Pressure washing · job planning
How long does the job actually take?
Not how long the washing takes — how long the job takes. The square footage sets the trigger time. The drive, the unreel, the pre-treat and the coil-up set everything else, and on a normal residential visit they are close to half of it.
Enter what you're cleaning and how. You get wash time, total time on the clock, how many of these fit in a day, and the price this job has to hit for the hours to be worth having.
- 116 min
- Typical residential visit, door to door
- 53%
- Of that visit with the trigger actually down
- 4.1
- Jobs like it in an eight-hour day
Time this job
Add a line for each surface. Production rates are the on-site figures published in the surface cleaner guide — already net of overlap, turns and trigger-off time.
1 · What are you cleaning
2 · Everything that isn't washing
Setup covers unreeling, water hookup, pre-treat, moving furniture and coiling back up. Twenty-five minutes is a fast solo operator on a familiar residential job.
Total job time
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3 · What the day is worth
Jobs like this per day
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Price floor at that target
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Every number above hangs off the square footage at the top, so a guessed area produces a guessed schedule and a guessed price. Pull the address up on satellite and trace the real surface in about a minute before you commit to a time on the phone.
The washing is the short part
Contractors quote the part they can picture. The clock counts the rest of it too.
A 1,000 sq ft residential job — say an 800 sq ft driveway behind a 20-inch cleaner plus a 200 sq ft walkway by wand — is 61 minutes of washing. That is the number in your head when you quote it. The visit is 1 hour 56 minutes, because 25 minutes of setup and teardown and 30 minutes of round-trip driving are as real as the trigger time and just as impossible to skip.
Price that job off the 61 minutes and a $242 ticket looks like $238 an hour. Price it off the 116 minutes and the same ticket is $125 an hour — which is probably what you actually needed, and exactly why the two numbers have to be kept apart. The gap between them is not waste. It is the job.
It also gets worse as jobs get smaller. Overhead per visit barely moves whether you are washing 400 sq ft or 1,400, so on a small job it can be two-thirds of the clock. That is the entire argument for a job minimum — not greed, just arithmetic.
Production rates, on site
Square feet an hour by method — the divisor behind every number on this page. These are timesheet figures, not spec-sheet figures.
| Method | Sq ft / hr | Range | Per 1,000 sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| House wash — downstreamed siding | 1,800 | 1,500–2,200 | 33 min |
| 24" surface cleaner — open flatwork | 1,700 | 1,500–1,900 | 35 min |
| 20" surface cleaner — smooth concrete | 1,400 | 1,250–1,550 | 43 min |
| 16" surface cleaner — smooth concrete | 1,100 | 950–1,250 | 55 min |
| Pavers — lower pressure, more passes | 750 | 600–900 | 1 hr 20 min |
| Wand work — edges, steps, detail | 450 | 300–600 | 2 hr 13 min |
The spread across that table is more than three to one, and it is almost entirely about whether a surface cleaner is on the ground. Width is the single biggest lever you can buy: going from a 16-inch to a 20-inch cleaner cuts the time on 1,000 sq ft of concrete from 55 minutes to 43 — a 27% saving that repeats on every flatwork job you ever do.
It only works if the machine can drive it. A wide bar on an under-flowing pump gives you a wide, slow, streaky pass and costs you time rather than saving it, which is why the surface cleaner sizing guide sizes off GPM and not PSI.
The wand row is the one people underestimate. At 450 sq ft an hour, detail work is three times slower per square foot than the cleaner beside it — so a job that looks small can be the long one, and a strip of walkway can outlast the driveway it runs alongside.
How long does it take to pressure wash a…
Common residential jobs at typical sizes. Wash time is the trigger; visit time adds the same 55 minutes of setup and round-trip drive the calculator assumes.
| Job | Area | Method | Washing | On the clock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-car driveway | 600 | 20" surface cleaner | 26 min | 1 hr 21 min |
| Two-car driveway | 800 | 20" surface cleaner | 34 min | 1 hr 29 min |
| Long drive to detached garage | 1,200 | 20" surface cleaner | 51 min | 1 hr 46 min |
| Concrete patio | 400 | 20" surface cleaner | 17 min | 1 hr 12 min |
| Front walkway | 200 | Wand — too narrow for a cleaner | 27 min | 1 hr 22 min |
| Pool deck | 800 | 20" surface cleaner | 34 min | 1 hr 29 min |
| Paver patio | 600 | Pavers — lower pressure | 48 min | 1 hr 43 min |
| Wood deck | 400 | Wand — boards and rails | 53 min | 1 hr 48 min |
| Two-story house wash | 2,600 | Downstreamed siding | 1 hr 27 min | 2 hr 22 min |
Read the walkway row against the patio row. The patio is twice the area and takes 17 minutes; the walkway takes 27, because it is too narrow to put a cleaner on and every square foot of it is wand work. Area alone tells you almost nothing about how long a job runs — the method does.
The wood deck row makes the same point harder. Four hundred square feet of deck takes three times as long as four hundred square feet of patio: boards, rails, spindles and steps are all detail work, and the pressure has to come down so you don't furr the grain. Quoting decks off a flatwork rate is one of the most reliable ways to lose a day.
Every figure assumes a clean pass. Rust, oil, heavy algae or a surface that has never been washed will need pre-treat dwell time or a second application, and none of that is in the table.
