THE SHORT ANSWER
Pool accounts on Florida routes for sale on Oct 30, 2026 bill a median $133 a month (n = 77, 95% interval $120–$141), 35% more than the $98 median of 422 routes in the sold archive. The billing is stated by sellers to public route brokers and is unaudited, and the archive is undated. Florida websites that publish a weekly price start at a median $140 a month (21 of 114 sites).
Key findings
$133 vs. $98
The median billing per account is $133 on 77 Florida routes for sale or pending (95% interval $120–$141), against $98 on 422 routes marked sold.
$82 → $127
Cut into fifths, one broker’s numbered Florida listings climb from $82 per account in the oldest fifth to $127 in the newest (55% higher). The listings carry no dates, so this shows order, not years.
$140
Websites that publish a weekly price start at a median $140 a month (21 of 114 sites, 95% interval $125–$150), a level similar to today’s route billing.
76%
76% of Florida pool service websites show no service price. Only 27 of 114 show any service price; 75% of the rest ask visitors to call or request an estimate.
12×
77% of 704 listings that state monthly billing ask exactly 12× it, so a route’s price per account tracks its billing.
Method: three kinds of price, kept apart
This report puts three different numbers side by side and never mixes them. Route billing is what a seller tells a route broker the accounts on a route pay each month, divided by the number of accounts: unaudited and seller-reported. Advertised prices are what a homeowner sees on a company’s website. The asking price of a route is not a transaction price: no public source we found states what routes actually closed at.
Route listings
We read every public listing on five route-broker sites and one classifieds site (sources 2–6). For 652 listings the broker states the monthly billing of the route; dividing it by the number of accounts gives the billing per account. Routes with more than 10% commercial accounts and rates below $40 or above $400 were set aside (30 and 22 listings). “For sale today” means listed as for sale or pending on Oct 30, 2026; the archive is every other listing with stated billing, almost all marked sold and undated. Because brokers differ, we compare today with the archive within each broker as well as overall, and use one broker’s sequential listing numbers to put its archive in order.
Websites
Our crawler opened each company website on a phone-sized screen, read the home page and up to six inner pages plus the blog index, and recorded every dollar amount near pool-service wording with the 200 characters around it. It respected robots.txt and waited at least 1.2 seconds between pages. We classified each amount with fixed rules:
| Rule | What we did |
|---|---|
| Unit | Words right after the amount: “/mo”, “a month”, “monthly” = per month; “per visit” and “/week” × 4.33 (52 weeks ÷ 12); “per four-week period” × 1.0825. Ranges use the unit after the second number. |
| Service type | The nearest plan name before the amount: chemical-only, bi-weekly (“twice a month”) or weekly full service. One-time prices: green-to-clean, filter clean, one-time clean, repair/equipment, other. |
| Excluded | Construction and remodel prices ($5,000 and up, build wording, per square foot), loan examples, DIY and blog cost figures, add-on surcharges, shop product prices (“add to cart”), a site selling other services, a repair-approval threshold. Commercial prices count as a price shown, not in residential rates. |
| Outliers | A residential monthly rate below $40 or above $400 does not count (0 rows; same band as the route data). |
| Entry price | Per site, the lowest weekly full-service monthly price, ignoring the top end of ranges. |
| Chemicals | Per priced site, all fetched page text was searched for statements that chemicals are included or extra; otherwise “not stated”. |
| Hand coding | 7 of 295 rows (both frames) were coded by hand after reading the snippet, plus 2 whole sites (a pool-build cost calculator and an online shop). All listed in the notes file. |
Medians, middle halves (25th–75th percentile) and counts are shown everywhere; cells with fewer than 5 observations are left out. Shares carry a 95% Wilson interval, medians a 95% order-statistic interval where stated.
