Work out what one route minute costs you (technician, vehicle, overhead), multiply it by the minutes each stop takes including the drive, add materials, then divide by one minus your target margin. Round the result into a rate sheet by home-size band, with initial visits priced above recurring ones and one-off jobs above both.
Published price lists will not tell you whether a given stop makes money. InvoiceOwl's August 2026 guide quotes cost-guide ranges of $150 to $300 for an initial visit on a plan, $100 to $175 for a quarterly visit and $40 to $75 for a monthly one, and it puts fully loaded labour at 25% to 40% above base pay. Use those as a sense check on where your sheet should land. Two firms with the same list price can differ by more than 20 points of margin, because one drives 10 minutes between stops and the other 30.
A route minute is the unit that sets your profit
Start with one technician, one vehicle and one route day. The technician earns $26 an hour, and burden (payroll taxes, insurance, holiday pay) adds 32%, so an hour costs $34.32 and an eight-hour day $274.56. The vehicle, with fuel, insurance, repairs and depreciation, costs $58 a day. Overhead (office, software, licences, marketing, insurance) is $100 a route day, worked out as monthly overhead divided by the route days your firm runs in a month.
That gives $432.56 a day before a single drop of product. Now count the minutes you can actually sell. Subtract 45 minutes for loading, restocking and paperwork from the 480-minute day, which leaves 435. You will never fill every one of them, because customers are late, jobs overrun and a gate is sometimes locked, so plan on using 90%: 391.5 minutes. Divide the day cost by those minutes and one route minute costs $1.10 (precisely $1.105).
| Line | Illustration | How to find yours |
|---|---|---|
| Loaded technician hour | $34.32 | Base wage plus your burden percentage |
| Technician cost per day | $274.56 | Loaded hour times paid hours |
| Vehicle per day | $58.00 | Fuel, repairs, insurance, depreciation |
| Overhead per route day | $100.00 | Monthly overhead divided by route days |
| Cost per route day | $432.56 | Sum of the three lines above |
| Sellable minutes at 90% | 391.5 | (480 - 45) times 0.90 |
| Cost per route minute | $1.105 | $432.56 divided by 391.5 |
The consequence is simple and a little uncomfortable: a minute in the van costs exactly what a minute at the customer's door costs. A stop that takes 28 minutes and sits 15 minutes from the last one costs 43 route minutes, and that is the number to price.
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Buy nowFrom one stop to a floor price
Take the middle band, homes of 1,501 to 2,500 square feet (about 140 to 232 square metres). A quarterly recurring visit takes 28 minutes at the property and about 15 minutes of driving, so 43 route minutes. An initial visit, which includes the inspection, a full treatment and the explanation, takes 80 minutes on site plus the same drive. The re-service reserve line covers free return visits between scheduled stops, a real cost that the sheet has to carry. Count last year's return visits, multiply by the minutes and materials each took, and divide by the visits you covered. Nine returns per 100 covered visits at about $50 each is $4.50 a visit.
| Cost line | Recurring visit | Initial visit |
|---|---|---|
| Route minutes (on site plus 15 driving) | 43 | 95 |
| Time cost at $1.105 a minute | $47.51 | $104.96 |
| Materials | $7.00 | $22.00 |
| Re-service reserve | $4.50 | $9.00 |
| Cost of the stop | $59.01 | $135.96 |
| Floor price at a 30% margin | $84.30 | $194.23 |
The floor price is cost divided by 0.70, not multiplied by 1.30. It is the lowest price that earns your target margin on this stop, and it is the number to protect. What you list above it is a commercial choice: competing quotes, how fast the route fills and how much you want recurring accounts. Pricing below it needs a reason you can write down.
The rate sheet by home-size band
Repeat the sum for each band using the on-site minutes you expect, and round to prices that read sensibly beside competing quotes. Materials rise with the size of the property: $5 and $16 for the smallest band, up to $12 and $40 for the largest. The prices below are illustrative; yours will come from your own minutes and costs.
| Home size (sq ft) | Recurring minutes | Recurring floor | Recurring listed | Initial minutes | Initial floor | Initial listed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 1,500 | 20 | $68.82 | $79 | 60 | $154.09 | $169 |
| 1,501 to 2,500 | 28 | $84.30 | $95 | 80 | $194.23 | $199 |
| 2,501 to 3,500 | 38 | $102.94 | $115 | 105 | $245.12 | $249 |
| 3,501 to 5,000 | 50 | $126.17 | $139 | 135 | $306.76 | $309 |
At the listed prices the recurring margins run from 36.5% to 39.0% and the initial margins from 30.5% to 36.2%. The initial prices sit inside the $150 to $300 range InvoiceOwl quotes for the first three bands and slightly above it for the largest. The two smaller recurring prices sit below the $100 to $175 quarterly range and the two larger ones inside it, which is what a dense route earns you. That is not a reason to raise them to match a guide; it is a reason to check demand before you do.
