Pest control benchmarks: only the numbers with receipts

The table

The whole page in one place. The sections below explain how to read each line without hurting yourself.

Retention, and the leak it implies

Kemp Anderson of Kemp Anderson Consulting, writing in PCT Magazine, puts healthy residential retention at 82 to 87 percent and commercial above 94. Flip those and you get the honest read: a good residential shop still loses 13 to 18 percent of its customers every year, and a commercial book should lose under 6.

Two traps. First, the period: a monthly cancel rate always sounds small, and 1.5 percent a month compounds to roughly 17 percent of the book gone in a year. Annualize before you compare. Second, the fatalism: the same research finds 91 percent of cancellations are controllable, and the top reason customers leave, at 62 percent, is feeling the company no longer views them as a priority. Not price. Not bugs.

Quality

Reservice rate is the share of your work that is you driving back for free. The scale that holds up across operators: under 3 percent is elite, around 5 is good, 5 to 8 is normal, and over 8 is a problem costing you real route days. Judge it against the season, because summer pressure runs the number hotter everywhere: under 8 through summer and under 5 by fall is a target that respects the calendar.

Money

Gross margin: Dan Gordon, CPA, puts the widely cited benchmark at 50 to 55 percent in PCT Magazine. Below that, the usual suspects are the price book, route density, or free work nobody is counting.

Recurring share: 85.4 percent of US residential pest control service revenue is recurring, per Specialty Consultants, LLC, in research reported by NPMA. This is the number that quietly sets your company's price, because buyers pay multiples for dollars that come back on their own. Which is why the valuation lines exist: roughly 2.3 to 2.9 times SDE for small shops per BizBuySell brokered-deal data, and about 4 to 8 times EBITDA as size grows, with recurring share the biggest single adjuster in both.

Production

Revenue per route day is the operator-traded benchmark: $800 to $1,200 is a good truck day, $1,500 and up is the top of the field. No named study stands behind it, which is why the table labels it what it is. Completion rate above 95 percent is in the same category: a rule of thumb, but one with teeth, because a schedule that only 88 percent happens drags every other number on this page down with it.

The numbers that do not travel

Revenue per hour is deliberately not on the table. It moves with your market, your price book, and your service mix, so a national dollar figure grades your zip code, not your operation. The honest benchmark for RPH is your own trailing ninety days plus the spread between your best tech and your worst. The revenue per hour guide covers how to set that baseline; the free grader below applies everything else.

Common questions