at concrete you have not been paid to clean.

It gets worse the moment the lead is not ready. Most estimate visits are for people collecting three quotes, so two thirds of that driving buys nothing at all. The contractor who answers with a real number that afternoon is not competing on price. They are competing on being first, which is a much easier fight.

Measuring from the office does not remove every site visit. A stained, sealed or badly spalled driveway still deserves eyes on it before you commit. It removes the visits whose only job was to find out how big something is, and that is most of them.

Calculators

Free, no account needed. Every one of them measures the same way the app does.

Pressure Washing Estimate Calculator

Enter the surfaces, get the square footage and the price at your own rate. The fastest way to sanity-check a number you have already given someone.

The reading behind the numbers

Longer form, with worked examples and reference tables.

Measuring

Quoting

Pricing

Equipment

Getting work

Running the business

Questions contractors ask

Then you walk that one. Aerial imagery is refreshed every one to three years in most of the U.S., which is fine for concrete that has not moved, and wrong for a driveway that was extended last spring. Mature tree cover is the other case: if you cannot see the edge, you cannot trace it. Both are visible before you commit, which is the point. You know within seconds whether this is a job you can quote from the office or one worth driving to, instead of finding out after the drive.

Typically within 1–3% of a tape measurement on a clearly defined surface like a concrete driveway. The imagery is orthorectified, so the scale is real rather than perspective-distorted. Accuracy drops where the edge itself is unclear, for example a driveway with grass growing over the apron, or a surface under heavy tree cover. On a $150 residential ticket that variance is worth a few dollars, which is well inside the noise of your own rate.

Only the surface you clean. That means the driveway apron to the garage door, the walk, the patio and the porch, and it means the pool deck with the water subtracted rather than the deck-plus-pool rectangle. Do not include lawn, mulch beds, or the strip of road in front of the apron. Overstating area is the fastest way to lose a job you had already won on trust.

Yes, and it is the case where measuring pays for itself. You trace the outside edge of the deck, then trace the pool as a second shape, and the pool area is subtracted automatically. Net deck area is the number that goes into your rate. Eyeballing the outer rectangle instead can overstate a residential deck by several hundred square feet, which is enough to lose the job on price.

For measuring, no. For judgement, sometimes. Surface condition, water access, gate clearance, slope and where the runoff ends up are all things you want eyes on before you commit to a fixed price on a difficult job. The visits worth cutting are the ones whose only purpose was finding out how big something is, and on residential work that is most of them.

New accounts start with a 7-day free trial of Pro: a card is required, nothing is charged today, and nothing at all if you cancel before the trial ends. After that it is $29.99 a month, or $299 a year (the yearly plan has no trial). Pro includes unlimited measurements, saved job history and branded PDF quotes. Two recovered driveways pay for the year, which is the whole argument for it.

Measure the next lead before you drive to it

Pull up the address, trace the concrete, and have a real number in front of the customer while they are still on the phone. Card required, cancel anytime.

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