Hard to very hard statewide on a mix of surface water and deep aquifers; hill-country well water runs the hardest residential water in the lower 48.
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The temperature hit a hundred and seven that afternoon, which is not unusual for a Wednesday in August west of Austin, and the south-facing patio doors of the house I was working on were sitting at a hundred and thirty-four degrees by the time I got to them at one-fifteen in the afternoon. I had a temperature gun on the truck. I checked. The patio doors were the color of weak tea on the inside because the homeowner had been running a wood-burning fireplace through the previous winter and the residue had built up on the interior surface of the glass, but I was not there for the interior. I was there for the exterior, and the exterior had been hit by the morning sprinkler cycle four days running, and the lower third of every pane was wearing a chalky white deposit that the homeowner had described over the phone as cloudy.
I should not have been there at one-fifteen. I should have been there at seven in the morning, when the glass was eighty-five degrees and the air was eighty-two and a thin coat of solution had a fighting chance of remaining liquid for the three seconds it takes a squeegee to cross a pane. By one-fifteen, on south-facing glass in August in central Texas, a coat of solution evaporates in roughly two seconds and what is left behind is the dissolved salt content of the water you applied, baked onto the glass as a fresh deposit on top of the deposit you came to remove. The window is worse after the cleaning than before the cleaning, and the homeowner is, reasonably, not pleased.
I was there at one-fifteen because I had moved the job from its seven a.m. slot to accommodate an emergency commercial cleanup at the office building downtown. This was the wrong call. I made it anyway. I am writing about it because the lesson I took from that afternoon is the lesson I think every Texas cleaner has to learn at least once: the heat is not a complication you work around. The heat is the central organizing fact of the trade in this state from June through September, and any decision you make that does not respect the heat is going to produce a worse outcome than the decision you didn't make.
I have been cleaning windows in central Texas since 2009. I started on a residential route in north Austin, picked up well-water households when I expanded into Lakeway and Dripping Springs around 2014, and have spent the last six years running a route that extends as far west as Marble Falls. About a quarter of my customers are on private wells rather than municipal supply, and the well-water households are where I have learned most of what I know about hard-water work, because the published cleaning literature does not really cover what happens at six hundred milligrams per liter.
This piece is the long version of what I would tell a new cleaner moving to Texas, or a homeowner trying to figure out why the windows in their new house in the hill country will not stay clean. I am going to walk through the water, the heat, the seasonal contaminants, and the way the trade actually works in this state in 2026. If you are looking for short, this is not it. The short version is: it is hot, the water is hard, and you work mornings.
Texas has no soft-water major metro. Houston is the softest of the big cities at around two hundred milligrams per liter, which is moderate-to-hard by national standards and is the lower end of what you'll find in this state. The four largest metros all run hard, and the hill-country wells west of Austin run very hard, and the wells around El Paso run hard and saline.
Houston blends Trinity River and Lake Livingston surface water with a small fraction of groundwater. Hardness sits around two hundred. Humidity is the bigger working problem here than the water — dew points stay in the seventies for months, glass sweats overnight, and the morning film you find on an east-facing window is condensation rather than residue most days from June through September. The water is the easiest in the state, which is to say it is still hard enough that you do not pure-water-rinse with tap on a route.
San Antonio pulls almost entirely from the Edwards Aquifer. The Edwards is a limestone-source aquifer that recharges through the Hill Country and discharges through the artesian springs that gave San Antonio its founding water supply. The water is hard and reliably so — three-fifty to four hundred milligrams per liter on the year, with seasonal variation of about ten percent. Sprinkler overspray work is the dominant residential service in this city. I have a number of trade contacts in San Antonio and the common protocol there is pure-water-on-the-pole for any exterior work where overspray is a known issue, because trying to clean San Antonio glass with a tap-water rinse leaves you ahead of where you started but not by much.
