Pool Tile Cleaning Pricing Calculator (per linear foot)
Price a waterline tile cleaning job and see what your own rate per linear foot actually is: production rate, scale severity, blast media, refill water and drive time.
How this is calculated
Everything scales off linear feet of waterline, because that is the only dimension a tile clean actually touches. The band height sets the area you work over, which is what the media is consumed against. Task times are per technician and crew size multiplies them, 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.
waterline = measured, or 2 × (length + width), or π × diameter
bandArea = waterline × bandHeight ÷ 12
cleanHours = waterline ÷ productionRate × severityFactor
onSite = prep + cleanHours + cleanUp + extra
crewHours = onSite × crewSize
driveCrew = drive × crewSize
billedDrv = driveCrew × driveBillPct
labour = (crewHours + billedDrv) × chargeRate
media = waterline × mediaPerFoot × mediaCostPerLb (blasting only)
refillGal = poolSurface × drop ÷ 12 × 7.4805
water = refillGal ÷ 1000 × costPer1000Gal
materials = (media + water + supplies + equipment) × (1 + markup)
subtotal = labour + materials + addOns
price = max(subtotal, jobMinimum)
perFoot = price ÷ waterline
tax = price × taxRate
cost = (crewHours + driveCrew) × costRate + materialsAtCost
margin = (price − cost) ÷ priceWorked example
One tech blasting a 16 by 32 ft rectangular pool with moderate calcium, at a 85 charge-out rate. The waterline is 2 × (16 + 32) = 96 linear ft, and a 6 in band makes that 48 sq ft of tile. At 30 ft/h with a 1.35 severity multiplier the clean is 96 ÷ 30 × 1.35 = 4.32 h, plus 0.75 h of prep and 0.5 h of clean-up, so 5.57 h on site.
Labour is 5.57 × 85 = 473.45. Media at 0.5 lb per foot over 96 ft is 48 lb, which at 1.10 a pound is 52.80. The job prices at 526.25 before tax, or 5.48 per linear foot. It consumed 5.57 + 0.5 = 6.07 paid crew-hours including the unbilled drive, so it returns 86.70 per paid crew-hour rather than the 85 on the rate card.
Drop that pool 8 in on a 512 sq ft surface and you put back 512 × 8 ÷ 12 × 7.4805 = about 2,553 gallons. At 6.00 per 1,000 gallons that is 15.32 of water, which is small. What it does to the chemistry is not.
Where every constant comes from
7.4805 gallons per cubic foot is a definition, not a survey. A US gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches and a cubic foot is 1,728 cubic inches, so a cubic foot holds 7.4805 gallons (1728/231 exactly). It is the only hard constant in the tool, and you can check it without leaving this page.
The production rates, the severity multiplier and the two task times are scoping conventions. 30, 18 and 10 linear feet an hour for blasting, hand scrubbing and a pumice stone; 1.0, 1.35 and 1.8 for light, moderate and heavy calcium; and 0.75 h of prep and 0.5 h of clean-up and restart. They say that a blast rig clears waterline faster than a hand pad, that heavy scale takes longer than a film, and that dropping the level and vacuuming up afterwards are not free. They are not market rates, not benchmarks and not sourced figures, every one of them sits in an editable box, and the numbers you replace them with after your first few timed jobs are the ones that matter.
Media consumption per foot is yours, not ours. It moves with scale thickness, nozzle, pressure and the operator, so the box starts empty. Weigh what a job actually used, divide by the feet, and you have a figure that beats any published one.
The coupled effect: refill water changes the pool. The water going back in carries its own calcium hardness and dilutes whatever cyanuric acid was in the pool, so the water that comes back up is not the water that went down. The tool prices the refill and says so. It does not balance anything: work the dosing out against a fresh test and the product label, in the chemistry calculators, not here.
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 waterline tile clean is a one-off restoration job on a band a few inches tall running the perimeter of the pool. It does not touch the floor, the walls or the steps, which is why pricing it off pool size or volume goes wrong so reliably: a long thin lap pool has far more waterline per gallon than a round spa does. This calculator prices the band, in linear feet, from your own production rate and your own costs.
The other one-off pool restoration job prices on a completely different unit. A drain-and-acid-wash is quoted against the whole interior surface with the pool empty, and that belongs in the acid wash pricing calculator. If you are quoting both on the same visit, price them separately and add them up. They do not share a rate.
The per-foot figure here is an output, not a lookup
Search for what tile cleaning costs per linear foot and you will find bands. 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.
So it runs the arithmetic the other way round. You give it the waterline, the method, how heavy the calcium is and what your materials cost, and it divides the finished build-up by the feet to show you what your own per-foot rate actually is. If you already work to a number, put it in the benchmark box and the tool reports how far above or below it the build-up lands. That is a comparison against your figure, never an endorsement of anyone else’s.
Measure the waterline, or let the pool’s own dimensions give it to you
Walk the coping with a tape on a freeform pool. For a rectangle, twice the length plus the width is the perimeter, and for a round pool it is pi times the diameter, both of which the tool will do for you. The tile band height is a separate measurement, and it matters: it sets the area you actually work over, which is what the blast media gets consumed against.
One other measurement earns its place here. If you are dropping the water line to get at the tile, the refill volume needs the pool’s water surface area, and the pool surface area calculator is where that comes from for anything more complicated than a rectangle. Bring the square footage back to the water panel and the refill prices itself.
The water you put back is the coupled effect
Blasting a waterline means taking the level below the band, and every inch off the line has to go back in. The money side is small and the tool prices it: surface area times the drop, converted with the defined 7.4805 US gallons per cubic foot, at whatever metered water costs you per thousand.
The part that is not small is the chemistry. Fill water carries its own calcium hardness and dilutes whatever cyanuric acid was in the pool, so what comes back up is not the water that went down. The tool flags the volume and stops there, because balancing is a job for a fresh test and the product label, not a pricing page. Work the hardness side out in the calcium hardness calculator after the refill has settled, and quote the rebalance visit as an add-on if you intend to do it.
Every constant on the page, and what it is not
There is exactly one hard constant: 7.4805 gallons in a cubic foot. That is a definition rather than a measurement, because a US gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches and a cubic foot is 1,728 of them, so a cubic foot holds 1728/231 gallons exactly, which is 7.4805 to four places. You can check it without leaving the page.
Everything else pre-filled is a scoping convention in an editable box: starting production rates of 30, 18 and 10 linear feet an hour for blasting, hand scrubbing and a pumice stone, and starting multipliers of 1.0, 1.35 and 1.8 for light, moderate and heavy calcium. They say a blast rig clears waterline faster than a hand pad and that heavy scale takes longer than a film. They are not market rates, not benchmarks and not sourced figures. Time two jobs, overwrite them, and the tool becomes yours.
Media consumption per foot starts empty for the same reason, only more so: it moves with scale thickness, nozzle, pressure and operator, so no generic figure would survive contact with a real job. Weigh what one job used, divide by the feet, and you have a better number than anything published.
Where the one-off sits beside the recurring line
A tile clean is a job you sell once and then, if the water balance and the run time are right, do not sell again for years. The monthly number that runs alongside it is a different calculation with a different shape, and it lives in the pool service price calculator. Quoting the two together, rather than letting a restoration job disappear into a service rate, is usually the difference between a profitable spring and a busy one.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. Estimate only, not a binding quote.