Pricing and quoting window cleaning jobs
Per-pane, flat rate or hourly, how to quote a house without counting panes on the phone, storefront route minimums, and the bundles that lift a ticket.
A homeowner calls and asks what it costs to clean her windows. You start asking how many panes she has, upstairs and down, French or single. She does not know. She says she will measure and call back. She never calls back, because the next company on her list gave her a number in 30 seconds.
That call is the whole pricing problem in this trade. The ticket is small, the buyer is comparing three companies in one afternoon, and the company that answers with a price wins the job before anyone looks at a website. Everything below is about giving a number fast without giving away margin.
Three ways to price, and the one that loses jobs
Per-pane pricing is the traditional method. You count exterior panes, price them at $4 to $7 each, price in-and-out at $8 to $15, and add for screens, tracks, storms and second-story access. It is accurate. It is also the reason the caller above hung up, because it forces the customer to do arithmetic on the phone.
Hourly pricing, at $60 to $90 per technician hour, is honest and impossible to sell. Customers hear an open meter. Use it internally to check your bids, never in front of a buyer.
Flat rate is what you quote. You still count panes in your head, or from a photo, but the customer hears one number: $285 for the outside, $420 inside and out. Keep per-pane as your costing tool and flat rate as your selling tool. The bid should land where your crew earns $80 to $120 per hour on site, all in.
Quote a house in 90 seconds without counting panes
Most homes in a given neighborhood fall into three or four buckets. Build them once and quote from the bucket.
Ask three questions: what is the address, is it one story or two, and do you want the inside done. Then pull the address up on satellite view and county records while she is still on the phone. Square footage and story count predict pane count closely enough for a quote you honor. A 1,600 square foot single story is a $180 to $220 exterior. A 2,400 square foot two story is $280 to $340 exterior, roughly $500 in and out with screens.
Say the number, then protect it: "That is my price for a home this size. If the windows have not been done in five years or there is hard water staining, I will call you from the driveway before I start any extra work." That sentence has saved more margin than any pricing spreadsheet. Hard water and construction cleanup are the two jobs that eat a flat rate, so quote those on site only.
Put your buckets on the website too. Companies that hide every price lose the click, and the website essentials guide covers where the range belongs on the page.
Storefront routes are priced per visit, not per pane
Commercial route work runs on different math. A dentist office with 14 panes of glass out front takes 12 minutes. You are not selling 14 panes, you are selling a recurring visit with a floor under it.
Set a minimum of $35 to $45 per stop and price up from there: $45 for a small storefront, $60 to $90 for a restaurant with a patio, $120 and up for a car dealership showroom. Sell the frequency, not the job. Monthly is the easy yes. Biweekly is where the money is, because your drive time is already paid for by the neighbors on the same block.
You sell these by walking in, not by advertising. Twenty doors on one street, in daylight, with a clipboard and a business card. The script is short: "I clean the glass for a few businesses on this block. Yours is $50 a month, first one free so you can see the difference. Who handles that here?" Expect one yes in eight to twelve doors. Forty doors on a Tuesday is a route.
Route work also fixes the seasonality that residential cannot, which is the whole argument in the slow season guide.
Give three prices, not one
One number invites a yes or a no. Three numbers turn the conversation into a choice about scope.
- Good: exterior only, $260.
- Better: interior and exterior, $420.
- Best: interior, exterior, screens washed and tracks detailed, $560.
Present them in that order, out loud, and stop talking. Roughly a third of homeowners take the middle option when a middle option exists. Put the same three tiers on the estimate you text, in the same order, with the middle one already selected.
Never build a tier out of something you would refuse to skip. Safety is not a tier. If a second story requires a water-fed pole rather than a ladder on a slope, that is how you do the job, not an upgrade.
The bundle that lifts a $260 job to $600
You are already at the house with a truck, water and two hours of labor sunk into the drive. The cheapest revenue you will ever earn is the second service sold on the same visit.
Gutter cleaning is the natural pair, at $150 to $250 on an average home, and the ladder is already up. House washing or a driveway is another $250 to $450. A $260 window job plus gutters plus a driveway is a $600 to $900 stop with one drive and one setup.
Sell it at the walkthrough, not in the invoice: "Your gutters are packed at the back corner. Since I am here Thursday anyway, I can do them for $180 instead of the $240 I would charge for a trip out on their own." The discount is real, because your drive time genuinely is not.
Track your average ticket monthly. Most residential companies sit near $260. Bundling well moves that to $380 or $420 without a single extra lead, which matters more than it sounds when you look at what leads cost in the Google Ads guide.
Minimums, deposits, and putting the range in public
Set a residential minimum of $150 and hold it. A $90 job on the far side of town costs you a slot in your spring calendar, and spring is when your calendar is worth something.
Take a 25 percent deposit on anything over $1,500, post-construction cleanups and multi-story commercial included. Below that, deposits cost you more in friction than they save in no-shows.
Then publish the range. Across 14,348 window cleaning listings on Google, 32% have no website at all, so most of your competitors are not publishing anything. A page that says "most homes we clean run $180 to $450, here is what changes it" gets quoted by AI answer engines when someone asks what window cleaning costs in your city, and it filters out the caller shopping for $60. See the AI search guide for how those answers get assembled, and the benchmark report for where the rest of the field stands.
Frequently asked
Will publishing prices let competitors undercut me? They already know what you charge, because they quote the same houses. The customer is who does not know. Ranges filter tire kickers before they reach your phone, which matters when the average job is small and your time on the phone is the expensive part.
Should I charge more for hard water stains? Yes, and quote it separately after seeing it. Restoration is a different service with different chemicals and real risk of damage. Price it at $8 to $20 per pane and put it in writing that results vary with the severity of the etching.
What about first-time versus maintenance pricing? Charge full price the first time and offer a standing 10 to 15 percent for customers who book twice a year in advance. Recurring residential is worth more than a discount costs, and it smooths out the months when the phone is quiet.
If you want the pricing page, the estimate template and the follow-up built for you, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.