Fleet washing is usually sold per unit: a price for a tractor, a trailer, a straight truck, a box truck, a van, often lower for a weekly customer than a monthly one. That structure is right. Customers understand it, it scales with their fleet, and an invoice that lists units by number is easy for a fleet manager to approve. The question is what the number should be.
Step 1: know your minutes per unit, by unit type
Everything starts with time. If a two-person crew spends 45 minutes on site and washes six tractors, that is 7.5 minutes of site time per unit, or 15 person-minutes per unit. Measure it across many stops, not one good night, and keep it by unit type: a 53-foot trailer, a tractor and a garbage truck are not the same job.
Use time on site from arrival to departure, not just spray time. Setup, moving the truck, waiting at the gate and packing up are all part of the cost of that stop.
Step 2: what does a person-hour cost you?
Take the hourly wage and add what it really costs: employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation (which is significant for pressure washing), any benefits, paid time that is not washing (driving, shop time, training). Spread the non-washing time across the washing hours.
| Illustrative | Per person-hour |
|---|---|
| Wage | $20.00 |
| Payroll taxes and workers' comp | $4.50 |
| Drive and shop time spread over wash hours (30%) | $7.35 |
| Loaded cost per wash person-hour | $31.85 |
At 15 person-minutes per tractor, labor is about $7.96 per unit.
Step 3: materials and the truck
Chemicals and water per unit are usually small and easy to estimate from what you bought last quarter divided by units washed. The truck is not small: the vehicle, the pressure washers, the water heater or burner, fuel for the engine and the burner, insurance, maintenance on the pumps by hour meter. Add a year of those and divide by the year's wash hours to get a truck cost per wash hour, then convert it to a cost per unit with your minutes per unit.
| Illustrative, per tractor | |
|---|---|
| Loaded labor (15 person-minutes) | $7.96 |
| Chemicals and water | $2.10 |
| Truck, equipment and fuel (7.5 site-minutes at $48 per truck-hour) | $6.00 |
| Overhead share (office, insurance, software, marketing) | $6.50 |
| Fully loaded cost per unit | $22.56 |
Step 4: add margin, then check it against the market
Decide the margin the business needs, then divide: a $22.56 cost at a 40% margin is $37.60. Now compare that to what you can actually charge in your area. If the market pays more, you have room to win on service rather than price. If the market pays less, the answer is almost never to match the price; it is to change the cost side, which in fleet washing usually means route density and minutes per unit.
Step 5: price the frequency, not just the unit
A unit washed weekly is faster to clean than the same unit washed monthly, because less has built up. That is why weekly customers get a lower per-unit price, and it should come from your own minutes-per-unit data, not a round discount. If weekly tractors take 6 site-minutes and monthly ones take 10, the price difference falls out of the method above.
Step 6: protect the stop with a minimum
A yard with two trucks on a given night costs you nearly a full stop of drive time and setup for very little revenue. A per-visit minimum (or a trip charge) keeps small stops honest. Customers accept it readily when it is on the rate card from the start; it is much harder to add later.
Step 7: put the variable costs on their own lines
Fuel and card fees move. Rather than reprice every rate card when diesel jumps, add percentage lines: a fuel surcharge, a card processing fee. They are transparent to the customer, they can be adjusted business-wide, and they keep the per-unit price stable.
Step 8: review rates every year, in writing
Wages go up every year. If prices do not, margin shrinks a little every year without anyone deciding it should. Pick a month, send every customer a short notice with the new rates and the date they take effect, and do it every year so it is expected. When you do, make sure the new rate applies only from that date forward and never rewrites invoices already sent.
Where pricing goes wrong after it is set
- Add-ons done and never billed. The undercarriage wash happened; the invoice does not know.
- Old rate cards. The price increase reached new customers but not the yard you have washed for six years.
- Discounts that compound. A discount taken after the card fee instead of before it, or a one-off discount that quietly became permanent.
We go through these and more in seven places a fleet wash business loses money.
How The Wash Book does it
Every yard in The Wash Book has a rate card: a price per unit type, an hourly rate for work like washouts, an optional per-visit minimum, and percentage lines such as a fuel surcharge or a card fee, each mapped to its own QuickBooks item. Rates are copied onto the invoice line when the draft is built, so a price rise never rewrites a week already sent. And the minutes per unit you need for step 1 come from time on site, filled from your vehicle tracker.