Pest control is sold as a subscription. The offer is a quarterly plan at an annual price, with free call-backs in between, and it arrives looking like the obvious choice. Sometimes it is. The test is one division: the plan's annual price divided by the price of a single visit bought on its own. That is the number of visits a year at which the two cost you exactly the same money. Need fewer than that and the plan loses on price. Need more, and it wins.More
Take the defaults. A plan at $480 a year, four visits included, works out at $120 a visit, against $160 for a single visit bought alone. That looks like a 25% discount and it is one, but only on the visits you would have bought anyway. Divide $480 by $160 and you get the number that matters: three. You have to need three visits a year before the plan pays for itself on price. If you would really only have called somebody twice, in April for the ants and October for the spiders, then paying per visit costs you $320 and the plan costs you $480, and the plan is $160 dearer. Which is exactly one visit's worth of money. Now the honest half, and this page will not skip it: what that $160 buys is the promise that they come back for free when the ants return in July. That is insurance, not a discount, and the division above cannot price it. If you would have made even one call-back, the plan has paid for itself. If you would not, it has not. The arithmetic tells you the size of the bet. It does not tell you whether to take it, and any page claiming otherwise is guessing. As for where the money goes: a pest control worker earns a median of $21.75 an hour, so the technician's three quarters of an hour at your skirting boards is worth about $16.31 of labour. The other $143.69 is not profit. It is the chemicals, the licence, the truck, the insurance, the drive, the unpaid hours, and the call-backs already promised.
What the plan costs you, against paying per visit
$160
The technician's time in one visit, if they are paid the occupation's median wage$16
Everything else in one visit: the chemicals, the licence, the truck, the insurance, the drive, the unpaid hours, and the call-backs the plan has promised$144
The contract is a subscription, and the whole decision is one division. Take the plan's
annual price and divide it by the price of a single visit bought on its own. On the defaults that is $480 divided by
$160, which is three. At three visits a year the two routes cost you the same money to the penny, so you must
genuinely need MORE than three before the plan is the cheaper of them. Buy two and you pay $320 for the visits and
$480 for the plan, so the plan is $160 dearer: exactly one visit's worth.More
And the second thing the plan sells is insurance, which the division above cannot price.
What the extra buys is the promise that they come back for free when the ants return in July. If you would have made
even one call-back, the plan has already paid for itself. If you would not, it has not. That is a bet about your own
house, and the arithmetic can tell you the size of the bet without telling you whether to take it. So the page will
not call a contract a rip-off when the numbers go against it, because the numbers are not measuring the thing you are
actually being sold.
Ask what the call-back promise really is, because that is the product. How quickly do they come. How
many times. Which pests are covered and which are carved out. Whether the guarantee survives you missing a scheduled
visit. A vague answer to those questions turns the insurance back into a discount, and a discount you can price with
the box above.
Where the money goes, and it does not go where people think. A pest control worker earns a median of
$21.75 an hour, so three quarters of an hour at your skirting boards is about $16.31 of labour. The remaining $143.69
of a $160 visit is NOT profit and calling it profit would be the easiest lie on this page. Out of it come the
chemicals, the licence (commercial pesticide application is a licensed trade), the truck, the fuel, the liability
insurance, the drive between jobs, the hours spent quoting and scheduling that nobody invoices, the tax, the empty
weeks in February, and the call-backs the firm has already promised and will have to honour.
§ 02 The arithmetic of the contract
Visits a year at which the plan and paying per visit cost the same3.00
What the plan charges per visit it includes$120.00
Share of one visit's price that is the technician's time, at the occupation's median wage10.2%
What the plan costs you above the visits you would have bought$160
The wage is BLS's and it is exact: a median for a broad occupation that contains residential pest control and a good deal else besides. The plan price, the single-visit price and the visit length are yours, because no federal source publishes a price for treating a house. The default figures in the boxes are round placeholders we chose to make the arithmetic legible, and they are not a claim about what anybody charges.
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The plan is dearer than the visits you would have bought, but by no more than the price of a single visit. This is the interesting band and it is where the arithmetic runs out. What the difference buys is the promise that they come back for nothing when the problem comes back, and a single call-back you would genuinely have made covers it. So do not read the calculator as a verdict here. Read it as the price of the guarantee, then go and find out what the guarantee is: how fast they come, how often, for which pests, and what happens if you miss a scheduled visit.
A pest control worker earns a median of $21.75 an hour, or $45,250 a year, which is 11.3% below the US median of $24.51.More
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, SOC 37-2021 (Pest Control Workers), May 2025. 102,620 employed. The tenth percentile is $16.67 an hour and the ninetieth is $29.75. And BLS excludes the self-employed by its own account, so the count is the technicians on a payroll rather than every person doing the work.
