House washing prices in New Zealand: what to charge for a soft wash, roof treatment and gutter clean
How much should you charge for house washing in New Zealand?
Build the number from your own costs rather than a national rate: labour at a rate that carries ACC levies, materials, travel across the section, equipment and overhead, then your margin. Quote the way New Zealand customers buy — per square metre of wall, or as a house wash, roof treatment and gutter package — and show the price GST-inclusive at 15 percent.
Most of the exterior-cleaning pricing advice a New Zealand operator finds was written for a US market, and the method half of it transfers. Cost build-up, margin, and the arithmetic of what an hour on site has to earn are the same anywhere someone owns a ladder. This page does not repeat that. It covers what a US page has no field for.
Two framing notes first. None of this is legal advice. It describes published tax rules, published consumer law and published regulator guidance, and links each one so you can read the source yourself; whether a particular clause or price works on your job is a question for your accountant or a lawyer here. And the figures below are the ones we could verify from a New Zealand primary source this session. Where a number is missing from this page — and several are — it is missing because we would not print it without one.
The words change before the numbers do
The first localisation is not the currency. It is the name of the product.
In New Zealand the residential service is a house wash, usually described as a soft wash, and the whole trade is commonly branded water blasting — it is in the company names. A homeowner searching for a price types “house wash cost” or “water blasting prices”, not “pressure washing”. The property is a section, not a yard. What you send them is a quote, not an estimate, and that word carries weight of its own further down this page.
This matters commercially before it matters for search. A quote headed “pressure washing” tells a customer with painted weatherboard that you are about to point a high-pressure lance at their cladding, which is the opposite of what most residential jobs actually are. The US-default pressure washing estimate calculator on this site does the per-surface arithmetic well, and its vocabulary and units are American: areas in square feet, gutters in linear feet, no tax line at all. Both of those are fixable at the point of use, and the section below says how.
What this climate is actually paying you to remove
A New Zealand house wash sells against biological growth, not dirt. That is a climate fact before it is a marketing one.
NIWA describes Auckland’s rainfall as plentiful all year round with sporadic very heavy falls, summers as warm and humid, winters as relatively mild, and puts most of the region on around 2000 hours of bright sunshine a year. Warm, wet and mild is the condition mould, moss and lichen like. On a timber weatherboard elevation that never sees afternoon sun, growth is visible within a season or two, and the south side of a house will always be the side the customer photographs.
Three consequences follow, and they are pricing consequences rather than atmospheric ones.
The job is a cycle, not an event. Growth returns on a schedule set by the aspect and shelter of the wall, so the honest sale is a repeat booking rather than a one-off rescue. That changes what the customer is worth rather than what the visit costs — the customer lifetime value estimator is the sanity check on any discount you offer to get the second wash booked, and recurring pricing is where the repeat-versus-one-off gap gets set deliberately instead of by feel.
Growth load is the variable that breaks a flat rate per square metre. Two houses of identical wall area, one on an exposed ridge and one under bush, are not the same job and should not carry the same number. If you quote a single rate per square metre with no condition factor, the sheltered damp house is the one that quietly eats your day.
Method is a pricing decision, not a preference. A soft wash on cladding and a water blast on a concrete drive take different time, different gear and different care, and a quote that folds them into one rate has already lost on one of them. What goes on the cladding is out of scope here — this page carries no product, no mix and no method — but what it costs you per job is very much in scope, and the soft wash mix dilution calculator exists to put a material figure on the job rather than a guess.
Price the unit your customer measures in
New Zealand is metric, and exterior cleaning is quoted on square metres of wall area, with the whole-house price presented as a single figure built from that. Storeys, access and growth condition are the modifiers. A US page’s square feet and linear feet are a conversion away — a square metre is 10.76 square feet — but a quote that arrives in feet reads as foreign, and reading as foreign is a conversion problem of a different kind.
What this page will not give you is a rate. There are per-square-metre and whole-house dollar bands for New Zealand circulating in aggregator content, and none of them re-anchored to a primary source we could check, so none of them is printed here. Copying one would be the same mistake as copying a competitor’s number: their cost, their section access, their equipment and their speed are not yours.
Build it instead. Your effective hourly rate is the number the whole quote resolves to, and the inputs behind it are ordinary: a loaded labour burden rate that carries the levies described below, an equipment cost per hour for the machine and the vehicle, an overhead recovery rate from the overhead recovery calculator, and a break-even job count that tells you how much of the month is already spoken for. Then work out how fast you actually clean with the production rate estimator, because a rate per square metre is only ever a speed assumption wearing a dollar sign.
