How to get more pest control jobs

Pest control work comes from five kinds of customer, and they behave very differently:

• Residential: homeowners and renters with ants, wasps, rodents, termites, bed bugs or roaches. Urgent, seasonal and often one-off, though quarterly home plans turn some into repeat customers.
• Commercial: restaurants, food plants, warehouses, stores, schools and offices. Planned visits under a contract, paid monthly or quarterly.
• Public sector: federal, state, county and school district sites, usually through bids.
• Property managers and HOAs who need a reliable contractor for their tenants and common areas.
• Facilities management companies that subcontract pest control across many sites.

Residential work is good cash flow in the busy months. Commercial contracts keep you busy in the quiet ones. Most growing pest control businesses want more of the second.

Start with businesses that have to control pests. Under the FDA Food Code, which FDA offers as a model for state and local food rules, food premises must be kept free of pests by routinely inspecting incoming shipments and the premises for evidence of pests. A health inspection that finds signs of pests is a bad day for any restaurant owner, so many prefer a contractor on a regular schedule.

To win those contracts:

1. 1Make a list of restaurants, food plants, warehouses and multi-site operators within easy reach of your base.
2. 2Offer a clear service agreement: how many routine visits a year, what each visit covers, response times for call-backs and the report they'll get after every visit.
3. 3Make the paperwork easy. A tidy service report and logbook help the customer show a health inspector that pests are under control.
4. 4Ask existing customers for introductions to other sites or businesses they know.
5. 5Follow up on every lead the same day. A restaurant with a sighting today won't wait until next week.

Price contracts so they pay for themselves. Our guide on how to price pest control jobs covers pricing per treatment and per contract.

Public sector work is advertised. The SBA says government agencies are required to use SAM.gov to advertise all contracts over $25,000, and you register your business in SAM to bid on federal work. States, counties, cities and school districts post their own bids on their procurement websites.

To give yourself a chance:

• Register on SAM.gov and save a search for pest control, then sign up for your state and county bid alerts too.
• Have your documents ready: state license and applicator certifications, certificates of insurance, safety policies, service reports from current customers and references.
• Show you're certified for the products you'll use. The EPA says federal law requires anyone who applies or supervises the use of restricted use pesticides to be certified under EPA rules and state, territorial or tribal law.
• Start with smaller contracts you can deliver well, and use them as references for bigger ones.

They help, especially with commercial and public buyers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says most states require pest control workers to be licensed, and license categories and exam rules vary by state, so check with your state's pesticide regulatory agency before you take on a new type of work.

Accreditation goes a step further. QualityPro, from the National Pest Management Association, says it sets the standards of excellence for professional pest management companies and their employees through education, training, and certification, and it runs a Find a Pro search for homeowners and businesses looking for accredited companies. It also has programs for food safety and schools, which line up with the commercial buyers in this guide.

Weigh the cost of accreditation against one commercial contract. If it helps you win a single monthly service agreement, it has probably paid for itself. Put your license number and any accreditation logos on your website, quotes, trucks and Google profile.

Homeowners search on the day they find the problem, so be easy to find and easy to reach:

1. 1Fill in your Google Business Profile. Google says businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results. If customers don't visit you, set it up as a service-area business.
2. 2List each pest you deal with as a service, with a short, plain description.
3. 3Ask for reviews after every job. Customers with rodents or bed bugs want proof you're trusted in people's homes.
4. 4Consider Google Local Services Ads, which charge per lead. Google warns that if you regularly fail to answer calls or respond to messages, your ad ranking may be affected, and is moving these ads into Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, starting with home services including pest control in August 2026. Our guide to Local Services Ads and missed calls explains the rules.
5. 5Weigh lead platforms such as Angi and Thumbtack by the cost of each job you win. Angi says different sized jobs have different lead fees, and Thumbtack says lead prices vary with the job, how many pros are available and your market.
6. 6Offer quarterly home plans to one-off customers, so a wasp call becomes a year of visits.

Residential work comes in waves. A warm spring can bring more calls in a week than you can take, which is exactly when answering matters most.

Answer while it's ringing if you can. Someone with mice in the kitchen or wasps by the back door calls the next number if you don't pick up. In a September 2025 survey of 1,000 US consumers, 82% said they'd call a competitor if a business didn't answer. In the same survey, 78% of US consumers said they had abandoned a business after an unanswered call, and only 42% said they leave a voicemail.

The cost of a missed lead is the job's value times the chance the caller would have booked. For example, in a busy week, missing eight calls that book half the time at $200 each is $800 that week. A missed call from a restaurant that would have signed a year-long contract costs far more. Put your own numbers into our missed call calculator.

Then follow up:

1. 1Call back missed callers within the hour, starting with the most urgent.
2. 2Send commercial quotes within a day of the inspection.
3. 3Chase quotes after two or three days.

For calls in the evening and on weekends, see our guide to the after-hours answering service options. Commercial cleaning companies sell to many of the same buyers, so our guide on how to get cleaning contracts is worth a read for the bidding side.

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