Dallas-Fort Worth runs surface water from a chain of reservoirs — Lake Ray Hubbard, Lake Tawakoni, Eagle Mountain Lake — at around two-thirty milligrams per liter. The hardness fluctuates with reservoir level. After the 2022 drought, the water ran noticeably harder for about eight months as the reservoirs concentrated. After the 2024 wet spring, it ran softer for a quarter. Dallas cleaners I talk to keep an informal eye on the reservoir reports, because the right protocol shifts by ten or fifteen percent over the course of a year depending on what the lakes are doing.
Austin is the city I work in and the city I know best. Austin Water pulls from the Colorado River — the Texas Colorado, not the Arizona one — via Lake Austin and Lake Travis. Municipal hardness runs around two-twenty. The water is unspectacular as Texas water goes. The interesting thing about Austin water is not the water itself but the gradient that starts the moment you cross Loop 360 heading west. Inside Loop 360, you are on Austin Water. Outside Loop 360, in the suburbs that spread up into the hill country, you are increasingly on private wells, and the well water can run two to three times harder than the municipal supply on a property a quarter mile away. The same cleaning protocol that works in Tarrytown does not work in Lakeway.
El Paso runs a blend of Rio Grande surface water and deep Hueco Bolson groundwater. The groundwater is hard and saline; the blend runs around four-twenty. El Paso is the only Texas metro with a desert climate the way Phoenix has a desert climate, which means El Paso also has the flash-evaporation problem the way Phoenix has it. The combination of hard water and flash evaporation makes El Paso, in my opinion, the hardest residential window-cleaning environment in the state for routine work. Drew Giordano has written about the desert heat-load problem from the Phoenix end of the spectrum; the El Paso version is the same problem with worse water.
The summary, if you want one line: every major Texas city runs hard. The hill country runs very hard. Cleaning protocols built for moderate-water markets need adjustment statewide.
About a quarter of my customer base — I count thirty-seven households on the current route — is on private wells. The wells in the Edwards Plateau and the hill country pump from limestone aquifers that have been concentrating dissolved calcium for tens of thousands of years. The water that comes out of those wells, before any softening, regularly tests at four-fifty to six hundred milligrams per liter of calcium carbonate hardness. I have one client outside of Dripping Springs whose well, untreated, tested at six-forty in 2023. That is the hardest residential water I have personally measured, and it is harder than anything documented in the published cleaning literature I have access to.
The practical effect on glass is severe. A sprinkler cycle that hits an exterior pane and dries leaves a deposit you can see across the room within a single irrigation event. Two weeks of sprinkler cycling, and the lower third of the patio doors look like they have been spray-painted with a thin coat of white. Standard residential cleaning protocol — surfactant solution, squeegee — will pull the surface deposit off but will not address what has bonded into the glass itself. By the third or fourth year of neglect, the deposit has worked into the micro-pitting on the surface of the glass and produces a permanent haze that does not come off with anything short of an oxalic-acid restoration treatment, and sometimes not even then. The piece on hard-water etching vs. deposits covers the line between removable and not. The hill-country households I serve crossed that line on parts of their glass before I got to them, and a lot of the work I do is managing the deposits that are still removable while documenting the etched panes that need replacement.
The correct setup for a well-water household is a whole-house water softener, sized to the demand of the property, plus a separate distilled-rinse protocol on the windows themselves. The softener removes the dissolved calcium from the water before it reaches the irrigation system, which prevents new deposits from forming. The distilled rinse handles whatever overspray drift still reaches the glass from neighbor properties or from the unsoftened outdoor hose bib. Without the softener, the distilled rinse alone is not enough — you are removing deposits faster than they can form on the rinse cycle itself, but the irrigation system is laying down a fresh coat every morning, and the math does not work.
I tell every new hill-country client this, and about half of them install a softener. The other half do not, and those are the houses where I am back every six weeks instead of every six months, and where the deposit eventually wins.
A note on the chemistry, because it matters: well water in the Edwards Plateau is not just hard. It is hard with a specific mineral signature — calcium carbonate dominant, with measurable magnesium, and varying levels of iron in wells that pull from particular formations. The iron is the wild card. A well with elevated iron produces an orange tint on the calcium deposit that the standard acidic dissolvers (citric, phosphoric) do not fully clear. For iron-stained deposits, the right move is an oxalic-acid pre-treatment to bind the iron, followed by a citric pass to clear the calcium. I worked this out the hard way on a property in Wimberley in 2018, and the protocol has held up across the dozen or so iron-rich wells I have encountered since. It is not in any published cleaning manual I have read. It probably should be.