Sample and coverage
5,016 route listings in 23 states
All public listings from route brokers that publish them without a login, deduplicated across brokers and limited to routes with at least 5 accounts. 2,257 are in Florida. Most are marked sold; the price on a sold listing is the last asking price. Large marketplaces that block automated reading were not collected.
| Source | Listings | With billing |
|---|---|---|
| poolroutesales | 4,375 | 94 |
| usapoolroutesales | 560 | 520 |
| vistapoolroutes | 42 | 38 |
| sealeybb | 21 | – |
| pooltrader | 18 | – |
Billing is stated mainly in one broker’s public spreadsheets (mostly sold, undated) and on detail pages of active listings at the largest broker. Florida has 499 usable rates: 77 for sale today, 422 in the archive.
114 websites in four Florida metros
The site frame is 167 independent pool businesses with their own website, found through map-listing searches in four metros on Oct 27, 2026 (chains, franchises and directories removed, one record per domain). 53 could not be read (23 blocked our crawler, 10 had no readable robots.txt so we did not crawl them, 6 no longer resolve, the rest errors or empty pages). The frame leans toward Tampa Bay.
| Metro | Sites read |
|---|---|
| Tampa Bay | 72 |
| Orlando | 20 |
| Fort Lauderdale | 15 |
| Fort Myers | 7 |
Comparison frame. A second set of 82 websites comes from a random sample of Florida’s contractor-license and company registers (72 readable). It is reported on its own, never added to the 114.
Routes for sale today bill 35% more per account than the archive
The archive of sold Florida routes describes a cheaper market than the routes on offer now. Overall, today’s median billing per account is $133 against $98 in the archive. Brokers differ, so the fair test is within a broker: at Pool Route Sales USA it is $127 against $97, at Vista Pool Routes $148 against $122. National Pool Route Sales publishes billing only for its current listings.
Seller-stated monthly billing ÷ accounts, per route. Dot = median, bar = middle half. Groups with fewer than 5 listings left out.
Source: Public route-broker listings, read Oct 30, 2026 (sources 2–4).
423 Florida listings from Pool Route Sales USA, sorted by listing number (issued in order) and cut into fifths. 35% of the newest fifth is still for sale; the other fifths are all marked sold.
Source: Pool Route Sales USA public listing sheets, read Oct 30, 2026.
What this can and can’t show. The archive has no dates, so we can’t say how old it is, only that its listings come earlier in the broker’s own numbering. The accounts may also differ: older routes may hold more chemical-only or bi-weekly accounts, and billing is reported by sellers, not audited.
For anyone pricing from route data, the practical point stands: the pooled Florida figure, $105 per account (n = 499), is dominated by archive listings. Today’s median is 27% above it.
Route billing differs by metro
Within Florida, billing per account ranges from $78 to $163 at the median across 12 metros with enough listings. Most listings here come from the archive, and metros differ in how much of their data is old, so part of the spread is age. Where routes for sale today give enough data, the metro figure is higher in every case (left table).
All usable Florida listings with stated billing, any date. Dot = median, bar = middle half. Metros with fewer than 5 listings left out.
Source: Public route-broker listings, read Oct 30, 2026. Metro assigned from the first town named in the listing.
| Florida metro | All | Median | For sale | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tampa Bay | 89 | $105 | 11 | $140 |
| Sarasota-Bradenton | 81 | $97 | 10 | $119 |
| Palm Beach | 61 | $97 | 5 | $134 |
| Orlando | 60 | $111 | 9 | $118 |
| Daytona-Palm Coast | 30 | $121 | 13 | $135 |
| Jacksonville | 14 | $163 | 7 | $172 |
| Port Charlotte-Punta Gorda | 9 | $115 | 6 | $119 |
| State | All | Median | For sale | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TX | 72 | $164 | 16 | $198 |
| CA | 26 | $150 | 26 | $150 |
| NV | 17 | $119 | 5 | $130 |
| AZ | 27 | $118 | 5 | $130 |
| FL | 499 | $105 | 77 | $133 |
Texas routes bill the most per account in every cut. California’s rates come almost entirely from routes for sale today, so they are not comparable with Florida’s archive-heavy “all” figure.
