Why a second storey costs more, and exactly how much
A second storey adds about 40% to window cleaning, about 50% to gutter cleaning and about 40% to a house soft wash. Those loadings buy time and safety, not altitude: water-fed poles, longer set-ups, ladder and harness work, slower movement over gardens and rooflines. Your suburb does not change the number. A steep block often does.
The three loadings, stated
Here they are, without the runaround. Window cleaning: a second storey adds about 40%. Gutter cleaning: about 50%. House soft wash: about 40%. Those percentages sit on top of the single-storey price for your home, which is set by window count, gutter length or wall area. Single-storey window jobs mostly land between $150 and $550, gutters between $220 and $430, and a soft wash between $420 and $960. Add the loading and you have your ballpark.
So a two-storey home with a $400 single-storey window figure lands near $560. A $300 gutter run becomes about $450. A $700 soft wash becomes close to $980. Those are illustrations, not quotes — the loading applies to your home's own base figure, not to the middle of a range. But the shape is right, and it is stable. Nobody at Schmick decides on the day how tall your house looks.
What the extra 40% actually buys
Height changes the tools. Upper-floor glass gets cleaned with a water-fed pole running purified water — a carbon-fibre reach system, filtration in the van, and a person on the ground working slowly enough to see what they are doing at ten metres. That kit costs money and the method costs time. Every pane takes longer than one you could reach from a step stool, and the rinse has to be done properly or it dries streaked and you have paid for nothing.
Then there is the set-up. Ladders get footed, levelled and tied off. Harness and anchor points go on for roofline work. Ladders move every few metres, and each move is a fresh read of the ground below — soft garden beds, a sloping path, a retaining wall, a hedge that has to be worked over rather than through. On a single-storey home the crew walks the perimeter. On a two-storey home they rebuild the workstation ten or fifteen times.
Gutters carry the biggest loading, and here is why
Gutters take 50% where windows and walls take 40%, because gutter work is ladder work end to end. Glass and cladding can be reached from the ground with poles and low-pressure lances across much of a home. A gutter cannot. Someone has to be up at the line, clearing by hand, with every downpipe flushed and confirmed running afterwards. Height turns a straightforward job into a slow, careful one, and the loading is the honest price of that.
Worth saying plainly: this is a time and risk loading, not a height tax. We are not charging you for the view from your first floor. We are charging for a longer job done by people who are trained, insured and moving at the speed the work deserves. The alternative — a quick lap with an extension ladder and no anchor point — is cheaper for a reason, and the reason is not efficiency.
Your suburb changes nothing. Your block might.
One thing that does not move the number: your postcode. A two-storey home in Mosman and the same home in Randwick are priced identically, because the price is built from window count, gutter metres and wall area, plus the storey loading. There is no eastern suburbs surcharge and no north shore premium. If a quote climbs when you mention the street, you are being priced on the car in the driveway rather than on the work.
What does move it is the block. Sydney is full of homes that read single storey from the kerb and drop two full levels at the back — split levels, sloping sites, houses cut into a hillside above the water. The rear elevation is genuinely two-storey work and gets priced that way, because that is what the crew has to do back there. It is not a technicality. It is the same poles, the same harnesses and the same slow going.
The only figure that matters is the one for your house
Ranges and percentages are useful for sanity-checking a quote. They are not a price. The loading multiplies a base figure built from your actual home, so two neighbours with the same number of storeys can sit a couple of hundred dollars apart on windows alone — one has forty panes and a conservatory, the other has fourteen and a courtyard. The percentage is stable. The thing it multiplies is not, and that is where the real variation lives.
So get the real number. The instant quote takes your address and the details of the home, applies the same price book this article quotes from, and returns a firm, bookable price in about 60 seconds. It holds unless the place turns out to be materially different from what you told us. And if you are booking more than one service on the same visit, bundling saves 5 to 15% — sensible, given the access set-up is already paid for.