The heat-load problem in Texas is the same physical problem Drew Giordano describes in his piece on Arizona, which I read and recommend. The mechanism is identical: south-facing glass, in direct summer sun, reaches a surface temperature high enough that cleaning solution evaporates before the squeegee can move the water across the pane. The result is a window with the surfactant film and the dissolved mineral content of the rinse water baked onto the glass as a fresh deposit. You have made the window worse.
The threshold is around a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit on the glass. Below that, you have a workable amount of time. Above that, you do not. In central Texas in August, south-facing glass routinely crosses that threshold by ten or eleven in the morning and stays above it until the sun moves off the pane around four in the afternoon. The working window for south-facing exterior work in the summer is the first three hours after sunrise and, sometimes, the last two hours before sunset. East and west-facing glass has its own pattern — east faces are workable in the morning, west faces are workable in the evening, north faces are workable most of the day but suffer their own problems with humidity-driven sweating in the humid east of the state.
The practical effect on a working route is that the summer schedule looks completely different from the spring and fall schedule. I am on the road by six-thirty in June, July, and August. I aim to be at the first house by seven, working glass while the air is still in the low eighties and the sun is at a shallow angle. I move through the morning fast — the cooler glass cleans easier, the solution behaves, the work is satisfying. By ten or ten-thirty I am off south-facing glass and onto north and east. By noon I am off exterior entirely and either eating lunch in the truck with the AC on or doing interior work for the rest of the afternoon. Some weeks in late July, I decline new exterior bookings entirely and only quote interior work or do follow-ups on routes I started in the morning.
The other adjustment is the solution itself. The House Standard surfactant blend the encyclopedia documents — half a teaspoon of dish soap per gallon of water, plus a couple of drops of ammonia — is a fine recipe for moderate temperatures. In one-hundred-and-five-degree heat with glass at one-twenty, that recipe flashes off before the squeegee crosses. I run a variant: slightly higher surfactant load (closer to a teaspoon per gallon), distilled water rather than tap, and the distilled water cooled to about fifty degrees in a chest cooler in the bed of the truck. The cooler water buys you about four extra seconds before evaporation becomes a problem, which is enough on most panes to complete the pass. The higher surfactant load helps the solution wet the hot glass and not bead up.
I have talked about writing this variant up for the encyclopedia for years. Our senior editor knows. I have not written it up. The reason is that I keep thinking I can improve it, and every summer I find another tweak — a slightly cooler dispense temperature, a different surfactant ratio, a different application method — and I want to publish the final version, not a working draft. I will get to it. The point is that the working solution in Texas summer is not the same solution as the working solution in Chicago summer, and the difference matters.
The application method shifts too. I do not strip-wash hot glass directly. I sleeve-apply — meaning I apply the solution with a microfiber sleeve held in my hand rather than a flooded strip washer — because the sleeve carries less solution, deposits it more evenly, and gives me more control over how much liquid is on the glass at the moment the squeegee makes contact. On a hundred-and-thirty-degree pane, the strip washer puts down too much water for the working window to handle. The sleeve puts down what the squeegee can clear in two seconds. The difference is the difference between a clean window and a streaked window with a fresh deposit.
Texas has a cleaning calendar of its own, and the seasons stack differently from the Midwest or the Northeast.
December through February is cedar fever season. The mountain juniper — locally called cedar even though it is properly a juniper — releases massive volumes of pollen across central Texas every winter. The peak comes in early to mid-January and lasts about six weeks. On heavy-release days, you can see the pollen clouds drifting visibly across the hill country, and the windshield of my truck wears a yellow film by the end of any drive west of town. Cedar pollen sticks to glass and needs a surfactant pass to release. The cleaning demand in this window is significant — cedar fever drives homeowners to look at their windows and notice things they had not noticed in months — and the calendar has shifted in the last decade so that January is now a meaningful residential month in central Texas, where ten years ago it was mostly quiet.
