Pool Filter Cleaning Pricing Calculator
Work out how much to charge for a pool filter cleaning: teardown time, one handling slot per cartridge or grid, the soak return trip, media and parts.
How this is calculated
The price is a straight build-up from time you enter. Three things behave deliberately: task times are per technician and crew size multiplies them, handling time is counted per element rather than per rated square foot, and drive time is tracked twice, so every drive hour lands in your cost while only the share you choose to bill lands in the charge.
elementHrs = elementCount × perElementHours (cartridge / DE only)
onSite = teardown + elementHrs + soakHandling* + extra (*soak only)
crewHours = onSite × crewSize
driveCrew = (drive + returnTrip*) × crewSize (*soak only)
billedDrv = driveCrew × driveBillPct
labour = (crewHours + billedDrv) × chargeRate
media = mediaQty × mediaCostPerUnit (DE / sand only)
materials = (media + cleaner + parts + elements) × (1 + markup)
subtotal = labour + materials + addOns
price = max(subtotal, jobMinimum)
tax = price × taxRate
cost = (crewHours + driveCrew) × costRate + materialsAtCost
margin = (price − cost) ÷ price
program = floor(cleansPerYear × poolsEnrolled) × priceWorked example
One tech on a four-cartridge housing at a 95 charge-out rate. Teardown 0.4 h plus 4 × 0.25 h of element handling is 1.4 h on site. Half an hour of round-trip drive, none of it billed. Cleaner 18 and parts 12 is 30 of materials at cost, marked up 20% to 36.
Labour 1.4 × 95 = 133, plus 36 of materials, gives 169 before tax. The job consumed 1.4 + 0.5 = 1.9 paid crew-hours, so it returns 88.95 per paid crew-hour, not the 95 the rate card implies. That gap is the drive you absorbed.
Where every constant comes from
No price presets anywhere. Every currency field starts empty. The only pre-filled numbers are the task times: 0.4 h, 0.75 h and 0.5 h of teardown for a cartridge, DE and sand housing, and 0.25 h and 0.2 h of handling per cartridge and per DE grid. They are scoping conventions in editable boxes, a starting point for "how long does this take", never a market rate and never a benchmark. Overwrite them after your first few timed cleans; the numbers you replace them with are the ones that matter.
The media quantity is not ours to supply. A DE filter's recharge weight is stamped on its own data plate, and a sand bed's charge is in the manufacturer's spec for that model. Both are specific to the filter in front of you, so the tool asks for the figure instead of printing one. Pounds and kilograms are the same money either way: the toggle converts the quantity and the unit cost together.
Two coupled effects the quote hides if you let it. A DE teardown ends with an empty filter, so the recharge is part of the job and the tool says so when you have not priced it. How many pounds that recharge takes comes off the grid area on the DE powder recharge calculator, which is the quantity this quote then puts a price on. And a soak is a second visit: the return drive is real, unavoidable and usually unbilled, so it gets its own field rather than being folded into "on-site time".
The margin check is all-or-nothing. Without a cost per crew-hour the labour half of the job cost is unknown, and reporting a margin off the materials line alone would flatter every quote, so the block simply does not appear.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
What this prices, and what it deliberately does not
A filter clean is a one-off, short, materials-light visit, and what decides whether it earns anything is not the pool it belongs to. It is how many things come out of the housing, whether the job ends in a soak that forces a second trip, and how much of the day the drive eats. This calculator builds the price from those, then runs the check a flat per-clean rate hides: what the visit actually returns per paid crew-hour once the windshield time is counted.
Recurring work prices on a different axis entirely. If you are setting a monthly per-pool number rather than quoting a one-off service call, the pool service price calculator is the right tool. That one is a monthly cost stack; this one prices a single job that sits beside it on the invoice.
Element count, not rated square footage
The nameplate on a filter tells you whether it is the right filter for the pool. It does not tell you how long it takes to clean, because cleaning time scales with how many elements you take out, work over and put back. Two housings rated identically can hold four cartridges or eight grids, and the eight-grid one is close to twice the handling.
So the driver here is a count the tech can make standing at the pad, not a figure off a label. If the question in front of you is instead whether the filter is sized correctly for the system, that is the pool filter size calculator, and it is worth answering before you quote a replacement element set: putting new cartridges into an undersized housing sells the customer a shorter cleaning interval, not a fix.
Every money field starts empty on purpose
Search for what a filter cleaning costs and you will find plenty of numbers. Follow their citations and they resolve to retailer blogs and lead-generation directories quoting each other. No regulator, no trade body, no published survey. Under this site’s cite-or-omit rule that means the tool ships with none of them.
The only pre-filled numbers anywhere are task times: a starting teardown time per filter type and a starting handling time per element. All of them sit in editable boxes. They are a scoping starting point, a way of saying that a DE teardown takes longer to open and reassemble than a cartridge housing, and they are not benchmarks. Overwrite them after your first few timed cleans.
A soak is a second visit, not a longer one
The single most common way a filter clean loses money is being booked as one visit when it is two. An overnight soak or degrease means the elements leave, loaners or an empty housing stay, and somebody drives back. Fold that into “on-site time” and the return trip disappears from the quote while staying very much in your week.
Tick the soak box and the tool opens a separate return-trip field, adds it to the paid hours, and tells you when you have left it at zero. The same split that governs the first drive governs this one: it always lands in your cost, and only the share you nominate lands in your charge.
A DE teardown ends with an empty filter
This is the coupled effect the quote hides if you let it. Break down a DE filter and the old charge goes out with the rinse water, so the recharge is part of the job rather than an optional extra. The tool says so when you have priced a DE teardown with no media against it, because the two defensible answers are to price the recharge or to state plainly on the quote that the customer supplies it. Quietly doing neither is how a clean turns into an argument at the door.
The quantity itself is not this page’s to supply. A DE filter’s recharge weight is stamped on that filter, and a sand bed’s charge is in the manufacturer spec for that model, so the tool asks you to read it. The same goes for cleaner and degreaser: they appear here only as a cost you paid, never as a dilution or a method, because the label is the authority on both.
From a one-off to a cadence
One filter clean is a service call. Two a year across a route is a program, and the panel at the bottom of the tool multiplies your own cadence out so you can see what that is worth beside the monthly line. Cadence itself is a judgement call from the pad: bather load, filter type and how fast pressure climbs off a clean baseline, which is why the tool asks rather than assumes.
If the clean is part of keeping an account rather than a one-off call-out, the weekly pool maintenance checklist is the route work it sits inside, and the pressure reading that triggers the next clean comes off that same visit.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. Estimate only, not a binding quote.