How A 45-Pool Route Nets Real Money After Taxes

Ever wonder what the numbers really look like behind a pool service route? We pull back the curtain with a clear, practical breakdown of a 45-pool operation charging $185 per month, then map the journey from gross revenue to true take-home pay. You’ll hear how recurring service, tight expense control, and smart tax choices can turn a four-day workweek into roughly $5,000 in monthly net income without 12-hour days or constant upsells.

The best part is scalability. Once your processes are dialed, adding accounts or a technician can grow revenue faster than your personal hours. Route density, predictable billing, and bulk purchasing create leverage that many service trades struggle to match. If you’re weighing a jump into pool service or deciding how to price and structure what you already run, this breakdown gives you the numbers, the strategy, and the confidence to build a durable, profitable business.

If this helped you see the business more clearly, follow the show, share it with a fellow pro, and leave a quick review—then tell us the one number you most want to improve next.

We model a 45-pool route with realistic pricing, expenses, and taxes to reveal true take-home pay and why this service business scales so well. Along the way, we weigh mileage vs actual vehicle costs, entity choices, audits, and how a CPA can boost your net.

• 45-pool route at $185 monthly per account
• Mileage deduction compared with vehicle expenses
• LLC vs corporation vs sole proprietor considerations
• Building the expense stack and tracking receipts
• Estimating net profit and tax burden
• Scheduling, workload, and route density
• Reasons to report income and avoid audit risk
• CPA strategies for purchases, payroll, and quarterly taxes
• Scalability through hiring and smarter operations
• Where to find more episodes and coaching

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why Pool Service Profitability Matters
• 2:19 Coaching Program And Experience
• 4:03 The 45-Pool Mock Route Setup
• 6:08 Incorporate Or Sole Prop
• 7:48 Mileage Vs Vehicle Expenses
• 9:33 Building The Expense Stack
• 11:44 From Net Profit To Taxes
• 13:14 Workload, Hours, And Pay
• 14:44 Reporting Income And Audits
• 16:24 CPA Strategy And Deductions
• 18:14 Scalability And Hiring
• 19:26 Where To Find More Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

