Flyra Research

Window Cleaning Statistics 2026

United StatesUpdated 2026-09-1219 sourced public figuresFree to cite with a link

What the window cleaning trade earns, charges, employs and risks — from federal data and 58,046 booked jobs.

Key figures

Market size

How big is the US window cleaning industry?

There is no reliable public answer, and every page that gives you one is picking a side without telling you. Published estimates for the same industry differ by roughly two orders of magnitude.

Published US window cleaning market estimates, as at 2026
SourceEstimate
IBISWorld$2.9bn
Fortune Business Insights$162.35bn
Third-party market report$808M

The $2.9bn IBISWorld figure is the one most commonly repeated and the most defensible, covering the US window washing industry in 2024 with a 2019–24 compound growth rate of 2.3%. The $162.35bn figure is internally contradictory: it falls to $16.85bn by 2034 while the same report claims 9.66% compound growth.

Our position is that the honest answer is a range and a caveat, not a headline number. If you need a single figure to cite, the IBISWorld one is the least bad, and it should be attributed to them rather than to whoever repeated it.

Estimates as published by IBISWorld and Fortune Business Insights, retrieved 2026-09-12.

Industry structure

How many window cleaning businesses are there?

US Census County Business Patterns counts 67,295 establishments in Janitorial Services (NAICS 561720), the federal industry code whose definition explicitly covers cleaning windows. That is the free, checkable number.

The figure you will see quoted almost everywhere else is 35,344 businesses in the US window washing industry. Quoted across most pages ranking for this term, but it sits behind IBISWorld’s paywall, so no reader can check it. Census County Business Patterns, which is free, counts 67,295 janitorial services establishments.

Is window cleaning a small business industry?

Overwhelmingly. 61% of janitorial services establishments have fewer than five employees, 41,063 of 67,295. In the narrower Other Services to Buildings and Dwellings code it is 74%. This is a trade of owner-operators and small crews, not of firms.

US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2022, from the published national bulk file. Retrieved 2026-09-12.

Employment and pay

How much do window cleaners make?

There is no federal occupation code for window cleaners, which is why most published wage figures for this trade are wrong. They are classified under Building Cleaning Workers, All Other (SOC 37-2019), a group of 17,210 workers with a median of $44,040 a year as of May 2025.

That is materially above general janitorial work, where the median is $36,840. Pages that quote a janitor’s wage for a window cleaner understate it by around $7,200.

What is the pay range?

From $32,370 at the 10th percentile to $64,030 at the 90th, a spread of almost exactly two to one. Moving up to First-Line Supervisor of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers takes the median to $49,100 and the top decile to $76,430.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, retrieved via the BLS public API on 2026-09-12.

Safety

How dangerous is window cleaning?

This is the part of the trade nobody publishes numbers on, and it is the part where federal data is best. 356 workers in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations died on the job in 2024, up from 337 the year before, against a national total of 5,070.

Falls are the mechanism that matters here. There were 844 fatal falls, slips and trips across all US occupations in 2024, and 10.8% of fatal falls were from a height of more than 30 feet, roughly the third storey of a building.

The federal data does not isolate window cleaning as its own occupation, so these figures describe the wider cleaning and grounds workforce. Anyone citing them should say so.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024 reference year, released 19 February 2026.

Pricing

The median residential window cleaning job in the United States is $299, and the middle 80% of businesses price a typical job between $200 and $400. That comes from 58,046 window cleaning jobs booked across 249 businesses, which makes it transaction data rather than the survey estimates most published pricing relies on.

Pricing has its own asset with the full distribution, per-service medians for gutter cleaning, pressure washing, solar and roof work, and the methodology behind all of it: the Flyra Window Cleaning Price Index.

Flyra Window Cleaning Price Index, 2026-09-12.

How the work runs

What is the busiest month for window cleaning?

June, which carries 15.5% of a window cleaning business’s annual job volume. December carries 1.9%. Peak season runs roughly 8 times the trough and more than half the year’s work lands between May and August. No public source publishes this; it comes from businesses tracked across a full twelve months.

6.7%Sep7.5%Oct4.3%Nov1.9%Dec2.4%Jan2.8%Feb6.4%Mar10%Apr13.5%May15.5%Jun13.9%Jul15.2%Aug

Share of a business's annual jobs falling in each month

Share of annual window cleaning work by month
MonthShare of annual jobs
Sep6.7%
Oct7.5%
Nov4.3%
Dec1.9%
Jan2.4%
Feb2.8%
Mar6.4%
Apr10%
May13.5%
Jun15.5%
Jul13.9%
Aug15.2%

Do window cleaning customers come back?

Mostly not within a year. Only 7.8% of a typical business’s customers book a second job inside twelve months, and the typical business averages 1.1 jobs per customer.

What else do window cleaning businesses sell?

Almost none sell window cleaning alone. During the period 78.8% also performed screen cleaning, 76.2% gutter cleaning, 59.1% pressure or soft washing and 39.4% solar panel cleaning.

Flyra Window Cleaning Price Index, 2026-09-12. Seasonality and retention rest on 18 businesses tracked across the full period; the service mix on 193.

Sources and method

Primary sources only
Every figure was taken from the body that produced it and the URL was loaded to confirm the number is on that page. Nothing here is copied from another roundup.
Dates are the figure’s, not ours
Each statistic carries the period it describes. BLS wage data is May 2025, fatality data is the 2024 reference year released February 2026, and Census business counts are 2022, the most recent County Business Patterns release.
Disagreements are shown
Where published sources contradict each other, as they do on market size, the page shows the contradiction instead of picking a number and presenting it as settled.
Paywalled figures are flagged
Numbers that cannot be independently checked are named as such rather than repeated as fact.
Flyra’s own data
Pricing, seasonality, retention and service mix come from the Flyra Window Cleaning Price Index, which carries its full methodology. No figure identifies an individual business or its customers; aggregate use is described in section 4 of the Flyra Privacy Policy.
Limits worth knowing
Federal data does not isolate window cleaning as an occupation or an industry code, so the employment, pay and safety figures describe the wider cleaning workforce. Flyra’s figures come from businesses running on Flyra, which skew residential and toward operators organised enough to use software.

Citing this page

Free to use, including commercially, with attribution and a link.

Flyra, Window Cleaning Statistics 2026. https://flyra.io/window-cleaning-statistics

Flyra is the scheduling, invoicing and payments software these window cleaning businesses run on.

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