Pricing a pool service route so it actually pays

Most techs who go independent price their first accounts the same way: they ask what the last guy charged, shave a few dollars off, and lock in a monthly number for a year. Then chlorine jumps, a heat wave doubles the chemical demand, and that account quietly turns into a pool you clean for free every fourth week. Pricing a route is not about picking a friendly monthly figure. It is about building each stop off real cost and knowing which pools carry the margin.

Price the stop, not the pool

A weekly service price is really four costs stacked together: chemicals, drive time to and from the stop, the labor minutes on site, and your overhead per visit. Figure each one honestly. Chemicals swing with pool size, sun exposure, and bather load, so use the actual gallons and your real chlorine and acid usage, not a flat guess. Drive time is the cost everyone forgets. A twenty minute pool that sits thirty minutes from your last stop costs you far more than a thirty minute pool next door to it.

Add those four numbers, then add your target margin on top. That is the floor. Anything you quote under it is a pool you are paying to service. Do this on five accounts you already run and you will usually find one or two that have been losing money for months.

Separate service from chemicals

Some markets expect an all-in monthly price, others let you bill chemicals as a pass-through on top of a flat service fee. The pass-through model protects you when chemical costs spike, because the customer absorbs the swing instead of you. If your market wants one number, then reprice every account at least once a year and immediately when a common chemical jumps at the distributor. A price you set once and never touch will bleed you as costs climb.

Write into every agreement what a normal visit covers and what triggers an extra charge: green pool recovery, filter cleans, a heavy leaf load after a storm. Those are repairs and add-ons, not free work you fold into the weekly rate.

Grade every account

Not every stop deserves to stay on the route. Sort your accounts by margin per visit, factoring the drive. The bottom of that list is either a candidate for a price increase or a candidate to drop. Losing a low-margin account that sits far off your cluster is not a loss, it frees the hour for a closer, better-paying pool.

Repairs and equipment swaps are where the real money lives, so track your repair revenue per account too. A route that only cleans water leaves margin on the table.

For the tools that price and schedule all this on a tablet, see the route software guide. To find distributors and pros to sub overflow, browse our directory.