The calculator below is the US-default one. Use it here with two substitutions: enter your area converted to square feet, and read every dollar as GST-exclusive New Zealand currency, because it has no tax line.
The package is the product
The New Zealand market buys exterior cleaning as a bundle: house wash, roof treatment and gutter clean, quoted together, often with a discount for taking all three. Sold well, that bundle is not a discount at all — it is the correct price for a job whose fixed costs only get paid once.
The reason is worth being explicit about, because it determines how big the discount can honestly be. Travel to the section, setting up, water and power access, moving furniture and pot plants, and the walk-around at the end happen once whether the customer buys one line or three. The labour and materials on each line do not compress at all. So the defensible bundle discount is roughly the duplicated setup and travel you no longer incur, and anything past that is coming out of gross margin on work you are still doing in full.
Write it as three priced lines with a stated package total rather than one number for “the house”. Three reasons: the customer can see what they are dropping if they decline the roof; you can decline the roof yourself for the reason further down this page without re-quoting the whole job; and the Consumer Guarantees Act promise you are making is bounded by what the lines say you are doing. Scope that turns up after the quote — a second garage, a fence nobody mentioned — belongs in a change order rather than in a favour, and the change order template is the document for it.
GST goes inside the number, not beside it
This is the single biggest structural difference between a New Zealand quote and a US one, and it is the one most easily got wrong.
If you are registered, Inland Revenue has you charging GST at 15 percent on most taxable supplies you make. Registration is compulsory once turnover was at least $60,000 in the last 12 months, or you expect it will be at least $60,000 in the next 12 months; below that you may register voluntarily, and plenty of one-van operators do.
That threshold creates two versions of every quote you write, and they are not the same document with a different total. The registered operator shows a GST-inclusive price with the GST identified underneath. The unregistered operator shows a price with no GST on it at all and should say so in a line, because a residential customer who assumes 15 percent is still to come has been misled by silence. Neither position is a competitive advantage in itself: the registered operator claims GST back on machines, chemicals and fuel, and the unregistered one does not.
Whichever you are, the residential norm here is that the number the customer sees is the number they pay. The Fair Trading Act treatment of pricing is unforgiving about the alternative: traders may not rely on fine print in advertising or contracts to correct a misleading overall impression or to hide important conditions. A large “$X” with a small “+GST” beneath it is exactly the shape of thing that provision is about.
Then there is the document that follows the job. Since 2023 the tax invoice has been replaced by taxable supply information, and Inland Revenue sets what it must contain by the size of the supply.
| Value of the supply | What the information must show |
|---|---|
| $200 or less | Your name or trade name, the date of the invoice (or the time of supply if there is no invoice), a description of what you supplied, and the amount. |
| Over $200, up to $1,000 | The above, plus your GST number, and either the GST-exclusive amount, the GST amount and the GST-inclusive amount, or the GST-inclusive amount with a statement that GST is included. |
| Over $1,000 | The above, plus - for GST-registered buyers - the buyer's name and one or more identifier details: physical or postal address, phone number, email address, trading name if different, New Zealand Business Number, or website URL. |
For supplies over $200 the information must reach a GST-registered buyer within 28 days of a request, or by another date the parties agree. Two practical notes for a house-washing round. Most residential jobs sit in the middle band, so your GST number belongs on every document you send. And the over-$1,000 band is the commercial and body-corporate work — the identifier-details list is why a New Zealand Business Number is worth having on the invoice template rather than hunting for one in February. The invoice template generator and the quote generator are US-default forms; the fields above are what a New Zealand version of each has to carry, and getting paid faster is the habit that makes the rest of it matter.
”Quote” is a promise the Consumer Guarantees Act already enforces
New Zealand customers ask for a quote, and Australian and British readers will recognise the reflex. What sits behind the word here is the Consumer Guarantees Act.
For services supplied to a consumer, the guarantees are that the work is carried out with reasonable care and skill — “the standard of a competent person with average skills and experience” — that the service is fit for the particular purpose the customer asked for, that where no timeframe was agreed the work is done in a reasonable time, and that where no price was set, only a reasonable price is payable. That last one is the argument you avoid entirely by putting a figure in writing before you start.
