“How much should I charge per pool per month?” It is tempting to start from what the company down the road charges. A better start is your own route, because a weekly pool is paid for in three things: the minutes you spend at it, the minutes you spend driving to it, and the chemicals you pour into it. Add those up per visit, multiply by the visits in a month, and you have a cost the price has to beat. Then the things that change one pool from the next, size, sanitizer and trees, become adjustments, and the work that is not weekly gets its own price list.
Decide what a visit is
Write down what every weekly stop includes before you price it. HomeAdvisor’s cost guide lists a typical professional visit as checking the water’s pH and the filters, brushing the walls, vacuuming, skimming, checking a robotic cleaner, and emptying the baskets and traps. Whatever your list is, it goes in the service agreement, so “full service” and “chemicals only” mean the same thing to you and the customer.
The chemistry you are aiming at has a public reference point. For home pools the CDC recommends a pH of 7.0 to 7.8 and free chlorine of at least 1 part per million, or at least 2 ppm when cyanuric acid, the chlorine stabilizer, is in use. The CDC also says to test chlorine and pH at least twice a day, and that “as a residential pool or hot tub owner, it is your responsibility” to check them regularly. A weekly visit cannot do that. Say so in the agreement: you balance the water each week, and the owner runs the pump, keeps the skimmer clear and checks the water between visits.
Time the stop, then price the minute
For two weeks, log the minute you arrive and the minute you leave at every pool, with its size and sanitizer, and the minutes of driving from the stop before. Average the time on site by size band, and write down what made the long ones long: leaf load, a cartridge filter that needed hosing, a gate code nobody sent.
Then give the minute a price: the tech’s loaded wage plus what the truck costs to run each hour. Your real hourly cost builds the loaded rate step by step. The drive is part of the stop. Route density works through why the same customers cost less on a tight route than a scattered one, and the lesson is the same for pools: price by zone, set a minimum per stop, and grow on the streets you already serve.
Chemicals: included, capped or billed
Chemical use varies from pool to pool, and there are three honest ways to handle it:
Sanitizer type matters to both your cost and the pool. HomeAdvisor’s guide puts the salt and chemicals for a saltwater pool at about $100 a year on average, plus about $800 every three to seven years for a new salt cell, and gives $65 for 25 pounds of chlorine tablets as an example of a chlorine pool’s chemical cost. Price the salt cell as an equipment repair, not inside the monthly fee.
Tablets have a second cost that shows up later. The CDC’s aquatic code annex notes that trichlor, a stabilized chlorine, is commonly found as tablets or sticks, and that repeated doses of stabilized chlorine lead to higher cyanuric acid levels. The Pool & Hot Tub Alliance puts numbers on it: trichlor adds 0.6 ppm of cyanuric acid for each ppm of chlorine it adds, and dichlor 0.9 ppm. It cites the APSP-11 standard’s maximum of 100 ppm, with 30 to 50 ppm ideal, and says high levels “should be reduced by draining and replacing water.” A pool run only on tablets keeps adding stabilizer, and draining is the fix the fact sheet gives. Put that on the extras list with a price, and say in the agreement who pays for it.
A worked example
Say a one-truck route costs an illustrative $45 an hour for the tech and the truck together, or 75 cents a minute. A 20,000-gallon chlorine pool takes 22 minutes on site and averages 8 minutes of driving from the stop before. Chemicals average an illustrative $6 a visit. A year has 52 weeks, so a weekly pool gets about 4.33 visits a month.
| Chlorine tablets | Salt system | |
|---|---|---|
| Time per visit (22 on site + 8 driving) at $0.75 a minute | $22.50 | $22.50 |
| Chemicals per visit | $6.00 | $3.00 |
| Cost per visit | $28.50 | $25.50 |
| Cost per month (× 4.33) | $123.41 | $110.42 |
| Price at a 35% margin | $189.86 | $169.88 |
So this route would quote about $190 a month for that chlorine pool and about $170 for the same pool on salt. Every input is yours to replace; the structure is what transfers. Dividing the monthly cost by 0.65 is what a 35 percent margin means, which is not the same as a 35 percent markup; markup vs. margin explains the difference.
Then adjust by band. A bigger pool takes longer and uses more chemicals; a pool under trees takes longer to skim and brush; a pool off your route carries more drive time. HomeAdvisor’s guide gives $80 to $150 a month for pool cleaning and water testing services. Use guide figures like that as a check, not a target: if your cost alone is near the top of that range, look at minutes and drive time before you look at the price.
The extras list
The monthly price covers the weekly visit. Everything else gets its own line, written down before anyone needs it:
The extra visit after a storm
After a big storm, if a whole route wants an extra visit in the same week, the schedule has to bend around it. Price it before hurricane season, not during it: a flat storm-visit fee covering debris removal, emptying baskets and rebalancing, with an hourly rate beyond a set time, and the chemicals billed as they are under your normal terms.
A flooded pool is a different job. The Pool & Hot Tub Alliance’s flooded-pool bulletin says to turn off power to all pool equipment at the main breaker before any cleanup, and to leave electrical repair work to a professional licensed by the state or local government to do it. After catastrophic flooding it recommends draining the pool, purging the plumbing lines and replacing the filter media, with a warning: high groundwater can make a pool “pop” out of the ground, so a hydrostatic release valve must be installed and working, and if you are unsure of the groundwater level, do not drain. That is a quote after an inspection, never a line on the weekly agreement.
If a state of emergency has been declared, check your state’s price rules before you raise anything; price-gouging laws after a storm covers them. A storm fee set in writing before the season is also easier to explain to a customer than one set the morning after.
Apartment and HOA pools are a different bid
The CDC’s Model Aquatic Health Code is guidance for pools open to the public, and the venues it names include hotels and motels, apartment complexes and homeowners’ associations. It becomes law only where a state or local government adopts it. For pools using stabilizer it calls for at least 2.0 ppm free chlorine and cyanuric acid at or below 90 ppm. Check your health department’s code before you bid one, and price whatever testing and record-keeping it requires on top of the route math above.
Every input in this article can be asked online: rough gallons, sanitizer, trees, how often, and the address. If you want a monthly range on your own website, NapkinPrice™ shows the homeowner one built from your own size bands, sanitizer adjustments, zones and minimum; the pool service page shows how it is set up for a weekly route.
General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change and vary by state; check with the agency named above or a professional for your situation.