The north side of our house is green. Only the stretch of cream vinyl behind the hydrangeas, where the sun never reaches and a film of algae climbs a little higher each year. Last October it hit the bottom of the kitchen window, and my neighbor asked, kindly, whether we had painted that wall a new color.
This September I finally priced it out. The price to pressure wash a house turned out to depend less on the size of the house than on how the crew planned to clean it. Three quotes for the same house came back at $199, $375 and $399, and the cheapest one would have done the most damage.
What I was trying to get clean
You already know our front if you read the Christmas lights post: 140 feet across, mostly one story, with a two-story gable over the entry. Built in 1996. On a Sunday morning I walked around it with my phone and listed each dirty surface.
- Vinyl siding on all four sides, bad on the north wall and fine on the south.
- A brick front stoop, with the mortar crumbling at one corner.
- A cedar porch railing the previous owners added.
- The concrete driveway, about 600 square feet, with oil spots and a gray tire track.
- The asphalt shingle roof, which has black streaks on the shady slope.
I thought I was pricing one job. The crews that knew what they were doing treated it as five.
Pressure washing and soft washing are two different jobs
Pressure washing uses the force of the water to do the cleaning. It’s the right tool for concrete. Soft washing sprays a cleaning solution at low pressure, lets it sit for a few minutes to kill the algae and mildew, and rinses it off with about the push of a garden hose. The solution does the work.
Both of the better crews proposed a soft wash for the siding and high pressure for the driveway only. The man who left a flyer on my mailbox planned to do all of it with one gas machine.
The siding industry agrees with the two crews more than with the flyer. The trade group for vinyl siding says you can use a power washer, with caution. Hold it straight at eye level and don’t aim the stream upward, because that can force water behind the panels. Some manufacturers don’t recommend power washing at all, and others cap the pressure and the cleaners. The group’s vinyl siding cleaning and maintenance guide is short, and worth reading before anyone points a machine at your walls.
The price to pressure wash a house, from my three quotes
These are my quotes from one suburb in 2026, so borrow the structure more than the numbers.
The flyer was $199 for “any house, any size,” driveway included, roof for $150 more. When I asked for a certificate of insurance, he said he’d have to look for it. I never heard back.
A local soft wash company priced by stories. Their one-story house wash is $325, and they added $50 for our entry gable because it needs a ladder and an extension wand. That $375 included the siding, the eaves and soffits, a low-pressure rinse of the stoop, and a rinse of the outside of the windows. A rinse leaves some water spots, they said, and window cleaning is its own job. The driveway was $0.20 a square foot, so $120 for ours. Their minimum for any visit is $250.
The third company measured our walls from satellite images and quoted by the square foot of siding: 2,100 square feet at $0.19, which came to $399 for the house alone. The driveway was a flat $150 on top.
That 2,100 surprised me, because our floor plan is about 1,700 square feet. They measure walls, and floor area tells you little about wall area. A two-story house with the same floor space has far more wall to clean, which is where most of the jump from one story to two comes from.
I booked the soft wash company. House plus driveway came to $495, and the two of them were packed up and gone in three hours and forty minutes.
The surfaces that should never get high pressure
I asked why each item on my list stayed away from the machine.
The cedar railing was the first. On soft wood like cedar or old pine, a high-pressure stream tears up the soft fibers between the growth rings and leaves the surface fuzzy and splintery. I did exactly that to this railing last spring. The crew told me to scrub it by hand with a deck cleaner and rinse with a hose, which is what I did, for $32 and an afternoon.
Then the roof. Those black streaks on shingles are usually algae, and blasting them knocks loose the granules on the shingle surface. The soft wash company does roofs as a separate, soft-only job. The flyer man wanted to go up there with his wand. I skipped the roof this year.
The brick stoop got a gentle rinse and a warning. High pressure on loose mortar blows it out of the joints, so the crew said to have the corner repointed before anyone puts real pressure on it.
Peeling paint is the one I’d flag for anyone in an older house (ours is from 1996, so it didn’t apply to us). The EPA says a home built before 1978 is more likely to have lead-based paint, and that dust and paint chips from it are one of the most common sources of lead exposure at home. Blasting peeling paint off a wall leaves the chips in your flower beds. The EPA page on reducing lead exposure at home explains the risk, and under its renovation, repair and painting rules, firms doing work that disturbs lead-based paint in pre-1978 homes have to be EPA- or state-certified. If your house is older and the paint is flaking, you want a painter who handles lead-safe prep, and a house wash can wait until after.
