← All articles Window Cleaning

Per Pane, Per Hour, or Per Job? Most Window Cleaners Pick the Worst Option

July 3, 2026 · 6 min read

Ask five window cleaning owners how they price a job and you'll get five different answers — a flat rate per pane, an hourly rate, a gut-feel flat quote after walking the property. Each method can work fine. The problem is almost nobody picks a method and then checks it against what the job actually costs to do. That gap between the price and the real cost is where your profit quietly disappears.

Short answer: Per pane, per hour, and flat per-job pricing are all reasonable starting points — but none of them protect your margin unless you build the number from your true hourly cost first. A flat per-pane rate that ignores height, screens, and hard water buildup will lose you money on exactly the jobs that take the longest.

The three ways window cleaners price a job

Per pane. You quote a flat price for every window — say $6 a pane — and multiply by the count. It's fast, customers understand it instantly, and it's easy to quote over the phone. It's also blind to everything that actually changes how long a pane takes: a ground-floor slider with light dust and a second-story window caked in hard water spots both count as "one pane."

Per hour. You charge for your time, plain and simple. It's honest and it protects you from underbidding a hard job. But most homeowners hate open-ended pricing — they want to know the number before you start — and an hourly rate gives your crew no incentive to work efficiently, since a slower job just bills for more.

Flat per job. You walk the property, size it up, and quote one number. Customers prefer this by a wide margin. The catch: a flat quote is only as accurate as the walk-through it's built on. If you're eyeballing it instead of estimating real time, you're just guessing with extra confidence.

Let's run the numbers

Say your true cost to run a job — labor, fuel, supplies, equipment wear, and your share of overhead, what SolidScope calls your burdened labor cost — comes out to about $65 an hour.

A simple job: 20 panes, all ground floor, no screens, light dust. That takes about an hour. Your real cost: roughly $65 in labor and overhead, plus $10 in supplies — call it $75. Quote it at a flat $6 a pane and you're charging $120. That's a $45 profit. Good job.

Now picture the same 20 panes, but this time it's a second story reached by extension ladder, the screens need to come off and go back on, and hard water spots need to be scraped before they'll come clean. That job takes three hours. Your real cost: roughly $195 in labor and overhead, plus $25 in supplies for the hard water treatment — about $220. Quote it at the same "$6 a pane" rate, and you're still charging $120.

Two jobs. Same 20 panes. One earns you $45. The other costs you $100 to complete. A flat per-pane rate can't tell them apart — but your real costs sure can.

Why this quietly drains you

Owners default to a flat per-pane or per-job number because it's fast to quote, customers are used to comparing it, and "that's what the price sheet says." The problem is that charging the same price for wildly different amounts of work means your easy jobs are secretly subsidizing your hard ones. As long as most of your schedule is single-story homes with routine dust, you might never notice. But the moment your book fills up with second stories, screens, and post-construction hard water spots — exactly the jobs that pay the best if priced correctly — that's when a "successful" month quietly turns into a break-even one.

What actually drives the cost

The fix isn't to throw out per-pane or flat pricing — it's to stop guessing at the number. Four things actually drive how long a window cleaning job takes, and therefore what it costs you to do it:

• Height and access — ground level versus an extension ladder, lift, or working off a roofline. More time, more risk, more insurance exposure.
• Screens and tracks — removing, cleaning, and rehanging screens, plus wiping out tracks and sills, adds real minutes per window that a bare pane count skips.
• Interior plus exterior versus exterior only — doubling the sides you clean doesn't double the time, but it adds a meaningful chunk, especially with furniture and blinds to work around.
• Condition — routine dust wipes off in one pass. Hard water spots, construction residue, or years of mineral buildup can mean scraping and a second treatment per pane. This is usually the single biggest swing factor.

Start from your true hourly cost, estimate how long the job will actually take given its real height, screens, and condition, and let that number set your price. Pane count becomes your starting estimate — not your final answer.

A simple way to adjust on the spot

You don't need a complicated system. A five-minute walk-through before you quote is usually enough to sort a job into one of these buckets:

• Ground level, light dust, exterior only → your base rate
• Screens and tracks included → base rate × 1.25
• Interior + exterior → base rate × 1.5
• Second story, ladder, or lift required → add 25–40%
• Hard water spots or construction residue → add a flat treatment fee per affected pane

Five minutes on-site, looking closely at what you're actually about to clean, can be the difference between a job that pays you fairly and one that quietly costs you money to finish.

The bottom line

Per pane, per hour, and flat per job aren't wrong pricing methods — they're just incomplete on their own. Anchor whichever one you use to what the job will actually cost you to do — your time, your supplies, your overhead — and let pane count or square footage be your starting point, not the finish line for your quote.

Keep reading: The pressure washing pricing mistake most owners don't catch →