And welcome to the PoolKay Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about a little bit about a kind of mock pool service. A lot of people ask, you know, can you make money in pool service and is it a good industry to jump into? And I think it's probably a good idea for me to do like a mock tax return based on a partial pool service route or a part-time route out there to see if it will benefit you to get into the industry. Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com. Now there are going to be a lot of numbers in this podcast, so stick with it because you're going to get a true sense of kind of a real net income after taxes in the pool service industry. So if you're really thinking about getting into the industry, this is something that you can utilize. If you're in the industry, of course, you can kind of relate to this and get some ideas for expanding based on some of these numbers that I'm throwing out here that are realistic in one sense, but of course, this is a kind of mock podcast, so they're not real tax return numbers from an actual business. But I think you're going to get a really good sense for the profitability of pool service if done correctly with a good monthly service rate. And of course, with the cost being kept down somewhat, even though you're going to deduct the cost, you can't just go crazy and not worry about the cost of business. It's really difficult to escape paying income taxes on anything, and you're going to have to pay income tax whether you're self-employed or if you work for a company and they take deductions out. So one thing that you really need to know is that the money you report in is going to be taxable depending on different aspects or you know factors would be your total tax amount you're going to get. But there's some ballpark figures I'll throw out here. Nothing is accurate. I'm not a CPA, and these are all just kind of estimates to give you an idea of the profitability of a pool service business, and if it's something that you want to jump into. Now I'm going to say that any service business is pretty profitable because of the deductions you can take off of your total gross income. And I'm going to give you an example here of just some basics. This is going to be based on a 45 pool route, service route, pool service business. So I guess part-time, not quite full-time. You'd have to get it to about 70 pools to be about full time. So you're just doing 45 pools and you're not doing anything else. You're not doing any repairs or asset washes to keep it simple, and it's just the monthly income. So you're gonna charge 185 a month, and you you have 45 accounts, and that brings you to$99,900 a year, or this is say$100,000 a year in income. And this is you know fairly reasonable in Los Angeles County and other areas to get this kind of income based on a partial route or a smaller pool route, which is like about a four-day work week here for this pool route, and maybe six hours a day, I would say, or maybe a little bit less. And it's a pretty good income. And what makes it good is that you're gonna deduct a good portion of everything you put into the business. If you want to start with your truck, you can do either the cost or the mileage deduction. And if you do the mileage deduction, I suggest you get an app that tracks the mileage accurately. There's a lot of them out there, like mile IQ, and QuickBooks also tracks your mileage for you. And it's a good way to make sure that you're reporting the mileage accurately. If you ever were to get audited, now there's a lot of talk about incorporating or being a sole proprietor. If you incorporate, there are some benefits. You have some protections from liability. You also understand that corporations get audited a lot less than individual tax returns. So you're also getting audited as a corporation or smaller because there's a lot of leeway in corporations as far as write-offs and different ways of reporting, but there is a cost involved, the filing cost of$800 a year. So that's something to consider. But you will have to make a choice of how you're going to file when you start your business. And I would suggest incorporating for the cleanest way to run your business, in my opinion. And you can do that pretty easily with a CPA. You could do it yourself, but I'd rather hire somebody to do it properly because you can file the paperwork incorrectly, which I've known people to do, and then they're a little bit of trouble at that point. So an LLC is fine. I actually use a C Corp for myself because I do a lot of business out of state as well, so that's why I formed a C Corp. And it's something that you just have to talk to your CPA about what the best way to set up your business. And then you have to decide if you're going to do the mileage or the expense deduction on your vehicle because you can't switch it once you start one way or the other. So just keep that in mind as well. That if you do the expenses or the mileage, you can't flip-flop and go back and forth. In a lot of cases, especially like in California, the mileage will probably be better than a standard deduction. And just for sake of argument, I'm going to say that you drive 18,000 miles a year, and that's 70 cents a mile, and then the deduction for that will be about 12,600 for 18,000 miles of business miles. Versus if you did the standard deduction, maybe it'll be around 7,500 or 8,000, depending on all the costs associated with your vehicle. And if you drive less miles, you definitely would want to probably do the vehicle expense deduction. So if you had 100,000 gross income, you would take the 12,600 and you would deduct that from there. Let's just say you had some office expenses and you had other expenses that were about$5,500. You could take that off your taxes too. You can do any kind of rents that if you rent anything, you can deduct that as well. Let's just say that your truck was in the shop, you rented a truck for a week, and that costs twelve hundred dollars to rent that, and maybe there's some other rental charges in there as well. Your chemical costs, let's just say that you spent$15,000 on chemicals to make it simple. And even if you bill the customers for chemicals, anything like phosphor remover or chlorine or even the acid, you still deduct that as a business expense because you paid for those chemicals, and the income from that is going to be reflected on the income from your pool route. And so all the chemical costs you're going to deduct, regardless if the customer paid for them or if you use those as a maintenance dose for their pool, all those are deducted as well. Any kind of equipment, let's just say that in that 5,500 was some new equipment that you purchased, and you can split that up between office expenses and equipment. That was the number I gave out earlier. And then there's some taxes and licenses that you pay for. Let's say that's$500, and then$300 for other kinds of expenses that go along with your business. And you know, let's just bring that up from$300 to$500 just to make it kind of even. Uh covering like insurance and things like that. So altogether, your total expenses is$36,600, and your net profit is$63,400. Now your CPA takes it from here because they're gonna do stuff like with the Social Security payment that you have to make, and you can deduct some of that, also self-employed from your gross from your net profit, I should say, and then your tax bracket may vary depending on if you take the center deduction or all those things, but in reality, you're gonna figure to pay with California. We have pretty high state taxes, and I would say between your federal taxes and your state taxes, you're somewhere around$7,000 a year, roughly off of that net profit of$63,400, which is about$135 a week