Three in four sites never say what service costs
A homeowner comparing pool services online mostly finds no number to compare. Only 27 of 114 sites show any service price, and 21 show the price homeowners ask about first, weekly service. Even among companies whose main business is weekly service, 18 of 71 publish a weekly price. Our conversion study (No. 01) looks at this in depth; here it means Florida’s published price data rests on a small group of sites.
Share of 114 readable Florida pool service websites (map-listing frame). A site can be in several rows.
Source: Ruberio crawl of company websites, Oct 27–30, 2026; price classification by Ruberio (section 02).
Cost: answered = a service price shown (our classification); hinted = call-for-pricing or estimate wording only. Included and chemicals: rule-based reading of all fetched pages; hinted = a task list without frequency, or chemicals mentioned without saying who pays.
Source: Ruberio crawl, Oct 27–30, 2026.
| Business type | Sites | Any price | Weekly price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly service companies | 71 | 31% (21%–42%) | 25% (17%–37%) |
| Repair companies | 15 | 27% (11%–52%) | 13% (4%–38%) |
| Builders / contractors | 28 | 4% (1%–18%) | 4% (1%–18%) |
| Metro | Sites | Any price |
|---|---|---|
| Tampa Bay | 72 | 28% (19%–39%) |
| Orlando | 20 | 15% (5%–36%) |
| Fort Lauderdale | 15 | 20% (7%–45%) |
| Fort Myers | 7 | 14% (3%–51%) |
Businesses found through the state registers show the same pattern
| Map-listing frame | Registry frame | |
|---|---|---|
| Sites read | 114 | 72 |
| Any service price | 24% (17%–32%) | 10% (5%–19%) |
| Weekly full-service price | 18% (12%–27%) | 4% (1%–12%) |
| “Call for pricing” or quote wording | 62% (53%–71%) | 56% (44%–66%) |
Pool businesses found through Florida’s license and company registers show a price on 10% of 72 readable sites and a weekly-service price on 3: Orlando $149; Rest of Florida $150; Tampa Bay $150. Those 3 prices are kept out of every median.
Registry shares are unweighted; the sample was stratified by region, so this is a rough comparison, not a state estimate.
Where a price is shown, weekly service starts at $140 a month
Lowest weekly full-service price per site, normalized to a month (n = 21 sites).
Source: Ruberio crawl, Oct 27–30, 2026.
21 of 114 sites publish a weekly full-service price. Entry prices run from $99 to $175 a month, median $140 (95% interval $125–$150). 15 of the 21 are written as “starting at”, “from” or a range.
43 of 44 weekly-service prices on these sites are quoted per month; 1 was converted.
On chemicals, 8 of the 21 sites say they are included, 0 say they are extra, and 13 don’t say. Only Tampa Bay has enough priced sites to report by metro (17 sites, median $149).
| Advertised price | Sites | Median | Middle half | 95% interval |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly full service, entry price | 21 | $140 | $125–$150 | $125–$150 |
| Weekly full service, top tier (sites with 2+ tiers) | 6 | $162 | $138–$172 | – |
| Chemical-only plan, entry price | 6 | $89 | $86–$97 | – |
| Green-to-clean, lowest one-time price | 5 | $300 | $250–$450 | – |
Sites with several tiers usually split screened from open pools, or add vacuuming and filter cleans.
Advertised entry prices and today’s route billing sit at a similar level
Set side by side, the median advertised entry price ($140, 95% interval $125–$150) and the median billing per account on routes for sale today ($133, $120–$141) are close, and their intervals overlap. 47 of the 77 routes for sale today (61%, 95% interval 50%–71%) bill less per account than $140. We report this as a description only: the two numbers measure different things.
Dot = median, bar = middle half. Route figures are seller-stated monthly billing ÷ accounts, per route.
Source: Ruberio crawl of company websites, Oct 27–30, 2026; public route-broker listings, Oct 30, 2026 (sources 2–6).