Frequency changes the minutes, not the formula. A monthly visit to a 1,501 to 2,500 square foot home might need only 20 minutes on site, $5 of materials and a $3 reserve. At the same route minute that is a $46.67 cost and a $66.67 floor, so a $69 listed price earns 32.4%. In year one the monthly plan brings in $199 plus eleven visits at $69, or $958, against $484 for the quarterly plan. Monthly plans have more stops to keep profitable, and they also pay for a lot more route time, so check which of the two your calendar can actually carry.
One-off jobs carry the whole trip alone
A one-off treatment has no follow-up visits to share the drive with, no route density to lean on and no plan revenue to recover a loss from. It should cost the customer more than an initial visit on a plan, and the gap is a decision you make with the figures in front of you. Say the property is in the middle band but sits 30 minutes from your last stop. The cost is 110 route minutes ($121.54), $22 of materials and a $9 reserve, which makes $152.54 and a floor of $217.91. Adding 15% for having no plan behind it gives about $250, and $249 is the listed price.
Set that beside what a plan customer pays: $199 for the initial visit and $95 for each of the next three quarterly visits is $484 in year one. The plan costs you $312.99 to serve, a 35.3% margin. The one-off customer pays $249 for a cost of $152.54, which is 38.7%. Both clear the 30% target, and the plan also brings the next year's revenue with it, which is the argument for steering customers towards it in the quote conversation, not at the till.
Specialist work sits outside the sheet. One published pricing guide says termite and bed bug jobs should be bid per job after an inspection, never from a flat rate card. The same applies to wildlife and exclusion work. Keep those prices off the public rate sheet and price them with a separate inspection step. A pest control service agreement is where the scope of an inspection-priced job gets written down.
Travel zones: the price of one extra drive minute
Because a route minute costs $1.105 and your margin target is 30%, each extra minute of driving per stop has to add $1.58 to the price ($1.105 divided by 0.70). That turns a vague "we charge extra for distance" into a rule you can apply to the map: ten extra minutes is $15.78, and twenty-five is $39.46.
| Zone | Average drive per stop | Extra minutes | Surcharge per visit |
|---|---|---|---|
| A (core routes) | 15 minutes | 0 | None |
| B (outer routes) | 25 minutes | 10 | $16 |
| C (edge of the service area) | 40 minutes | 25 | $40 |
The reason to bother is what drive time does to a route day. Hold the middle-band recurring price at $95 and change only the drive between stops:
| Drive between stops | Stops in a route day | Cost of each stop | Margin at $95 | Profit per route day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 10.3 | $53.49 | 43.7% | $428 |
| 15 minutes | 9.1 | $59.01 | 37.9% | $328 |
| 20 minutes | 8.2 | $64.53 | 32.1% | $248 |
| 30 minutes | 6.8 | $75.58 | 20.4% | $131 |
| 40 minutes | 5.8 | $86.63 | 8.8% | $48 |
A stop 40 minutes from its neighbours, priced at the core $95, earns an 8.8% margin, and a route made entirely of such stops earns $48 a day instead of $328. The $40 surcharge brings a single distant stop back to target. It also tells you where a new route should be: closing the gap between stops from 30 minutes to 15 is worth more than any price rise on the list. Route planning for quarterly customers is the next lever once the zones are in place.
Letting an assistant lay out the rate sheet
An assistant is good at laying out a sheet like this and doing the repetitive arithmetic across four bands. It is not good at knowing which of your costs it has forgotten, so give it every input and forbid additions. Strip customer names and addresses from anything you paste, and use your own figures in place of the illustration.
I run a pest control company. Build a spreadsheet layout for Excel or Google Sheets
that turns my costs into a rate sheet. Use formulas, name every input cell, and list
every assumption you make.
