If you want one number you can budget against and a guaranteed spot on our route, take the seasonal contract. If your driveway is short, you work from home, and you can wait until mid afternoon for a push, per storm will probably cost you less across an average Rutland County winter. The trouble with that sentence is the word average. Where your house sits decides which side of it you land on, and most people guess wrong because they are thinking about the valley when they live on a hill.
I have this conversation every September, usually with somebody who got a surprise bill last March and does not want a repeat. So here is how I actually explain it.
What you are buying with each one
A seasonal contract is a flat price for the winter, billed in installments, covering every plowable event from the first storm through the last one. Some winters you come out ahead. Some winters we do. You are buying the end of the arithmetic.
Per storm means we bill each time we push. The rate is set per visit, and the visit is triggered when accumulation hits the threshold in your agreement, usually 2 or 3 inches. Nothing is owed in a week where it does not snow. In a week with three storms and a January thaw that refreezes, you are paying for all of it.
Neither one is a trick. They are two different ways of handling the same risk, and the question is only whether you would rather carry that risk yourself or hand it to us.
The elevation part nobody accounts for
This is the piece that surprises people, and it is the reason I will not quote a rule of thumb over the phone without asking where you are.
Rutland city sits around 620 feet. A house on the Killington access road, or up in Mendon, or out toward Chittenden, can easily be 1,200 to 2,000 feet. That difference is not cosmetic. There are storms every winter that put down an inch of wet slush in the valley and eight inches on the mountain. We will run a full route up high on a night when nothing in town triggers a push at all.
So two neighbors, in the loose Vermont sense of neighbor, can sign the same per storm rate and end the winter with bills that are not close. I have seen a Killington property bill out at nearly twice the pushes of a Rutland one in the same season. If you are up in elevation, per storm is a bet against your own address.
The seasonal contract flattens that. It is priced to your property, so the mountain premium is baked in once, in October, instead of arriving in pieces all winter.
Light winter, heavy winter
In a light winter, per storm wins. That is just true and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
In a heavy winter, the seasonal contract wins, and it wins by more than the light winter saves you. That asymmetry is the whole argument. The downside of guessing wrong on seasonal is that you overpay a bit in a quiet year. The downside of guessing wrong on per storm is an invoice in February that you did not plan for, in the same month the heating bill peaks.
Our valley seasons tend to land somewhere in the 60 to 80 inch range, but the average is made of wild years on both sides. I have plowed a winter with barely a dozen real events and I have plowed one where we were out more than twenty five times. Nobody knows in October which one is coming.
What counts as a push, and who decides
Ask this before you sign anything, with either structure. It matters more than the rate.
The agreement should name a trigger depth and say who calls it. Ours is a stated accumulation, and we make the call, because the alternative is waiting for a phone call from somebody asleep at 4am. It should also say what happens in a storm that runs for two days, because that is either one push or three depending on how the contract is written, and that single clause can move a per storm winter by a lot.
It should cover drifting too. A wind event after a dry snow can close a driveway with no new accumulation at all. We wrote up the rest of the scope in what is included in snow removal in Vermont, including where the walkways and the sanding sit.
Route position is real
Seasonal customers go on the route first. I want to be straight that this is not a punishment for per storm people, it is just how the truck has to work. The route is built in the fall around committed properties, and per storm calls get fitted into the gaps.
On a normal six inch overnight, nobody notices the difference. On the morning after a foot, seasonal properties are open early and per storm properties are open later in the day. If somebody in the house commutes over the mountain, or you have a second home you are driving up to on a Friday night, that gap is the thing you are actually buying.
What I tell people
If you are in the valley, the driveway is short and flat, and a late morning push does not wreck your day, per storm is fine. Take it and keep the flexibility.
If you are above about a thousand feet, if the driveway is long or steep, if somebody has to leave at 6am, or if you simply want the number settled, take the seasonal. The people who are happiest with it are second home owners, because they are paying for the property to be handled whether they are here or not, and they do not want a decision to make from Connecticut at 5am.
One more thing on timing. Sign it before the first storm. Once we are plowing, the season is built and I am fitting people in around a route that already exists. Our snow and ice management page lays out both structures, and if you are booking fall cleanup anyway, do them in the same conversation. We walk the property once and set both up. I wrote more about the booking window in when to book snow removal in Vermont.