Source: As above.
| Florida routes for sale today | n | Median | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Pool Route Sales | 38 | $133 | $117–$156 |
| Pool Route Sales USA | 30 | $127 | $110–$137 |
| Vista Pool Routes | 9 | $148 | $135–$188 |
Why the comparison is loose. National Pool Route Sales, the source of 38 of the 77 current rates, says its price is calculated on the base monthly service fee only and excludes repairs and chemicals. Only 8 of 21 websites say their price includes chemicals. Route billing is also an average over every account, including chemical-only and bi-weekly customers; an entry price is the offer for one standard pool.
A route’s asking price is twelve months of billing
Brokers say routes sell for 6 to 15 times monthly billing (sources 7–9). In the listings themselves, one number dominates: 540 of 704 listings that state monthly billing ask between 11.95 and 12.05 times it (77%). Only 8% ask 10.5× or less and 5% more than 13×. Even on routes for sale today, 65% sit at exactly 12× (n = 148).
Asking price ÷ stated monthly billing, rounded (n = 704).
Source: Public route-broker listings, Oct 30, 2026.
Median asking price ÷ accounts by listing year (stated on the page, or estimated from the listing number). Years with n < 5 left out.
Source: National Pool Route Sales index and detail pages, Oct 30, 2026.
| State | Listings | Median $ per account | For sale today | Median $ per account |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FL | 2,257 | $1,261 | 98 | $1,628 |
| TX | 638 | $2,057 | 18 | $2,378 |
| CA | 1,389 | $1,450 | 31 | $1,898 |
| AZ | 388 | $1,390 | 12 | $1,707 |
| NV | 215 | $1,205 | 6 | $1,300 |
Because the price is a formula, price per account says little beyond the rate. Asking is also not selling: of 39 Florida listings that were for sale in an archived March 2026 snapshot and are now marked sold, 36 still show the identical price. The “sold” price on these pages is the last asking price; any discount at closing is not public. Our route valuation study (No. 07) looks at prices and multiples in depth.
Limitations
- The archive is undated. We know its listings come earlier in a broker’s numbering, not when. If the archive covers many years, the gap mixes years of price change with other differences.
- The account mix may differ. Archive routes may hold more chemical-only, bi-weekly or older-rate accounts than routes for sale today. Account mix is rarely stated; we removed routes with more than 10% commercial accounts where the mix is known.
- Route billing is seller-reported and unaudited, and whether it includes chemicals varies by broker. Rates are averages per route; each listing counts once regardless of size.
- Few websites publish a price. The advertised figures rest on 21 sites, 17 of them in Tampa Bay; the 95% interval for the median entry price is $125–$150. Advertised is not charged: larger, open or neglected pools pay more.
- The site frame leans to Tampa Bay and comes from map listings. The registry comparison is small (72 readable sites) and unweighted.
- Coverage. Large marketplaces that block automated reading were not collected, so owner-listed routes are under-represented.
- What would change the conclusion: dated closing prices or invoice-level billing from route software showing that archive routes and today’s routes hold different kinds of accounts.
What an owner can do with this
The most useful number in this report is one you already have: your monthly billing divided by your number of accounts. Here is how to set it against your market.
Worksheet · price your route against your metro
| A. Total monthly recurring service billing (no repairs, no one-time jobs) | |
| B. Number of recurring residential accounts | |
| C. Your average billing per account = A ÷ B | |
| D. Florida routes for sale today, median per account: $133 (or your metro, section 05). Broker figures differ on chemicals; the largest broker excludes them. Compare like with like. | |
| E. Advertised entry price for weekly service, Florida websites: $140 | |
| F. Gap per account = D − C | |
| G. Monthly gap to the market median = F × B | |
| H. That gap at the brokers’ 12× = G × 12 |
- List your accounts by what they pay and mark every account below $115, the low quartile of Florida routes for sale today.
- Check your own website: does it say what weekly service costs, what a visit includes, and whether chemicals are included? Only 21 of 114 Florida sites in our sample show a weekly price, and 26 of 114 say clearly how chemicals are handled.