Inputs (a labelled block, one value per cell):
- Technician base wage per hour: 26
- Burden on wages: 32%
- Paid hours per route day: 8
- Vehicle cost per route day: 58
- Overhead per route day: 100
- Minutes lost to loading, restocking and paperwork: 45
- Share of the remaining minutes I can fill: 90%
- Average drive minutes between stops: 15
- Target profit margin on price: 30% (margin, not markup)
- Re-service reserve per visit: 4.50 recurring, 9.00 initial
Home-size bands: on-site minutes (recurring, initial) and materials (recurring, initial)
- Up to 1,500 sq ft: 20 and 60 minutes; $5 and $16
- 1,501 to 2,500: 28 and 80; $7 and $22
- 2,501 to 3,500: 38 and 105; $9 and $30
- 3,501 to 5,000: 50 and 135; $12 and $40
For each band show route minutes, cost of the stop, floor price (cost divided by 1
minus margin) and the margin at a listed price I can type in. Add a drive-time table
(10, 15, 20, 30, 40 minutes) for the middle band. Do not add any cost line I have not
listed.A typical first reply gets the layout right and one cost wrong. Illustrative output for the recurring visit:
| Band | Cost of stop as printed | Floor as printed | Correct floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 1,500 | $31.60 | $45.14 | $68.82 |
| 1,501 to 2,500 | $42.44 | $60.62 | $84.30 |
| 2,501 to 3,500 | $55.49 | $79.26 | $102.94 |
| 3,501 to 5,000 | $71.74 | $102.49 | $126.17 |
Every printed floor is $23.68 too low, which is exactly 15 drive minutes at $1.105 divided by 0.70. The sheet priced the minutes at the property and left out the van. The tell is a stop cost that does not equal on-site minutes plus drive minutes, times the route minute, plus materials and reserve. Check one band with a calculator before reading any of the others, and if it is out, paste the discrepancy back and ask the assistant to find the missing term. If you build the sheet in Google Sheets, the Google Sheets AI prompts guide covers prompts for formulas.
Markup mistaken for margin, and what it costs in a month
The other slip to look for is a price built as cost times 1.30. For the middle-band recurring visit that gives $59.01 times 1.30, or $76.71, instead of the correct $84.30. The margin on $76.71 is 23.1%, not 30%. The difference is $7.59 a stop. At nine stops a route day over 22 route days that is $1,503 a month of profit missing from one technician's route, and nobody would notice it in a single quote. This is why the formula in the sheet should read cost divided by one minus the margin, and why a hand check of a single cell is worth the half minute.
Ten logged visits against the sheet
A sheet built from assumed minutes is only a hypothesis. Record the on-site and driving minutes for each visit, band by band, and ask the assistant to compare them with the sheet. Ten recurring visits in the middle band, as an illustration:
| Visit | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| On site (minutes) | 30 | 26 | 35 | 29 | 33 | 38 | 27 | 31 | 34 | 32 |
| Driving (minutes) | 18 | 22 | 16 | 20 | 17 | 21 | 19 | 18 | 22 | 17 |
On site averages 31.5 minutes against the 28 in the sheet, and driving averages 19 against 15, so a stop is really 50.5 route minutes, not 43. The cost becomes $67.30 and the floor $96.14. At the listed $95 the margin has slipped to 29.2%, just under target, and nothing in the quoting process would have told you. The drive figure matters more than the on-site one: 15 minutes was the planning figure, 19 is what the vans do. Ten visits only show where to look, so keep logging. If the band still averages about 50 route minutes after around 30 visits, update the inputs from the logs and move the listed price to $99 (a 32.0% margin). Use estimate software that logs visit times if you are still keeping them on paper.
A stop that is not a house: a ten-unit building
The same method prices a property manager's request without a separate rule book. A ten-unit building gets a monthly interior check at 12 minutes a unit, plus 20 minutes on the exterior and common areas, which is 140 minutes on site. Add the 15-minute drive and that is 155 route minutes, or $171.26. Materials are $30 and the reserve is $12 for a building of this size, so the stop costs $213.26 and the floor is $304.65, about $30.47 a unit. A listed $309 for the building earns 31.0%. If the manager asks for a flat $29 a unit, the $290 total earns 26.5%, below your target, so the question to answer is whether the building brings enough neighbouring stops to make a smaller margin acceptable. The sheet gives you the number for that conversation instead of a guess. For bids that include several buildings or a warehouse, the commercial proposal template shows how to present them.
What a $2 wage rise does to every price
Because every price comes from the same inputs, a cost change is a one-cell edit. Raise the technician's base wage from $26 to $28 and the loaded hour becomes $36.96, the route day $453.68 and the route minute $1.159. The middle-band recurring floor moves from $84.30 to $87.61 (up 3.9%), and the listed $95 still earns 35.4%, so it can wait. The initial floor moves from $194.23 to $201.55, which is above the listed $199: that margin is now 29.1%. The initial price is the one to raise first, and the sheet showed you which one without a day of rechecking quotes. Ask the assistant to produce a before-and-after table whenever you change an input, so the next price letter to customers rests on figures you can show.