The plan is a subscription, so the decision is a break-even, and the break-even is one division.More
The plan's annual price, divided by the price of a single visit bought on its own, is the number of visits a year at which the plan and paying per visit cost exactly the same. Below it the plan costs you more. Above it, less. On the defaults it is $480 divided by $160, which is three, so three visits is a wash and it takes a fourth before the plan is actually the cheaper buy. It is the number the plan is quoted in a way that makes hard to see: the plan comes per month or per quarter, and the single visit comes only if you ask for it.
The advertised discount is real, and it applies only to visits you would have bought anyway.More
A $480 plan with four visits works out at $120 a visit against $160 alone, which is 25% off. That is a genuine discount on each of the four visits. It is not a discount on the two visits you would actually have bought, and buying four things at 25% off is not thrift if you wanted two.
The contract is insurance as much as it is a discount, and the arithmetic cannot price insurance.More
The free call-back is the part of the product that the break-even calculation is structurally unable to see. If they come back in July for nothing when the ants return, you bought something real, and it costs the firm real money: a technician, a truck, a tank of fuel and an hour of a working day. So a plan that loses the arithmetic by less than a single visit is not a bad plan. It is a bet, and this page tells you the size of the bet rather than pretending to settle it.
At the wage and the visit length in the boxes, the labour is a small share of the price, and the rest is not profit.More
At the occupation's median, three quarters of an hour is about $16.31, or 10.2% of a $160 visit. What the other $143.69 pays for: the chemicals, the licence (applying pesticides commercially is a licensed activity), the truck, the fuel, the liability insurance, the drive between jobs that nobody invoices, the quoting and the scheduling, the tax, the empty weeks, and the call-backs the firm has already promised to make for free. Subtracting a wage from a price does not produce a profit, and anyone who tells you it does is selling you something.
The wage moves 2.19-fold across the country, from $11.25 an hour to $24.66.More
Puerto Rico at the bottom and Washington at the top, across the 52 areas for which BLS publishes a median for this occupation. A missing area is a suppressed cell rather than a zero, and we do not read it as one. Your local wage will not be the national median, and that is one more reason a national wage cannot price your visit.
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Nobody publishes what a pest control VISIT costs, and this page will not invent one.More
BLS gives the wage. The Economic Census gives receipts and employees for exterminating and pest control services, and no count of VISITS, so no price per visit can be built and that absence is real. But the HOURS are not missing: BLS Current Employment Statistics publishes average weekly hours for NAICS 561710 itself (series CEU6056171002, 37.53 hours in 2022). The gross rate falls straight out of the two of them together, and we have built it. The industry took $19,895,993,000 across 147,561 employees, which is $69.08 of receipts per EMPLOYEE-hour. Read that number carefully. It is gross, it is industry-wide, it bounds no individual firm (Rule 16), and its denominator is ALL employees including the office rather than only the technician in your garden, so it is lower than a field-hour rate would be. It is not what you are charged. It is what the industry takes, per hour that somebody is at work.
Sourced: the wage, and only the wage. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics,
May 2025, SOC 37-2021 (Pest Control Workers): median $21.75 an hour, $45,250 a year, 102,620 employed, against $24.51
an hour for every occupation in America. Ours, and declared: the default plan price, the default
single-visit price and the default visit length, which are round placeholders rather than findings, and the tier
boundaries. Yours, and this is the point: the two quotes. The arithmetic is done on your numbers,
because nobody publishes what pest control costs.More
The SOC code is wider than this page's subject, and Rule 22 says to tell you so. Pest Control
Workers covers the technician who treats your kitchen, the one who fumigates a food warehouse, the one who does
termite work under a commercial building, and the one who baits a restaurant. One median covers all of them. It is
not a residential-pest-control wage, it is the wage of a broad occupation that contains residential pest control, and
no amount of arithmetic on this page can narrow it.
BLS excludes the self-employed, in its own words. Its FAQ asks whether the survey includes them and
answers: no. So the 102,620 are the technicians on somebody's payroll, and the owner-operator working out of his own
truck is not in the count and not in the median. That also means the employment figure is not a denominator: this
page never divides anything by it, and if it did, the answer would be about a population the survey does not contain.
The wage is a group statistic and it does not bound your bill. It tells you what the labour in a
visit is worth at the occupation's midpoint. It does not tell you what your technician is paid, it does not tell you
what any firm should charge, and the gap between the two is a business rather than a markup: chemicals, licence,
truck, insurance, unpaid drive time, tax, and the free call-backs already sold. We will not imply you are being
overcharged, because we have no sourced price to compare yours against, and a comparison to nothing is worth nothing.