February through April is oak pollen. Live oak and post oak shed pollen across the eastern half of the state from late February into early April. The pollen is yellow-green, layers visibly on glass, and is the dominant residential driver of spring cleaning bookings. April is the busiest month of my year. I take very little new commercial work in April; the residential phones do not stop. The hill-country live oaks produce particularly heavy pollen loads, and the cleaning passes around Lakeway and Bee Cave in April can require a pre-rinse before the standard cleaning protocol can begin.
March through May is pecan pollen and catkin debris. Pecan trees, common throughout the eastern two-thirds of the state, release pollen and shed long catkins in late spring. The catkins lodge in window screens and against glazing beads, decomposing into a sticky residue if not cleared. The catkins are a screen problem more than a glass problem, but the residue migrates onto the glass within a couple of weeks of catkin-drop. Houses with mature pecan trees in the yard need a screen-clearing pass as part of the spring cleaning, not just a glass pass.
June through September is the heat-load season I covered in the previous section. The contaminant load is lighter in this window — pollen is mostly done, the sprinkler overspray is building but not yet crusting — but the working conditions are the hardest of the year, and the morning shift is mandatory.
June through August is Saharan dust season on the Gulf Coast and east Texas. Trans-Atlantic dust plumes from the Sahara reach the Texas coast regularly during this window — sometimes mildly, sometimes dramatically. The dust is fine, reddish-brown, and deposits on every exterior surface. Houston gets the worst of it; Dallas and Austin get the lighter plumes. The dust cleans off easily but requires an extra cleaning pass during the active plume weeks, and the residential phones from Houston-area cleaners I know light up in proportion to the plume forecasts.
September through November is the second peak season. The heat breaks in September, the residential market opens back up to afternoon work, and pre-holiday cleaning begins in October. This is, for me, the easiest working season of the year. The light is good, the air is dry, the glass is cooperative, and the customers are pleased.
December and January, outside of cedar fever, are commercial and interior work. The hard freezes — usually one to three per winter — shut down exterior work for a couple of days at a time but the market does not close the way it does in Chicago. The major exception was February 2021, when the entire state lost power and water for a week, glazing seals failed across the housing stock, and the residential cleaning trade had a strange spring as homeowners discovered failed IGUs they had not noticed before. We are still seeing the long tail of those failures in routine cleaning passes — a fog appears in an IGU four years after the freeze that compromised the seal, and the cleaner is the first one to spot it.
Houston is the most humid working environment in the state and the softest water. The residential housing stock is dominated by post-1980 brick veneer two-story with hip roofs, with concentrated pre-war stock in the Heights, River Oaks, and parts of Montrose. Saharan dust drives a meaningful share of summer cleaning bookings. Coastal areas see occasional hurricane-debris cleanups.
San Antonio runs the hardest municipal water of any major Texas metro and has the heaviest sprinkler-overspray work. The housing stock concentrates in mid-century ranch in Alamo Heights and the older neighborhoods, with newer development in Stone Oak. King William and Monte Vista hold the pre-war stock. Pure-water-on-the-pole has wider adoption here than in any other Texas metro because of the water profile.
Dallas-Fort Worth is the largest and most varied of the metros. Reservoir-source water at moderate-to-hard hardness, fluctuating with drought conditions. Highland Park and the M Streets hold pre-war stock; Lakewood and Preston Hollow have the major mid-century concentrations; the outer suburbs are heavy with post-2000 single-family. Climate is hotter and drier than Houston. Flash-evaporation matters here but is less severe than in Austin and San Antonio because the metro sits at lower elevation and the worst heat is shorter.
Austin is where I work. The municipal supply is moderate, the hill-country surroundings are not, and the gradient runs along Loop 360. Hyde Park and Tarrytown hold the early-twentieth-century stock; Travis Heights and Clarksville hold the mid-century; Mueller and the newer eastern developments are post-2010. The cedar fever and oak pollen seasons are concentrated here. The summer heat load is severe and shapes the working calendar.