if you want to break it down weekly. So your income taxes for your business is about$135 a week for 45 pools, bringing in$100,000 a year, even with that tax burden, because if you work for somebody, you're gonna pay taxes anyway, you can't escape that. I would say that the profitability of the pool service business is really unmatched out there by a lot of by any service business, in my opinion, and is something that requires very little startup cost. And as you can see, by the amount of money you're making, with even just the basic deductions, you're really very profitable even after paying your income taxes, your federal and state. And so there are costs involved in that, but you can throw a pretty good chunk of that mileage deduction back into your net. And let's just say then if you were going to do all the subtraction here and then the addition of some profit back in from some expenses that you can kind of put back in as net income because you're not going to use all of that, but let's just say again the 64,000, 63,400, and then I'm gonna minus 7,000 from that for your taxes. That's 56,400. So 56,400. And let's just throw a third of the mileage uh right off back into that. So let's just put 3,000 back on and then put 3,000, that's 59,400 divided by 12. That's about 4,950 a month, close to 5,000 a month. Net income after all of your expenses, your supplies, your all the cost of operations, and then your tax burden. And by the way, you should be paying quarterly taxes so you don't get penalized on that. And so doing 45 pools a week will bring in about five thousand dollars. Now, this is not anything that you can take home and say it's 100% accurate, but I think it falls within a reasonable level of accuracy with the income based on the averages out here and how much money you can actually take home after everything with the pool service business, working really just four days a week and part-time at 45 pools. That would be roughly 11 pools a day, Monday through Thursday, with Fridays off, or Friday working Friday having Mondays off. 11 pools would take you probably if you start at 8 o'clock, you'd be done by noon, 1 o'clock every day. And to me, that's what I consider a part-time job, and it brings in pretty substantial amount of money. Now, of course, you can double that by doubling the size of your route, and then you would double your income, you would double your expenses and everything, and your tax burden, but of course, your income would go up as well. If you just wanted to add 10 more pools to that, you would actually bring in a lot more income as well. And I know in a perfect world, this example would show that everyone's reporting all the money they make, but according to the latest data from the IRS, there's about$539 billion in under-reported income, and a lot of that, of course, is in the service industry, where a lot of the income is just not reported on the taxes, and it's you know very difficult, I think, for the IRS to track everyone down. And again, I mentioned that sole proprietors they're the ones that they actually single out for audits under Schedule C. And it seems like if you incorporate, you probably have a better chance of not being audited, even if you don't fudge on your taxes, that's not going to be an issue for you. I think there are a lot of reasons why you shouldn't under-report your taxes. A lot of that has to do with potential for investing later. If you under-report your income and you don't report all your all your earnings, you don't get credit for that, of course. And if you wanted to buy, let's say, an investment property or something of that sort, you would need to have your income verified. Although there are DSCR loans now where the loan is based on the rental income of the property and not on your income taxes, so that is not a completely valid point, and it's something that a lot of investors are not even using their income taxes when they when they purchase an investment property nowadays. And also there are other things like Social Security. If you don't report your income, you're going to draw less Social Security later on because that's based on the income you reported on your taxes. So there are some reasons. Of course, you'll sleep better at night if you report your income. And with the amount of deductions you're able to take anyway, it really doesn't make a lot of sense not to try to keep accurate books and report your income as it comes in. With the deductions, of course, lowering your total taxable income down or your net income or your net gross income. This is one reason why I recommend a good CPA because they can find ways to save you money, they can give you ideas. If you're gonna buy a new truck, they can help you maximize those deductions on the following year's taxes. Maybe they can maybe they they'll advise you to bring your spouse on as an employee, even though you pay double taxes, it might be worth it in that case, or your CPA may recommend getting an employee, hiring somebody, giving them some accounts, and then using that on your taxes as a deduction as well. You'll be making more money because you'll have an employee out there, plus you can deduct the expenses associated with that. And I think it's not a bad idea to try to find a CP that specializes in self-employed small businesses that can really advise you on your best strategy, you know, vehicle expenses or the mileage deduction, what deductions are something that you could take. Like, for instance, you could take a home office deduction on your taxes, but you gotta be careful because a lot of people get audited with their home office deduction. But you can deduct a portion of your utility bills for that in that case. If you can prove that you use your home office, of course, a percentage of time for your business, and these are all things that, of course, you would talk to a professional about. I was just trying to give you kind of a mock idea of a typical service business and what to expect as far as profitability. And you can see with a small amount of pools, with a good service, weekly service rate or monthly service rate, I should say, with just the typical expenses, you can do pretty well out there, and it's something to consider when you start your small business. How much profit is actually in that business, how much can you actually make, how much are the expenses, and what is the total amount of profit. And with pool service, I think one aspect that kind of trumps a lot of different businesses is the fact that it's scalable. You can do the same amount of work, same amount of hours, bring on an employee or two, scale your business to where you're double or triple the amount of money you're making, but still working the same amount of hours, and then you would still be extremely profitable because again, the more you expand, the more supplies and costs that are involved, the more deductions you have on the income that you're bringing in as well. So it's all relative based on the fact how much of money you're bringing in, how much are your expenses that you're writing off, and how much you're netting. But it's one of those industries where you can scale it to a point where you can bring in be bringing in two times, three times, four times your income while still working in the same amount of hours each week. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website. If you go to the banner, swimming poollearning.com as the site. If you click on the podcast icon on the banner, there'll be over 1800 or close to that podcast you can bring down and listen to at your leisure. And if you're looking for my coaching program, you can learn more about that at PoolGuyCoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great story of your week, and God bless.