The drive is the most expensive thing you do
It is the only part of the day that consumes hours and produces nothing — and it is the part most quotes ignore entirely.
Four jobs at 30 minutes of round-trip driving is two hours. On the eight-hour day drawn above, that is a quarter of your working time and roughly one entire job you did not do. Nobody bills for it, everybody pays for it, and no amount of washing faster gets it back.
Which is why the biggest available gain on most residential routes is not equipment — it is proximity. Cutting round trips from 30 minutes to 15 across four jobs frees an hour, and an hour is another half a job at no extra cost. That is a bigger swing than upgrading a surface cleaner, and it costs nothing but scheduling discipline.
It also changes how a small job should be judged. A 400 sq ft patio two doors down from a job you are already on is 17 minutes of washing with almost no marginal drive — genuinely profitable at a price that would be a disaster across town. Same square footage, same rate, completely different job, and the only thing that changed was the map.
The practical version of this is quoting whole properties instead of single surfaces, and asking for the neighbour while the hose is still out. Both are covered in getting more pressure washing leads.
Why there's no crew multiplier
The calculator reports single-operator time on purpose.
It would be easy to add a “crew size” field and divide by it. It would also be wrong most of the time, and the size of the error changes with every job, so publishing a single efficiency constant would make the tool confidently inaccurate rather than usefully honest.
Two people on one machine cannot both run the surface cleaner. The second operator is pre-treating, wanding edges, managing hose and doing the walk-around — genuine time off the visit, mostly out of setup and teardown rather than out of the pass. On a normal residential job that is a fifth to a quarter of the clock, not half of it.
Two machines with two hose reels is a different story and does approach halving the wash time, but only where there is room. On a 600 sq ft driveway the second operator spends the visit looking for somewhere to stand; on a 12,000 sq ft commercial lot they are the reason the job finishes the same day. Size the crew to the surface, then time it as what it actually is: one operator per machine, per area.
Questions contractors ask about job time
The washing itself is quick: a 600 sq ft single driveway behind a 20-inch surface cleaner is about 26 minutes, and a 1,200 sq ft long drive is about 51 minutes. The visit is not. Add roughly 25 minutes for setup, pre-treat and pack-up and 30 minutes of round-trip drive, and that 600 sq ft driveway is an hour and twenty minutes of your day. When a customer asks how long you'll be there, the second number is the honest answer.
A downstreamed house wash runs about 1,800 sq ft of siding per hour, so a typical two-story home at roughly 2,600 sq ft of siding is about an hour and a half of actual washing, or a little under two and a half hours on site once you include setup and drive. Cut-up elevations, heavy organic growth needing a second application, and anything requiring a ladder push that well past the rate.
It depends almost entirely on whether a surface cleaner is on the ground. A 20-inch cleaner on smooth concrete covers about 1,400 sq ft an hour, a 24-inch on open flatwork about 1,700, and a 16-inch about 1,100. Wand work — edges, steps, stairs, detail — drops to roughly 450 sq ft an hour, and pavers sit near 750 because they take lower pressure and more passes. Those are on-site rates that already absorb overlap, turns and trigger-off time, which is why they look low next to a spec sheet and land right against a timesheet.
Because a spec sheet multiplies cleaning width by walking speed and assumes you never stop. A 20-inch cleaner walked at 3 mph is theoretically over 2,600 sq ft an hour. In the driveway you overlap every pass, you turn at both ends, you edge and detail what the cleaner can't reach, you stop to move the hose, and the trigger is off more than you think. The published on-site rates already carry all of that, so use them as-is rather than discounting a spec figure by a factor you guessed.
For typical residential flatwork, three to five. A 1,000 sq ft job with a 20-inch cleaner is about an hour of washing and just under two hours door to door, so an eight-hour day holds a little over four. The variable that moves this most is not how fast you wash — it is how far apart the jobs are. Two hours of driving spread across a day is a whole job you didn't do.
Rarely, and this calculator deliberately doesn't pretend otherwise. Two people sharing one machine cannot both run the surface cleaner, so the second person is doing edges, pre-treat, and hose management — real work that shortens the day, but nothing like a 50% cut. A second operator with their own machine and their own hose reel on a large enough surface gets close to halving the wash time; on a 600 sq ft driveway they will spend most of the visit waiting for somewhere to stand.
Multiply total job hours — washing plus setup plus drive — by what an hour on your truck has to earn, and treat the result as a floor rather than a quote. If a job is 1 hour 56 minutes and you need $125 an hour, the floor is $242. Divide that by the square footage and you get the per-square-foot rate that job actually requires, which is the honest way round: the rate is an output of your production rate and your overhead, not a number you borrow from a forum.
Buy width and buy proximity. Moving from a 16-inch to a 20-inch surface cleaner is roughly a 27% cut in wash time on flatwork, provided your machine has the flow to drive it — check the sizing guide before you buy, because an undersized pump makes a wide cleaner slower, not faster. After that, the biggest lever is route density: the drive is the one part of the day that produces nothing, and it shrinks by booking neighbours, not by working faster.
Get the square footage
Turn hours into money
A schedule is only as good as the square footage under it
Every hour on this page came out of an area figure. Guess the area and you have guessed the day, the price and the time you promised the customer. Trace the property on satellite instead — first measurement free, no card.