Fort Worth runs similarly to Dallas on water and climate. Westover Hills and TCU/Westcliff hold the older single-family stock. The trade here overlaps significantly with Dallas operations; many cleaners work both sides of the metro.
El Paso is the desert-climate exception. Hard, saline blended water; flash-evaporation conditions through the long summer; lower-density development on larger lots; a housing stock that leans stucco and post-1970 ranch. The local trade is smaller than the city's population would suggest, in part because the cleaning conditions favor pure-water-on-the-pole specialists over traditional squeegee operations.
Texas has, as best I can estimate, somewhere between two thousand and three thousand active residential window-cleaning operations of one to ten employees, plus a larger commercial sector concentrated in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. The trade is more fragmented than in the older northeastern markets — the state has grown fast, the housing stock has grown faster, and most operations are under fifteen years old. The franchise window-cleaning brands have significant presence in the suburbs of all five major metros; the independents concentrate in the older urban cores.
Pricing has held up. A standard Austin residential exterior — fifteen to twenty windows, mid-grade complexity — runs three to four-fifty in 2026, with hill-country well-water households pricing higher because of the longer per-window time and the pre-treatment work required. Houston runs similar pricing; Dallas slightly lower per window but with larger average jobs; San Antonio higher per window because of the hardness work. El Paso prices the lowest of the major metros despite the difficult conditions, which says something about local labor markets rather than about the work itself.
The biggest shift in the Texas trade over the last decade has been pure-water-on-the-pole adoption, driven hard by the water profile. I would estimate that fifty to sixty percent of Texas residential exterior work is now being done with deionized water through a carbon-fiber pole rather than with traditional squeegee technique. In hill-country well-water territory, the share is even higher. The traditional squeegee work has retreated to interiors, to the historic single-pane stock, and to the high-rise commercial market in the major downtowns.
If you are reading this as a homeowner deciding between cleaners: the most important question to ask in Texas is what they do about the water. A cleaner who says we just use tap water and squeegees is going to leave you with a deposit problem within a couple of cycles, especially west of I-35. A cleaner who says we use pure water on the exterior and traditional technique on the interior is asking the right question. A cleaner who knows the difference between municipal and well-water households, and adjusts the protocol for each, is the right hire if you are in the hill country.
I have gone long on the problems. Here is what I would actually tell you if we were standing on the porch with the temperature gun out.
Know your water. If you are on municipal supply, your utility publishes an annual water quality report. Look up the calcium hardness. If it is over three hundred, you are dealing with sprinkler-overspray work that the standard protocol will not fully address. If you are on a private well, get a hardness test — you can buy a test strip kit for ten dollars at any decent hardware store — and find out where you actually sit. The number matters more than your intuition. The article on white spots after rain covers the diagnostic side of the question.
Address the sprinkler before the windows. This is the single most common conversation I have on the first visit to a hill-country household. The homeowner wants the windows cleaned. The right answer is to adjust the sprinkler heads first, because no cleaning will hold if the sprinkler is rebuilding the deposit every morning. Half the time, the homeowner did not realize the sprinkler heads had drifted off their original aim and were spraying directly onto the glass. Five minutes with a screwdriver can save a thousand dollars a year in cleaning bills.
For well-water households, install a softener. If you are on a private well in the hill country and you want your windows to look clean, the softener is not optional. The cleaning will not hold without it. I have customers who refused softeners for years and finally installed them after the fourth or fifth visit, and the improvement is immediate and dramatic. The softener pays for itself in cleaning frequency within a couple of years.
Time your work around the heat. If you are hiring a cleaner for exterior work in June, July, or August, ask what time they start. The right answer is six or seven in the morning. Anyone willing to clean your south-facing exterior glass at one in the afternoon in August in central Texas is either inexperienced or about to make your windows worse. I have seen the work. I have, as I admitted in the opening of this piece, done the work. It does not produce the result you want.