They also taped over two outdoor outlets and the flap on the dryer vent hood I’d just had replaced. Before spraying anything they soaked the hydrangeas with plain water, and rinsed them again at the end, because the cleaning solution can scorch leaves.
| Surface on my house | How the better crews handled it | What it cost me | What high pressure does to it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vinyl siding | Soft wash, rinse held level | $375 (flat price, one story plus the gable) | Aimed upward, it pushes water behind the panels |
| Concrete driveway | Pressure washing with a round surface cleaner | $120 at $0.20 a square foot | A wand held close leaves stripes you can see from the street |
| Cedar porch railing | Hand scrub and hose rinse, done by me | $32 and an afternoon | Raises the grain and leaves it fuzzy and splintered |
| Asphalt shingle roof | Soft wash only, quoted separately | $0, skipped this year | Strips the granules off the shingles |
| Brick stoop | Low-pressure rinse, repoint first | Included in the house price | Blows loose mortar out of the joints |
| Peeling paint on a pre-1978 house | Not a wash job, a lead-safe painting job | Didn’t apply to our house | Scatters paint chips into the soil around the house |
Common mistakes that raise the price to pressure wash a house
- Comparing a flat price with a per-square-foot price. The $199 and the $399 weren’t quotes for the same job. Ask what each one includes and what gets measured.
- Hiring the crew that will pressure wash anything. A cheap wash on cedar or shingles turns into a sanding job or a roofer’s visit, and that’s where the savings go.
- Booking the house without the driveway. My company’s minimum was $250, so a separate trip for the driveway later would have cost me more than twice the $120 add-on.
When to book it, and how often
I booked for mid-September. Crews want a dry day above freezing. I also wanted the gutter lip clean before lights get clipped to it in November, and if washing the outside is part of a bigger fall push, my fall home reset checklist puts it in order with everything else.
The crew lead guessed the shady north wall will need it every year or two, and the sunny south side much less. They barely touched the south wall this time. If only one side of your house is green, ask whether the quote covers all four walls anyway.
Grab the free printable: my one-page House Wash Quote Sheet, with a row for every surface on your house, a column for soft wash or pressure, and the five questions I asked each crew before I booked. Get the free sheet →
What didn’t work, and what I’d do differently
Last spring I tried to save the money. I rented a gas pressure washer from the hardware store for $89, bought a $24 jug of house wash, and gave it a Saturday.
By noon the driveway had pale stripes from where I held the wand too close. I fuzzed the top rail of the cedar railing so badly that I spent the next weekend sanding it. Near the garage I sprayed up under the siding to reach a high spot, the move the siding guide warns about. A day later the drywall inside the garage had a damp patch. It dried out. I slept badly for a week anyway.
The DIY try cost me $113 plus sandpaper and two weekends. The stripes on the driveway lasted until this September. The north wall stayed green.
Next time I’d price it by surface before calling anyone, send the concrete to the pressure washer and the walls to the soft wash, and scrub the soft wood myself. For the inside half of the season, my fall cleaning checklist picks up where the hose leaves off.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average price to pressure wash a house?
My three quotes in 2026 for a mostly one-story house with about 2,100 square feet of siding were $199, $375 and $399, and the two I trusted landed $24 apart. One charged $0.19 per square foot of wall, the other a flat rate plus $50 for the two-story section. Driveways were extra, $120 to $150.
Is soft washing more expensive than pressure washing?
Not in my quotes. The soft wash company came in under the per-square-foot company, and the cheapest quote was the one that would have used high pressure everywhere. What each crew included moved the price more than the method did.
How often should you wash the outside of a house?
The crew lead told me every one to two years for a shady wall like ours, and less often for walls that get full sun. Check your siding manufacturer’s care instructions too, since some limit the pressure and cleaners you can use.
If your house has a green side, walk around it this weekend and photograph each wall and each surface. Write down what it’s made of next to each photo. That list is what you hand to three crews, and it’s how you’ll see which of them plans to aim high pressure at your wood.
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