The honest answer is under $1,500 if you buy your first pressure washer used and start with driveways, not houses.
Most "how to start a pressure washing business" videos are made by guys trying to sell you a $12,000 trailer rig on day one. You don't need it. Year one is a used 4 GPM gas machine, a surface cleaner, and three flyers in your neighborhood.
The surface cleaner attachment ($100 to $200) is the one piece of gear most new washers skip. It's the round disc you push along a driveway instead of using a wand. It turns a 90-minute driveway job into a 20-minute one. Without it, your labor cost per job is so high the margin barely works. With it, a driveway pays for itself in the first pass.
Chemicals are simpler than the YouTube guys make them look. Sodium hypochlorite (pool shock) plus a surfactant covers about 95% of residential jobs — driveway oxidation, house siding, sidewalks. The branded "soft wash" mixes are the same thing at 3x the price. Don't buy them until you're running a high-volume operation.
Test the spigot before you quote. Some houses have weak water pressure that can't keep up with a 4 GPM machine. If you quote a job and can't run at full capacity, you either finish slowly or walk off — neither is good. Check flow rate before you give a number.
The rest — exact machine specs to look for on Craigslist, chemical ratios by job type, pricing tables by city, and the four job types to walk away from — is in the full plan:
See the full pressure washing business plan →
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