Match the technique to the conditions. Pure-water-on-the-pole is the right answer for hard-water exterior work, especially in the collar areas of the major metros and in the hill country. Traditional squeegee technique is the right answer for interiors, for historic single-pane wood-sash work, and for high-detail commercial work. A cleaner who only uses one technique is not equipped for the range of Texas conditions. The piece on glass types and cleaning covers the technique side; the piece on streaks come back overnight covers the diagnostic side of what goes wrong when the protocol does not match the water.
Read the basic technique piece. How to wash a window properly covers the four stages — preparation, washing, squeegeeing, detailing — and the four stages work the same in Austin as they do in Chicago. The chemistry shifts; the sequence does not. If you are cleaning your own windows, read that piece first. If you have hired a cleaner, ask them about the four stages. They should be able to answer without thinking.
Plan for the failed seals from 2021. Many central Texas houses lost glazing seals during the February 2021 freeze. The failure is not always immediate — some seals held for a year or two before fogging. If your house was through that freeze and you have not had a careful look at the IGUs since, the next cleaning pass is a good time. Cleaners are usually the first people to spot a fogged unit, because we look at the glass closely in the right light. If you are hiring a cleaner, ask them to flag any IGUs that look compromised.
Consider the calendar. The best residential cleaning windows in Texas are mid-March through late May, and mid-September through mid-November. Avoid scheduling exterior work in July and August unless the cleaner is doing early-morning shifts and you know it. Avoid scheduling exterior work in the week or two after a hard freeze, when caulk and seals are at their most stressed.
That is the long answer. The short answer is: it is hot, the water is hard, you work mornings, and the well-water households are their own problem. If you understand those four things, you can keep windows clean in this state. The seventeen years I have been doing this have mostly been about getting better at those four things. The spiral notebook holds the route. The Tundra holds the cooler. The cooler holds the water. The water holds steady at fifty degrees, which is what makes the morning shift work in August.
If you can clean a window in Austin in August, you can clean a window anywhere. I have said this for years. I have not yet found a counterexample.
Houston blends Trinity River and Lake Livingston surface water with a small fraction of groundwater. Hardness is moderate-to-hard at around 200 mg/L. Humidity is the bigger working problem than the water — dew points stay in the seventies for months.
San Antonio pulls almost entirely from the Edwards Aquifer — limestone-source water that runs reliably hard at 350-400 mg/L. Sprinkler overspray work is heavier here than in any other major Texas metro.
Dallas draws from a chain of surface reservoirs — Lake Ray Hubbard, Lake Tawakoni, others — that run moderately hard. Hardness varies seasonally with reservoir level; expect 220-260 mg/L on the year.
Austin pulls from the Colorado River via Lake Austin and Lake Travis. Municipal hardness sits around 220 mg/L. The hill-country surroundings, however, are a different story — wells west of Loop 360 routinely run 450+.
Fort Worth runs surface water from Eagle Mountain Lake and Lake Worth, similar profile to Dallas at around 215 mg/L. Climate is hotter and drier than Houston; flash-evaporation on south-facing glass is the seasonal concern.
El Paso blends Rio Grande surface water with deep Hueco Bolson groundwater. The groundwater is hard and saline; the blend runs around 420 mg/L. The desert climate produces flash-evaporation problems on summer afternoons that match the worst of Phoenix.
Each city page carries its own water profile, neighborhood breakdown, cost range, and city-specific operating notes.