Two things follow for the document. You cannot write your way out of these when the customer is a consumer: a business that tries to contract out of the Consumer Guarantees Act commits an offence under the Fair Trading Act, and the written contracting-out route exists only between businesses that have agreed to it in writing. And the price itself is regulated conduct — quotes and estimates may be treated as misleading if the final cost is bigger than the customer expected — so the useful protection is not fine print but a scope that says what is included, what is excluded, and what triggers a variation. The general shape of those clauses is in service agreement clauses, the quote versus estimate versus bid distinction is worth reading before you pick the word, and the pressure washing contract template is a US-default document you now know how to read locally.
The costs a New Zealand hourly rate has to carry
Three of these are invisible in a US cost build-up, and all three belong inside the rate rather than in a shoebox at year end.
ACC. Everyone who works or owns a business in New Zealand pays levies. A self-employed operator pays the Earners’ levy — currently $1.52 per $100 (excluding GST) of liable income — plus the Working Safer levy at $0.08 per $100 of liable payroll or income, which ACC collects for WorkSafe, plus a Work levy that varies with the injury risk of your business classification, your claims history and your liable earnings. The classification is the part operators overlook: it is a rate input, not just a form, and exterior cleaning at height is not classified like an office. Put all three in your labour burden before you set an hourly rate, not after.
Hazardous substances. If your work uses them, all businesses must manage their hazardous substances risks under the Health and Safety at Work (Hazardous Substances) Regulations 2017, which WorkSafe organises around inventories, safety data sheets, labelling, signage, and certified and approved handlers. That is a compliance and time cost — the inventory, the sheets, the training — and it is a legitimate line in your overhead. What goes in the tank, and how, is a WorkSafe and supplier question, not one this page answers.
Height. Most of a house wash happens off the ground. WorkSafe’s working at height guidance puts maximum lengths on temporary non-fixed ladders — nine metres for a single ladder, 15 metres for an extension ladder, 6.1 metres for a step ladder — and says ladders should be used for low-risk, short-duration tasks with three points of contact maintained throughout. Read commercially, that is a statement about what a two-storey job is: not a longer ladder, but different access, more setup and a different price. If you quote storeys at the same rate per square metre, the first floor is subsidising the second.
The roof you may have to turn down
This is the quoting question with no US equivalent, and it is worth getting into the first phone call.
WorkSafe states plainly that if a building was built before 1 January 2000, it probably contains some asbestos materials, and its residential list names exactly the surfaces this trade cleans: roofing panels — “Super Six” is called out by name — cladding including baseboards, soffits, and gutters and downpipes. New Zealand’s housing stock is full of pre-2000 buildings.
And on what releases the fibres, WorkSafe’s homeowner guidance is unambiguous: they are released when material is sanded, drilled, cut, or water blasted, the instruction is “Do not disturb asbestos materials in any way”, and the advice is to always check for asbestos before starting any work on a home or property.
Water blasted is in that list, in the regulator’s own words, using the trade’s own word for what it does.
The operational consequence is a question in your quoting script — when was the house built, and what is the roof made of — and a willingness to walk away from a line item. On a pre-2000 property with cement-sheet roofing, the roof is a WorkSafe question before it is a pricing question, and it belongs with people licensed for that work rather than on your quote. Turning down one roof line is cheap. The alternative is not, and the three-line package described above is what lets you decline it without re-quoting the house.
The seasons run the other way
A US or British exterior-cleaning calendar is upside down here. Demand builds through spring into the pre-Christmas rush, holds over summer, and thins through the cold months — while the growth your service removes does its best work in exactly the period nobody is booking. That is an operational asymmetry rather than a complaint: winter is when next season’s demand is being manufactured on shaded walls.
Two things fall out of it. Route efficiency matters most in the compressed months, so the difference between a good and a bad summer is often stop density rather than price — the route density calculator is the arithmetic behind that. And the trough has to be funded from the peak, which is a planning problem with a known shape: off-season cash flow for service businesses covers it, and repeat bookings taken at the peak for the following season are the cheapest version of the fix.
Decide in this order
Start with the words, because they are free: house wash, soft wash, water blasting, section, quote. Then measure in square metres and price the condition of the walls, not just their area. Build the rate from your own costs with ACC levies inside the labour line and height access priced as the different job it is. Quote the package as three visible lines so the customer can see what they are buying and you can decline a line without re-opening the whole job. Put the price in front of the customer GST-inclusive, and make sure your document carries what Inland Revenue expects for its band. Ask how old the house is before you ask anything else about the roof.
If you are earlier than that — still deciding what the business charges rather than what this job costs — service business operations benchmarks is the wider frame, and the service hourly rate calculator is where the number starts.