What Should a Window Cleaning Pro Charge Per Hour?

Ask ten window cleaners what they charge per hour and you will get ten different answers, plus a couple who refuse to say. That secrecy hurts you, because it pushes new owners to just copy whatever a competitor posts on their site. The problem: you have no idea what their costs, crew size, or profit margin look like. Their rate might be losing them money. Copying it means you lose money too. This post walks through how to build a window cleaning hourly rate from the ground up, starting with the income you actually want to keep.

Why Copying a Competitor's Rate Loses Money

When you match the guy across town at, say, $60 an hour, you are inheriting his math without knowing if it works. Maybe he runs a paid-off truck and works out of his garage. Maybe he is subsidizing low prices with a spouse's income and will be out of business in eighteen months. You cannot see any of that from his website.

There is also a mix problem. Two cleaners can both bill $60 per hour and take home wildly different amounts because one drives 40 minutes between jobs while the other clusters routes tightly. The posted number tells you almost nothing about profit. Build your own instead.

Start With the Income You Want to Keep

Work backwards. Decide what you want to earn in a year as take-home pay, then add the taxes, overhead, and slack you need to actually clear it. This is the opposite of how most people price, and it is why most people underprice.

Say you want to keep $65,000 a year before income tax. That is your target owner pay. Now you need to figure out how many hours you can realistically bill against it, and what it costs you to operate. The rate falls out of those two numbers.

Billable vs Unbillable Hours: The Trap

Here is the mistake that sinks people. They assume a 40-hour week is 40 billable hours. It is not. Drive time, quoting, invoicing, chasing payments, buying supplies, equipment repair, marketing, and answering the phone all eat the clock, and none of it is directly billable.

For a typical solo or small-crew window cleaning operation, expect somewhere in the range of 50 to 65 percent of your working hours to be actually billable. The rest is the business running itself. If you work 2,000 hours a year, you might only bill 1,100 to 1,300 of them.

• Billable: time on a ladder or pole, on a customer's property, doing the work they pay for.
• Unbillable but necessary: driving, quoting, scheduling, invoicing, buying soap and squeegee rubber.
• Overhead time: bookkeeping, licensing, insurance calls, learning, fixing gear.

If you price as if every hour is billable, you will underprice by roughly a third to a half. That gap is exactly why busy cleaners still feel broke at year end.

Overhead Recovery: The Step Everyone Skips

Overhead is every cost that keeps the doors open whether or not you clean a single window this week. It has to be spread across your billable hours and recovered in your rate.

• Vehicle: payment or depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance.
• Business insurance: general liability, and workers comp if you have crew.
• Equipment and consumables: poles, water-fed systems, soap, scrapers, replacements.
• Software, phone, and admin: CRM, business phone line, accounting.
• Licensing, marketing, and the occasional job that goes sideways.

Add these up for a year. A lean solo operation might see $12,000 to $25,000 in annual overhead. A small crew with a wrapped truck and water-fed poles can run higher. Whatever your number is, it gets divided across your billable hours and baked into the rate.

A Worked Example You Can Copy

Let us put it together with round numbers. Adjust every input to your own reality.

1. Target owner pay: $65,000 for the year.
2. Annual overhead: $18,000.
3. Add a self-employment and income tax cushion of roughly 25 percent on owner pay: about $16,000. (Talk to your accountant for your actual rate.)
4. Total the business must collect: $65,000 + $18,000 + $16,000 = $99,000.
5. Working hours: 2,000 per year. Billable at 60 percent = 1,200 billable hours.
6. Required rate: $99,000 divided by 1,200 = $82.50 per billable hour.

That $82.50 might feel high if the competitor site said $60. But that competitor either bills more hours, carries less overhead, or is quietly underpaying himself. Your number is honest. Now you can decide: raise efficiency to bill more hours, trim overhead, or hold the rate and stop apologizing for it.

Turn Your Rate Into Profitable Quotes

Once you know your target hourly rate, quoting gets easier. Estimate the hours a job will take, multiply by your rate, and add any special access or travel costs. Then present it as a clean flat price. Over time, log actual hours against each job so you learn where your estimates drift, especially on second-story work, hard water stains, and screens.

Two efficiency levers move your rate more than anything: cutting drive time by clustering routes, and getting paid faster so cash is not stuck in unpaid invoices. Both quietly raise the effective rate you take home without touching the number you quote customers.

Revisit the Number Every Season

Fuel goes up. Insurance renews higher. You buy a water-fed system that changes how many jobs you clear in a day. Your rate is not a tattoo. Recalculate it at least once a year, and any time a big cost changes. The cleaners who quietly do well are not the cheapest in town. They are the ones who know their number cold and price to it without flinching.