| CONTAMINANT | SEASON | SEVERITY |
|---|---|---|
| Cedar pollen (mountain juniper) | Dec-Feb | severe |
| The central Texas mountain juniper releases huge volumes of cedar pollen from December through February — locally called cedar fever season. Pollen settles on glass in visible yellow clouds on heavy-release days. Sticks tenaciously and needs a surfactant pass. | ||
| Oak pollen | Feb-Apr | severe |
| Live oak and post oak release pollen from late February through early April. Yellow-green pollen layers everywhere in Austin, San Antonio, and the eastern hill country. Heavy enough to require a pre-rinse on most spring jobs. | ||
| Hard-water sprinkler overspray | May-Sep | severe |
| Heaviest in San Antonio and El Paso where municipal hardness exceeds 350 mg/L, and on hill-country well systems where it can be far worse. Lower-third of patio doors and ground-floor windows accumulate visible mineral cement within a single summer. | ||
| Saharan dust | Jun-Aug | moderate |
| Trans-Atlantic Saharan dust plumes regularly reach the Gulf Coast and east Texas in summer, depositing a fine reddish-brown dust on all exterior surfaces. Hits Houston harder than the rest of the state but reaches Dallas and Austin in heavier-plume years. | ||
| Pecan pollen and catkin debris | Mar-May | moderate |
| Pecan trees, common throughout central and east Texas, release pollen and shed catkin debris in late spring. Catkins lodge in window screens and against glazing beads, decomposing into a sticky residue if not cleared. | ||
| Hill country limestone dust | year-round | mild |
| Limestone road dust and construction dust from quarry operations west of Austin and around the I-35 corridor produces a fine calcium-rich film on glass. Cumulative; not dramatic, but a contributing factor to the regional hardness staining. | ||
March through May is the residential peak. The post-cedar-fever and post-oak-pollen passes drive the call volume; sprinkler overspray begins building in late spring.
June through August is the heat-load season. Work shifts to early morning (sunrise to 10am) and late evening (after 7pm) to avoid the flash-evaporation problem. Many cleaners decline new residential bookings July-August.
September through November is the second peak. Heat breaks in September; pre-holiday work begins in October.
December through February is steady commercial and selective residential. Hard freezes shut down residential work for two to four days at a time but the market does not close the way it does in the Midwest.
Land-adjacent states each get their own water-and-window profile. If you're working a regional route or moving across the border, these are the natural next reads.
Municipal water in Texas typically runs 180–600 mg/L (CaCO₃), which is very hard, meaning municipal water deposits noticeable mineral residue every wash cycle and accelerates the long-term etching problem. Hardness varies by city and source; check the city-by-city breakdown below or use our ZIP-code hard-water tool for a closer reading.
In Texas, the working operator's calendar typically favors fall — september through november is the second peak. heat breaks in september; pre-holiday work begins in october. For a full seasonal breakdown, see the cleaning calendar section on this page.
Residential window cleaning in Texas typically runs $8–18 per pane or $200–500 for a standard single-family house exterior, depending on metro pricing, story height, screen condition, and frame type. Use our cost estimator for a calibrated quote for your home.
The dominant residue problem in Texas is cedar pollen (mountain juniper) (Dec-Feb). The central Texas mountain juniper releases huge volumes of cedar pollen from December through February — locally called cedar fever season. Pollen settles on glass in visible yellow clouds on heavy-release days. Sticks tenaciously and needs a surfactant pass. Regular cleaning intervals tied to
Single-story homes with accessible glazing can be cleaned by homeowners using basic squeegee technique and the right solution. Multi-story houses, post-2010 coated glass, hard-water markets, and screens-plus-tracks work usually pay for themselves with a professional. See our hiring checklist below.
The 2021 February freeze produced widespread glazing-seal failures across the state that cleaners are still encountering in the housing stock. Hill-country flash flooding deposits silt on lower-elevation glazing. Coastal east Texas sees occasional hurricane debris. These conditions shape what a cleaner needs to know about scheduling, technique, and timing. The cleaning calendar
Houston is the largest market in Texas and has the deepest concentration of professional window-cleaning services. Use our "Find a Cleaner" page to be matched with vetted local pros, or read the Houston section of this page for the city-specific water and cleaning context.
Jerry has been a working cleaner in central Texas since 2009. His route is built around Austin proper but extends into the hill country — Lakeway, Dripping Springs, Bee Cave, and a handful of accounts as far west as Marble Falls. About a quarter of his customers are on private wells, and well water in the Texas hill country runs significantly harder than the published cleaning literature accounts for. He drives a 2016 Tundra and runs the route from a spiral notebook on the grounds that the spiral notebook has not yet crashed.
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