How much does gutter cleaning cost?

About $95 to $225 on a single-story house and $175 to $375 on a two-story, averaging roughly $150 and $250. By the foot that is $0.80 to $2.00 per linear foot. Brightening the outside face of the gutter is a separate job and adds $75 to $200; lifting and re-setting gutter guards adds $25 to $75, or about $1 per foot on a long run.

Is gutter cleaning priced per foot or per job?

Both, in sequence. The crew prices from the linear footage of gutter and the number of stories, then quotes a flat price for the job. The per-foot rate is how the number is built rather than how you are billed. An open hourly rate with no cap is a red flag on this job in particular, because gutter work is mostly ladder repositions.

Why is a two-story house so much more when the gutter run is the same length?

Because you are paying for access, not for gutter. OSHA's portable-ladder standard requires side rails to extend at least 3 feet above the surface being reached, and the ladder foot to stand roughly a quarter of its working length out from the wall. A gutter 20 feet up needs a much longer ladder standing further out, on ground level enough to hold it, and every few feet of gutter means moving it again. That standard governs employers in construction rather than homeowners, but it is the geometry the price comes from.

My gutters were cleaned and they still look dirty. Is that normal?

Usually it means you bought cleaning and not brightening. Cleaning empties the inside of the trough so water reaches the downspouts; brightening treats the outside face, which is what you see from the street. A gutter can drain perfectly and still look black from the kerb. Ask for the two as separate named lines on the quote rather than as one word.

How far from the house should a downspout discharge?

University of Minnesota Extension puts the minimum at 4 feet beyond the wall, and recommends at least one downspout per 50 linear feet of roof eave. The Department of Energy's Building America guidance asks for at least 5 feet. Treat 4 feet as the floor and 5 as the target. A downspout with no extension or splash block is, in UMN's words, worse than no downspout at all, because it concentrates thousands of gallons in one spot against the foundation.

Gutter Cleaning Cost | Pressure Washing Cost Guide

The one exterior job priced by the linear foot rather than the square foot. What a gutter clean costs, what the add-ons are, and which of them are real.

Gutter cleaning is the odd one out on this site. Every other job here is priced by area — so many cents per square foot of siding, concrete or roof. A gutter has almost no area. It is a line, and it is priced by the linear foot of that line plus how hard it is to reach. That single difference is why gutter quotes vary more than any other exterior job, and why comparing two of them is harder than it looks.

What it costs, by house

House	Typical gutter run	Typical cost	What moves it
Single-story, compact	100–150 ft	$95 – $150	Footage and debris load, and not much else
Single-story, sprawling or complex roofline	150–250 ft	$140 – $225	More runs, more inside corners, more downspouts to prove out
Two-story	150–250 ft	$175 – $300	Ladder height and setup time — usually not extra footage
Two-story, steep, or no level ground for a ladder	200 ft+	$275 – $375	Roof access or a lift. You are paying for the safe way to get there

Those are our modelled national bands, in the same low/average/high form as the rest of this site; see our methodology for how we build them. Local labour rates move them, and so does what grows overhead — a lot under mature oaks or pines fills its gutters several times a year, while an open-sky lot may genuinely only need one visit.

Your gutter run is not your house’s perimeter

This is the one number that decides the quote, and almost every homeowner guesses it high, because they measure around the house. Gutter hangs on the eave — the low edge of a roof slope. A simple gable roof slopes two ways, so it has two eaves and therefore gutter on two sides only. The gable ends have no gutter at all. A hip roof slopes four ways and does carry gutter on all four edges.

Roof shape	Where the gutter actually hangs	Rough run on a 40 ft x 30 ft footprint
Simple gable	The two long eaves only	about 80 ft
Hip	All four edges	about 140 ft
Gable, plus attached garage and a porch	The two main eaves, plus the low edge of each added roof	about 120–160 ft

So walk the outside, look up, and pace only the edges that have a gutter on them — then add the garage, the porch and any dormer or bay with its own short run. Two minutes of that turns a quote you cannot check into one you can, and it is the single most useful thing you can do before calling anyone. Count the downspouts while you are out there. They matter more than the footage does, for reasons below.