The rate sheet your customers read
The customer-facing sheet is shorter than the working one and hides the arithmetic. It states what is included, how the first visit differs from the rest, and what is priced after an inspection. Something like this, for the middle band (illustrative):
Initial service, home of 1,501 to 2,500 sq ft: $199. Includes the inspection, interior and exterior treatment, and a written note of what we found and what to do next.
Quarterly plan: the initial service, then $95 a visit every three months, with a free return visit within 30 days if covered pests persist.
Monthly plan: the initial service, then $69 a visit.
One-off treatment: from $249.
Outer routes: add $16 a visit. Edge of the service area: add $40.
Termites, bed bugs and wildlife: priced after an inspection.
Write the plan terms, cancellation rules and what counts as a covered pest into the service agreement so the sheet and the contract say the same thing, and send the quarterly visit reminders from your reminder text templates so skipped visits do not quietly turn into extra route minutes. Review the sheet every quarter: re-run the cost block with last quarter's wages, fuel and overhead, then the logged minutes, then the margin at each listed price.
Questions pest control owners ask about the rate sheet
Should I price by home size or by number of rooms?
Home size is easier to quote and track, because interior floor area roughly follows the minutes a visit takes. Treat lot size, outbuildings, crawl spaces and heavy activity as add-ons priced in minutes, not as a new band for every case. If a band's logged visit times drift apart, split the band; do not add rooms to the sheet.
What about termites, bed bugs and wildlife?
Bid them after an inspection rather than from the rate sheet. One published pricing guide says termite and bed bug work should be bid job by job, never from a flat rate card, and the same logic covers wildlife and exclusion work, where time and materials vary far more than they do on a routine general-pest visit.
How often should I review the sheet?
Check the first ten logged visits in each band to see where the minutes are going, then review properly at around 30 visits per band and again each quarter. Compare logged on-site minutes, drive minutes, materials and return visits with the sheet's assumptions, and change only the input that is out, not the whole price.
Can I let AI set the prices without checking?
No. An assistant is good at laying out the sheet and doing repetitive arithmetic, but it will happily drop a cost line or confuse markup with margin and sound confident. Ask for formulas, check one band by hand with a calculator, and list the assumptions it made before any price goes to a customer.
Further reads
- AI for Pest Control Companies: What a Monthly Toolkit Costs — What a monthly software toolkit adds to your overhead line.
- Pest Control Lead Generation Tools Compared: Cost per Booked Job — Cost per booked job for the leads that fill your routes.
- Commercial Pest Control Leads: Prospect Warehouses and Offices With AI — Find the warehouse and office accounts that suit your routes.
- Is Jobber Good for Pest Control? Setup, Limits and AI Features — How one field-service tool handles recurring pest control work.
- How to Price Garden Maintenance: Visit Rates and Seasonal Extras With AI — Visit-rate pricing for another route-based service.
- How to Price Pool Service With an AI-Built Pricing Sheet — A second recurring-visit pricing sheet to compare logic with.
- How Can AI Help My Pest Control Business? Three Jobs to Start With — Where AI saves a small firm the most time first.
- How to Price Christmas Light Installation: Roofline, Trees and Take-Down — A worked quote with roofline, two trees and take-down as separate priced lines, the cost behind each rate, and an AI check of the sheet.
- Local Services Ads for Pest Control: Bad Leads and the Google Ads Move — Which pest control leads Google may credit, how to write feedback from call summaries, and what to export before Local Services Ads move into Google Ads.
- Mosquito Control Business: Quotes and Season Plans With AI — A yard-size quote table, season plan pricing and the messages around it, with AI drafting the replies, reminders and review requests from your own numbers.
- Pest Control Company Content Marketing: A Seasonal AI Calendar — Twelve months of pest control posts, emails and service-page updates built around ant, wasp, rodent and bed bug seasons, with AI prompts.
- Can AI Write Pest Control Service Reports? What Must Stay Manual — What a pest control service report should contain, a prompt that drafts it from technician notes, and the fields that stay manual.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: InvoiceOwl's guide to pricing pest control jobs (20 August 2026) for the published price ranges and the labour-burden range quoted. The rate sheet figures are illustrative.