- If you publish a price, write what it covers (screened or open pool, chemicals, filter cleans). Sites that publish tiers mostly split on exactly those points.
- When you value a route to buy or sell, use listings for sale today, not the archive: in Florida the archive median is $98 against $133 today.
- Ask what a route’s billing includes. A rate that excludes chemicals is not comparable with one that includes them.
Sources
- Ruberio website crawl of 167 Florida pool service company websites (Tampa Bay, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers), Oct 27–30, 2026.
Comparison frame: 82 websites from a random sample of Florida DBPR pool/spa contractor licenses and
Sunbiz company records (Oct 2026), crawled the same way. Price classification and analysis scripts:
04-pricing-by-city/analysis.py. Aggregates only; available on request. - National Pool Route Sales, regional listing pages and listing detail pages, poolroutesales.com/regions/florida/ (and Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Southern and Northern California, other states). Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- Pool Route Sales USA, state listing pages with embedded public spreadsheets, usapoolroutesales.com/listings/florida/ (and other states). Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- Vista Pool Routes, vistapoolroutes.com/for-sale and vistapoolroutes.com/sold-pool-routes. Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- Sealey Business Brokers, sealeybb.com/florida-routes/, /texaspoolroutes/, /california-routes/. Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- Pool Trader classifieds, pooltrader.net/pools/. Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- National Pool Route Sales, FAQ (“10 to 12 times its monthly recurring service billing”), poolroutesales.com/faqs/. Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- Sealey Business Brokers, “Selling and buying pool routes in the Big Three states” (Aug 5, 2026), sealeybb.com/selling-and-buying-pool-routes-in-the-big-three-states-tx-ca-fl-valuation-secrets-regional-markets-and-insider-strategies/. Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
- Skimmer, “How to buy a pool route 101” (updated Jan 8, 2026), getskimmer.com/blog/how-to-buy-a-pool-route-101; and Superior Pool Routes, superiorpoolroutes.com/pool-routes-for-sale/ (6–7× claim). Accessed Oct 30, 2026. Third-party claims.
- Internet Archive snapshot of the National Pool Route Sales Florida page, Mar 10, 2026, web.archive.org/web/20260310193125/https://poolroutesales.com/regions/florida/. Accessed Oct 30, 2026.
About this research
Who made this
Ruberio is a Dutch design studio: Ruben designs, Sven answers every email. We’re focused on websites for pool service companies and fence contractors in Florida. We ran this study because the question we hear most about a pool service website is whether to put the price on it, and nobody had shown what Florida sites actually publish next to what accounts actually pay. We don’t sell routes, software, insurance or financing, and nobody named here paid for or reviewed this report. The data and scripts are available on request. If you spot an error, email hello@ruberio.com and we’ll correct it and note the change.
If you want to see your own site with your weekly price and what it includes on the first screen, we build a preview for $49 at us.ruberio.com. The $49 comes off the price if you keep it.
Cite this study
Ruberio Research (2026). Florida pool accounts on routes for sale today bill $133 a month, 35% more than the sold-route archive (No. 04). Data as of Oct 30, 2026. us.ruberio.com/research/pool-route-billing-per-account-florida/
Questions
Is $133 what Florida pool customers pay?
It is what sellers tell route brokers their accounts pay each month, divided by the number of accounts: seller-reported and unaudited. Whether it includes chemicals varies by broker, and the largest broker states its price excludes chemicals. Larger, open or neglected pools pay more.
Does the 35% gap mean prices rose 35%?
Not necessarily. The archive is undated, so the gap may mix years of price change with other differences. Archive routes may also hold more chemical-only, bi-weekly or older-rate accounts than routes for sale today.
How is a route’s asking price set?
Mostly by formula: 77% of 704 listings that state monthly billing ask exactly 12× it. That gives a Florida median of $1,628 per account on the market today, against $1,114 for routes listed in 2020.
Does the study show that publishing a price brings more calls?
No. It shows what Florida sites publish (76% show no service price) next to what route accounts bill. Whether a published price changes how many people call was not measured.
