Thirty-six pence a minute. That is what the worked example below comes out at, and it is not the price of anything. It is a floor and a veto.
Pricing window cleaning jobs on a doorstep works like this. The trade band for the property gives you the price. Your minutes times your own rate tell you whether that price is worth getting out of the van for. No agonising, no guessing what the last bloke charged.
Getting to the rate is the part nobody lays out. Here it is, every division written down.
Start with what you need, not what the house looks like
Add up your monthly costs. Fuel, van, insurance, resin, phone, the lot. Add the money you want to take home. Say it comes to £2,600 a month.
Divide by the days you work. Twenty working days in a normal month gives you £2,600 ÷ 20 = £130 a day.
Now divide by the hours you will genuinely clean. Six hours gives you £130 ÷ 6 = £21.66 an hour.
Then turn the hour into minutes, because minutes are what you count standing on a path. £21.66 ÷ 60 = 36.1p, call it 36p a minute.
The hours you will actually clean
That last division is where people fool themselves. You are not cleaning for eight hours. You are driving, parking, unwinding hose, talking to Mrs Patel about her neighbour's tree. Trade advice clusters on four to six hours of actual cleaning a day. Plan for five or six, so a windy morning does not wreck the month.
Plan five rather than six and the same £2,600 needs £130 ÷ 5 = £26 an hour, which is £26 ÷ 60 = 43.3p, call it 43p a minute.
If five hours is your honest day, 43p is your floor and 36p is wishful thinking. This post carries 36p because it is what the worked example produced; two floors running through every sum would cost you the thread. On a five-hour day, read 43p wherever you see 36p.
What the trade actually charges
These are trade prices for a recurring 4-weekly exterior clean, front and back. Not one-offs, not insides.
| Property | 4-weekly, front and back |
|---|---|
| Flat or apartment | £6 to £14 |
| 2-bed terrace | £8 to £15 |
| 3-bed semi | £12 to £20, middle around £15 |
| Bungalow | £10 to £25 |
| 3 to 4 bed detached | £15 to £26 |
| 4 to 5 bed detached | £20 to £35 plus |
| Minimum charge | £12 to £15 |
Region shifts all of it. London and the Home Counties sit above those bands, the North East and parts of Scotland and Wales below.
One warning. Search window cleaning prices UK and you get consumer cost guides quoting £30 for a terrace, £35 for a semi, £40 for a detached. Those guides are not wrong, they are pricing one-off cleans and insides, where one visit carries all the travel and no repeat work follows. Benchmark against them and you price yourself off every street you knock.
Pricing window cleaning jobs, house by house
Two steps, and they do different jobs. Step one sets the price: find the property in the table above and pick a point in the band. Step two checks it: count the minutes on site, add travel and set-up, multiply by your rate. That is the least the job can pay and still be worth doing. If the band price clears it, that is what you charge. If it does not, charge above the band or leave the job.
A 3-bed semi. The table puts it at £12 to £20, middle around £15, so £15 is the price.
Now the check. Eighteen minutes on the glass, seven for the drive from the last one, parking, getting the pole out and packing away: 18 + 7 = 25 minutes. At 36p a minute, 25 × 36p = £9. The travel and set-up half of that sum is the bit everyone drops, and the reason minimum charges exist.
£9 is what the job has to beat, not what you charge. £15 beats it, so the semi is £15.
What the gap is telling you
The gap between £9 and £15 is the useful part. Either your minutes are optimistic, or the rate you said you would accept is lower than the work is worth.
Run the trade's middle price backwards and you can see which. £15 for a job that takes 25 minutes door to door is £15 ÷ 25 = 60p a minute, and 60p × 60 = £36 an hour, against the £21.66 an hour your own sum produced.
So the gap is your margin, not an error. A gap the other way is the veto firing: the house is too slow for what that street will pay.
Three hourly rates have been through this post. Only one of them multiplies your minutes.
- £21.66 an hour, 36p a minute. The worked example, six hours on the glass. Multiply your minutes by this, and what comes out is a floor.
- £26 an hour, 43p a minute. The same £2,600 on a five-hour day. Multiply by this instead if your day is shorter.
- £36 an hour, 60p a minute. Not a rate you set, and never one you multiply by. It is what £15 for 25 minutes works out at.
The price itself always comes off the table.
Where the money leaks out
Three jobs that look fairly priced and stop paying once you count the minutes.