The add-ons, and which are real

Add-on	Typical	Why it is priced separately
Brightening the outside face	$75 – $200	A different job on the same component — see below
Gutter guards lifted and re-set	$25 – $75, or about $1/ft on a long run	Sections have to come off and go back on, run by run, by hand
A downspout compacted solid	$35 – $95	Ours, by derivation: it is 20–40 minutes of dismantling and re-hanging at the same labour rate as the base job, not a scoop-and-flush
Booked with a house wash instead of alone	saves $50 – $100	The crew mobilises, sets up and packs down once instead of twice

The last row is the one worth acting on. A gutter clean is a small job carrying a full trip charge, which is why it is poor value alone and good value attached to something else — see our whole-home package pricing, or pair it with the roof, since the roof job usually starts with clearing the gutter line anyway.

Cleaning and brightening are two jobs on one component

Cleaning is the inside of the trough: debris out, downspouts flushed, water proven to exit. Brightening is the outside face — the dark vertical striping visible from the street. They are not the same work, they are not done with the same materials, and the important consequence is this: a properly cleaned gutter can still look filthy from the kerb. Most complaints about a gutter crew “not finishing” are really a cleaning quote that never included brightening. Ask which one you are buying. If it is both, get them as two named lines rather than one word.

Why the second storey costs more when the run is the same

It is not a markup for the word “two-story”. It is geometry, and the ladder rules make it concrete. OSHA’s portable-ladder standard requires that “the ladder side rails shall extend at least 3 feet (.9 m) above the upper landing surface to which the ladder is used to gain access”, and that a ladder be set so “the horizontal distance from the top support to the foot of the ladder is approximately one-quarter of the working length of the ladder”. A gutter 20 feet up therefore needs a much longer ladder standing about five feet out from the wall, on ground that is level enough to hold it — through the planting bed, not in it. Every reposition costs minutes, and a gutter run is nothing but repositions.

An honest limit on that citation: 1926.1053 is a construction standard and it binds employers, so it is not a law about a homeowner on their own ladder. It is the industry’s working line, and we cite it here because it explains where a two-story price comes from — setup and safe access, not extra gutter.

What you are actually buying is drainage

The reason to spend anything at all on this is not the look of the gutter. The Department of Energy’s Building America Solution Center puts the scale of it plainly: “A few inches of rain falling on the roof of a house can produce several thousand gallons of water runoff”, and the job of gutters and downspouts is to “direct rainwater down and away from the home, to reduce the chances of saturating the soil around the foundation”. A blocked trough does not hold that water. It relocates it — over the edge, down the fascia, and into the ground against the wall.

Which is why the downspouts, not the troughs, are where a cheap job hides. University of Minnesota Extension is blunt: “A downspout without an extender or splash block is worse than no downspout at all”, because “it is depositing the huge volume of rainwater from the roof in a single concentrated location near the basement”. Its guidance is a minimum of “one downspout per 50 linear feet of roof eave” with extensions that “discharge water at least 4 feet beyond the wall”.

The two sources do not perfectly agree, and we would rather say so than pick one. DOE’s guide asks downspouts to “terminate at least 5 feet away from foundations”; UMN says at least 4 feet. Treat 4 feet as a floor and 5 as the better target. Where that water ends up is not an abstraction either — persistent damp against a wall is a moisture problem, and EPA’s position on mould is that moisture control is the control. A $150 gutter clean is cheap insurance against a problem that is not priced in this range at all.

What a good gutter quote itemises

The linear footage they measured — not “a house this size”. If they did not measure or count from the ground, they guessed.
Whether downspouts are flushed and proven to run, and what happens if one is solid. A clear trough draining into a blocked spout still overflows, so a job that stops at scooping has not finished.
Cleaning or brightening, named separately. One word covering both is where the disappointment comes from.
Guards: lifted and re-set, or worked around? Worked around is cheaper and it is also not a clean.
Debris removed or left bagged on site. Both are fine; only one of them is what you assumed.
A flat price for the job, not an open hourly rate. On a job made of repositions, an uncapped meter is the wrong instrument.

Local rates and local trees move the number more than anything on this page; in the wooded Upstate of South Carolina, for instance, the crew we recommend there prices the same job on a hardwood lot and publishes its own footage bands. Our cost-by-city table shows how much of the difference is simply where you live, and our per-square-foot rates cover every other surface on the house — the ones that genuinely are priced by area.

Gutter Cleaning Cost