How to price pest control services (with a worked example)
Updated 2026-10-11 · 8 min read
Price from your real costs, not from the company down the road. Here is the formula and a worked example for a quarterly residential plan.
Start with your true cost per hour
Add a technician's wage, payroll taxes, insurance, vehicle, fuel, phone and software, then divide by the hours they actually spend on jobs. Most owners are surprised: a tech paid $22 an hour often costs $45 to $60 per productive hour once everything is counted.
Productive hours matter. If a tech works 40 hours but 12 are spent driving, your cost spreads over 28 billable hours, not 40.
Add materials and drive time per stop
Track product used per service from your chemical records. For a typical exterior residential treatment, materials are usually a small share of the price; labor and drive time are the big costs.
Drive time is where routing pays off. Every ten minutes saved between stops is ten minutes you can sell.
Worked example: quarterly residential plan
Cost per productive hour $52, service time 45 minutes ($39), average drive 15 minutes ($13), materials $9. Direct cost is about $61 per visit.
Add overhead (office, marketing, admin) at 20% and a target net margin of 25%: $61 x 1.20 = $73, then $73 / 0.75 = about $98 per quarterly visit. An initial service usually prices at 1.5 to 2 times the recurring visit because it takes longer.
- Direct cost: labor + drive + materials
- Add overhead percentage
- Divide by (1 - target margin)
- Price initial visits higher than recurring ones
Keep prices consistent
Put your services and prices into your software so every estimate uses the same numbers, and review them every year as fuel and wages change.