The minimum charge is not optional
Below about £12 to £15 the drive and the set-up eat the job, whatever the glass looks like. Seven minutes of unpaid faffing is fine when the job is £20. On a £6 job, seventeen minutes door to door at 36p, it is nearly half the job. Some tight terraced estates run £8 to £10 minimums, which only work because the next door is thirty feet away.
Bungalows are not the easy job they look
No ladders, nothing out of reach, and then you get round the back and find a glass sunroom, a gate that will not open and a fifty-foot hose run. Hence the wide band.
Front-only is half the windows, not half the job
You still drive there, still park, still set up, still pack down. Front-only belongs at or near your minimum charge, not at half the full price.
The first clean is a premium, not a leak
A first clean takes materially longer: frames, sills, cobwebs and whatever the last person left. The mainstream premium is 25% to 50% on top of the regular price, and a good number of cleaners charge double.
The premium is not paying for the extra labour. It filters out the people who wanted a cheap one-off and were never going to stay. Charge it as your default, and waive it only when you have decided you are buying a customer. It is genuinely contested: a minority charge nothing extra, treating the first clean as the cost of winning a customer, which is defensible.
How you say it matters more than the multiple. Customers accept double when you tell them up front and explain that the first one is always the hard one. Objections come from cleaners who mumble the price.
Add-ons are the money you are leaving on the pavement
All of these are on houses you already visit.
| Add-on | Typical price |
|---|---|
| Gutter clear, domestic house | £75 to £150 |
| Fascias and soffits | £50 to £350, depending on size |
| Conservatory glass, added to the regular clean | £5 to £12 a visit |
| Conservatory roof | £15 to £70, or priced per panel |
| Velux | From £2 each |
| Solar panels | £5 to £15 a panel |
| Bundling discount | 10% to 20% |
At £15 a house, one gutter clear is worth five to ten window cleans. Selling one to a customer you already have beats winning several new window customers: no canvassing, no first clean, no new drive.
The other leak is frequency
Cleaners charging 33% to 50% more for 8-weekly often think that uplift makes them whole. It does not: it covers the extra minutes the dirtier glass takes, not the cleans that dropped off the calendar. The arithmetic is in our post on window cleaning frequencies.
Putting the price up
Once a year, or every two. Pick a fixed point in the calendar and stick to it, so it becomes a thing that happens rather than a decision you nerve yourself up to.
What cleaners report doing: plus £1 on jobs up to £30, plus £2 up to £40, plus £2 to £3 above that. Others use flat £5 steps, or a 10% minimum.
That is the trade described. Now the advice: state the increase, not the new total, and give two to four weeks' notice.
Most cleaners do a window cleaning price rise by text, tacked onto the routine message the night before. Face to face gets the same acceptance rate; it is just politer.
Cleaning you tomorrow as usual. Just to let you know prices go up by £1 from your next clean after this one. First rise in two years. Thanks.
What a rise actually costs you in customers
Less than you think. Reported losses run from none at all, through two or three from a round of about a hundred, which is 2% to 3%, up to around 7% on a bigger rise. The worst case people describe is one man saying he would have to speak to his wife.
A deliberately large rise is also how you shed the outliers fifteen minutes off your route. Losing them is the point.
The bigger lever is not the price at all
A newcomer once asked how to price window cleaning so he could earn more. An experienced cleaner told him £15 to £18 a house on clustered work beats £22 to £26 spread out.
Do the sum in minutes, because a round is paid in minutes, not in pounds per house. The £15 semi from earlier takes 25 minutes door to door: £15 ÷ 25 = 60p a minute.
The £22 house sits fifteen minutes off the route, and those fifteen minutes cost you again on the way back, on top of the same 25 minutes at the house. That is 25 + 15 + 15 = 55 minutes, and £22 ÷ 55 = 40p a minute.
Both clear the 36p floor. The cheaper house pays half as much again for every minute of your day, all day. That is why the money in planning a window cleaning round properly usually beats another quid on the price.
Price properly. Then tighten up.
Seeing which prices have gone stale
None of this works if you cannot see your prices in one place. Most rounds carry a few jobs that have not moved since the customer signed up, and they hide well in a spreadsheet with a column per month. RoundWiz keeps every customer's price, frequency and history on one screen, so when the annual rise comes round you can see which jobs are lagging and which outliers you would not mind losing.
Your sheet imports, so the prices you already have are the prices you start with. £7.99 a month, or £79.90 a year, VAT in, and the first thirty days cost nothing and want no card. The features list will tell you whether it is worth an evening of your time, or you can put your own prices through it and see.