Where every number above comes from
Wage data
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, national. Pest Control Workers (SOC 37-2021): 102,620 employed, median $21.75/hr, $45,250/yr, 10th percentile $16.67/hr, 90th percentile $29.75/hr. All occupations (SOC 00-0000): median $24.51/hr
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, by state. Pest Control Workers: a median wage published for 52 areas, from $11.25/hr in Puerto Rico to $24.66/hr in Washington
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics FAQ: 'Does OEWS have occupational employment estimates that include the self-employed? No.' So the employment count above is the technicians on a payroll, and it is never used as a denominator on this page
Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.
The break-even prices the visits and cannot price the call-backs. That is a limit of the arithmetic, not a verdict on the contract.
A free call-back is worth nothing if you never make one and a great deal if you do, and no calculation on this page can tell which house you live in. So when the numbers say the plan costs more, read that as the size of the premium you are paying for the guarantee, and then go and find out what the guarantee actually promises.
The default plan price, single-visit price and visit length are OURS, and they are placeholders.
They are round numbers chosen to make the division legible, and they are not a finding about what pest control costs. Replace all three with your own quotes. The page is arithmetic on your numbers, and on the defaults it is arithmetic on ours.
SOC 37-2021 is wider than the person who treats your kitchen. Rule 22, and we are saying it out loud.
The occupation covers commercial and industrial pest control, warehouse and restaurant work, and termite technicians, all under one median. It is the wage of a broad trade that contains residential pest control. It is not the wage of a residential pest control technician, and this page never claims it is.
BLS excludes the self-employed, so the employment count is not a denominator.
Its own FAQ says so. The owner-operator with one truck is not in the 102,620 and not in the median. This page therefore divides nothing by that count, because the answer would describe a population the survey does not contain.
The gap between what you pay and what the technician earns is not profit.
Chemicals, the licence, the truck, the fuel, liability insurance, the drive between jobs, the quoting and scheduling nobody invoices, the tax, the empty weeks, and the call-backs already sold and not yet made. Calling the remainder profit would be the easiest lie available on a page like this, and it would be false.
Frequently asked questions
How much does pest control cost?
Nobody publishes a national price for it, so this page does something more useful than making one up. Pest control is sold as a subscription, so the question that decides your money is not what a visit costs, it is whether the plan beats buying visits one at a time. Take the plan's annual price and divide it by the price of a single visit. That is the number of visits a year at which the two cost you the same money, and you have to need more than that before the plan is genuinely the cheaper one. Then ask what the free call-backs are worth to you, because the division cannot price them and they are half of what you are buying.
Is a quarterly pest control contract worth it?
It depends on one number and you already know it: how many times a year you would otherwise pick up the phone. On the defaults, a $480 plan against $160 a visit breaks even at three visits. If you would really only call somebody twice, the plan costs you $160 more than the two visits would have, and what that buys is the promise that they come back for free in between. One call-back you would actually have made and the plan is ahead. None, and it is not. The contract is a bet on your own house, and the honest answer is that it is a reasonable bet for some houses and a poor one for others.
Why is a single visit so much more expensive than a visit inside the plan?
Because the plan is buying a year of your custom and the single visit is buying one afternoon. A $480 plan with four visits is $120 a visit against $160 alone, a 25% discount, and the firm can afford it because a scheduled route is cheaper to drive than a one-off call-out, the customer is already sold, and the visits can be batched with the neighbours. The discount is real. It just only applies to visits you were going to buy in the first place.
What does a pest control technician actually earn?
A median of $21.75 an hour, or $45,250 a year, which is 11.3% below the $24.51 median for every occupation in America. That is BLS's figure for Pest Control Workers, SOC 37-2021, from its survey of employers. Two warnings that matter. The occupation is wider than the person who sprays your kitchen: it covers warehouses, restaurants and termite work too. And BLS excludes the self-employed, so the 102,620 it counts are the technicians on somebody's payroll, not the owner-operator with one truck.
If the technician earns $21.75 an hour, where does the rest of my money go?
Not into a pocket. Three quarters of an hour at your house is about $16.31 of labour, and the other $143.69 of a $160 visit pays for the chemicals, the licence (applying pesticides commercially is a licensed trade), the truck, the fuel, the liability insurance, the drive between jobs that nobody invoices, the quoting and the scheduling, the tax, the empty weeks in winter, and the call-backs the firm has already promised to make for nothing. A wage subtracted from a price is not a profit. It is the top line of somebody's business, and everything else comes out of what is left.
Am I being overcharged for pest control?
We do not know, we are not going to imply it, and we could not prove it if we wanted to, because there is no published price to compare yours against and a comparison to nothing is worth nothing. What this page can do is show you the arithmetic of the offer in front of you: the break-even number of visits, the discount the plan is really giving you, and the share of a visit that is somebody's time. Take those to the firm and ask about the call-backs. That is a much better conversation than an accusation, and it is the conversation the data can actually support.
