Gutter Cleaning Cost Calculator

How this calculator prices the job

Almost everything here turns on one input: how many storeys the crew has to work at. That is not a proxy for house size — it is a proxy for how the work is done. A single-storey gutter is reachable from a step ladder by one person. A two-storey gutter needs an extension ladder, stabilisers, and in practice a second person footing it, which is why the band doubles rather than creeping up.

Note that the step from two storeys to three is proportionally much smaller than the step from one to two. Going from one storey to two costs 100 percent more; going from two to three costs about 33 percent more. The ladder work and the second person are already priced in at two storeys — the third floor mostly adds time, not method.

A worked example, step by step

Run the same house quarterly and the discount rises to 15 percent: the plan price becomes $128 and $255, and four visits cost $512–$1,020 a year. That is more money for more service, which is the honest way to read it — quarterly is not a cheaper way to buy twice-yearly, it is roughly twice the annual spend at a slightly better unit rate.

The discount is genuinely worth having but it is not the reason to choose a frequency. Ten percent of a $150 visit is $15. Whether your gutters need two cleans or four is decided by what is above them — a house under mature deciduous trees fills every autumn and often again after spring seed drop, while a house with no overhang may go a year without trouble.

The add-ons, and which one actually changes the maths

Three extras are priced here, and they behave very differently from the base service.

Guards are the only line that changes the long-run arithmetic, and the numbers are worth sitting with. At $1,050–$3,000 they cost between four and eleven years of twice-yearly cleaning on a two-storey house. Guards also do not end cleaning — they reduce the load of leaf matter while still passing shingle grit and seed, so the honest comparison is guards plus reduced cleaning against cleaning alone, not guards instead of cleaning.

Unclogging is the add-on most often discovered on the day rather than booked. A clogged downspout is invisible from the ground and usually only found when the crew flushes the system, which is why it belongs on this page at all: at $200–$600 it can exceed the cleaning it was attached to.

Why this is a labour price, and what that means regionally

Gutter cleaning has essentially no material cost. What you are buying is time, height access and disposal, which makes it one of the purest labour prices on this site — and the most exposed to local wage levels.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 124,600 of the 135,490 US roofers (SOC 47-2181) work in foundation, structure and building exterior contracting — the industry that maintains gutters. The May 2025 mean hourly wage is $27.95, and the spread runs from $18.01 at the 10th percentile to $39.29 at the 90th. On a service with no materials to dilute it, that better-than-twofold wage range passes almost undamped into the price.

For wider context, BLS puts the annual mean wage across all construction and extraction occupations at $65,360, against $58,140 for roofing specifically. Employment is concentrated too — Florida (23,550) and California (21,190) hold about a third of US roofers between them, ahead of Washington (5,890), Texas (5,740) and Illinois (5,300). In thin markets the binding constraint on a $150 gutter clean is whether a crew will take the booking at all.

One honest limitation: there is no current federal price index for gutter hardware to check guard quotes against. The BLS producer price series covering sheet metal roofing and roof drainage equipment has published no observation since June 2024. For scale on where this sits in a build, NAHB's 2024 construction-cost survey puts exterior finishes — the stage carrying roof drainage — at 13.4 percent of the cost of constructing a new home.

What this estimate excludes

• ·Fascia and soffit repair. Gutters that have been overflowing for a season often sit on wet timber. That is carpentry, priced separately.
• ·Re-hanging or re-pitching. The $75–$200 repair line covers minor work — a bracket, a seam. A run that no longer falls toward its downspout needs re-hanging, which is closer to replacement.
• ·Roof debris removal. Clearing valleys and behind chimneys is roof work, not gutter work, and is not in the base price.
• ·Guard removal. Cleaning gutters that already have guards costs more, not less, because the guards come off and go back on.
• ·Anything above three storeys. Past that the access method changes again — lifts or rope access — and this calculator does not model it.

A last note on reading quotes: a price far below the bands here usually means the downspouts will not be flushed, only the troughs scooped. Ask specifically whether downspouts are flushed and tested, because that is the part that prevents the overflow you are paying to avoid.