Most solo operators who answer this question publicly report taking home between $30,000 and $70,000 a year. A smaller group reports six figures. A meaningful number report less than the median wage of an employed cleaner. The spread is enormous, and the reason is that almost everyone answering is quietly answering a different question.
This is the most asked question in the trades and the worst answered. Below are the actual numbers working operators have put in writing, where they came from, and why you should not treat any of them as a forecast.
WHY MOST ANSWERS TO THIS QUESTION ARE USELESS
When someone says they made $100,000 cleaning windows, they might mean any of three completely different things:
- Gross revenue. Everything customers paid them. This is the biggest number and the one people quote in public.
- Net profit. What is left after fuel, insurance, equipment, chemicals, vehicle payments, software and marketing.
- Owner draw. What actually reached their personal bank account, which may be lower than net profit if they reinvested, or structured differently if the business is incorporated.
You can watch this confusion happen in real time. In a 2015 thread on the Window Cleaning Resource forum asking operators what they paid themselves, one respondent stopped to point out that people were using "how much did you make" to mean salary taken, business profit, and gross revenue interchangeably, and that the answers were therefore not comparable.
So before you compare yourself to anyone, get specific about which number you mean. Most of the discouragement new operators feel comes from comparing their net against somebody else's gross.
WHAT OPERATORS ACTUALLY REPORT
The most useful single data point available publicly is a survey run on the Window Cleaning Resource forum and published in February 2015. Twenty-three operators participated. Most had been in business three to ten years, most were solo or running one to five employees, and all but three did no high-rise work.
On net earnings paid to themselves in 2014, the results were scattered, with most responses falling between $30,000 and $60,000 and a few reporting up to $200,000.
A separate 2017 discussion asking how much a one-person window cleaning operation could make produced a similar shape. One experienced operator put the realistic ceiling for most successful solo operators at around $70,000. Another said they knew several solo operators grossing $150,000 to $160,000 and one above $200,000. A third, working three or four days a week and not every week, described being content at about $1,000 a week.
On the pressure washing side, a 2014 thread from a new two-person operation reported $1,500 to $2,000 per week in sales with a best week above $3,500. An experienced responder did the arithmetic out loud: $100,000 gross split between two partners is $50,000 each before costs, and after costs closer to $35,000 each.
Read those numbers carefully. They are self-reported, from people who chose to answer publicly, in threads that are now nine to twelve years old, and mostly from one trade in one online community. They tell you the rough shape of the distribution. They are not a benchmark and they are not adjusted for inflation.
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT DATA SAYS, AND WHY IT IS THE WRONG BENCHMARK
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes wage data for adjacent occupations. As of the May 2025 figures, the median annual wage was $38,340 for building cleaning workers and $33,960 for landscaping and groundskeeping workers. Janitors and building cleaners had a median hourly wage of $17.71.
These are employee wages. They are not what a business owner earns. An owner carries costs, risk and unpaid administrative hours that an employee does not, and in exchange keeps profit that an employee does not. Using the BLS median as your target is a mistake in both directions: it is too low to be an ambition and too clean to be a comparison.
What it is genuinely useful for is a floor. If you are working full time in your own business and clearing less than an employed cleaner earns, that is a signal worth acting on, whether the fix is your pricing, your route density, or your costs.
THE FOUR THINGS THAT ACTUALLY MOVE YOUR NUMBER
Across every one of these discussions, the same four variables explain most of the spread.
- Season length. The one new operators underestimate most. An operator in a northern climate raised the point that they have roughly 30 workable weeks in a year. That single constraint caps annual revenue no matter how good the day rate is. Run your annual projection on your real season, not on 52 weeks.
- Repeat rate. First-year revenue is almost entirely new-customer acquisition, which is the slowest and most expensive way to fill a calendar. The operators reporting higher numbers are almost always describing a book of repeat customers built over years, not a better first year.
- Residential versus commercial. Higher hourly rates are typically available in residential work, but the pool of customers willing to pay a premium is finite in any given area. Commercial work tends to pay less per hour and offer more predictable volume.
- Solo versus crew. Staying solo caps revenue at what one person can physically do inside the season. Hiring raises the ceiling and adds payroll, insurance, management time and risk. Both are legitimate. They produce very different businesses.
HOW TO WORK OUT YOUR OWN NUMBER
Someone else's figure is entertainment. Yours is arithmetic. You need four inputs, and you probably already have three of them:
- Your average job value, which is total revenue divided by number of jobs.
- How many jobs you can realistically complete in a week at your current route density.
- Your real season length in weeks, not the calendar year.
- Your costs per week, including the ones that are easy to forget: fuel, insurance, equipment replacement, and your own unpaid admin time.
Multiply the first three for a gross ceiling. Subtract the fourth across the season for something close to net. The result will almost certainly be lower than the number you had in your head, and it will be yours.
The reason most operators cannot do this in five minutes is not the math. It is that the inputs are spread across a notes app, a truck console full of receipts, and memory. If your jobs, prices and payments live in one place, average job value and season revenue are things you can read rather than reconstruct. That is most of what running field service software buys you at this stage, and it is worth being blunt that a spreadsheet you actually maintain beats software you do not.
THE HONEST SUMMARY
If you are solo, in a full season, with a real repeat book and disciplined pricing, the publicly reported range clusters between $30,000 and $70,000 taken home, with a real but smaller group above that. First year will be below it. Nobody can tell you your number without knowing your season, your rates and your costs, and anyone who quotes you a confident figure without asking is selling something.
What you can control is knowing your own numbers well enough to spot which of the four variables above is the one holding you back.
SOURCES
- Window Cleaning Resource, operator survey with 23 participants, published February 2015: Salary: How much did you pay yourself in 2014?
- Window Cleaning Resource, November 2017: How much can a one man show make?
- Pressure Washing Resource, August 2014: How much income should I expect in my first year?
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: Building and Grounds Cleaning Occupations