If you sell recurring pest control plans, the best time of year to advertise is Q1 and early spring, before the nationals turn their budgets on. Not July. The reason is not that summer is a bad market. It is that summer is a market where your demand goes up about 25% and your click price goes up considerably more, and you are the one paying the difference.
Almost every pest control marketing calendar published online tells you the opposite: spend more from March through September, run mosquito creative in spring and rodent creative in fall, and do not go dark in winter. None of that is wrong. It is just answering a different question. It tells you what to say in each month. It does not tell you which month buys a customer cheapest, which is the question an owner setting a budget is actually asking.
The demand curve is flatter than the trade believes
Start with the only seasonality number in this industry that is audited. Rollins, parent of Orkin and the largest pure-play pest control company in the world, has to publish its quarterly revenue split. Its FY2025 10-K reports consolidated net revenues of:
| Quarter | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | Share of 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | $822.5M | $748.3M | $658.0M | 21.9% |
| Q2 | $999.5M | $891.9M | $820.8M | 26.6% |
| Q3 | $1,026.1M | $916.3M | $840.4M | 27.3% |
| Q4 | $912.9M | $832.2M | $754.1M | 24.3% |
| Year | $3,761.1M | $3,388.7M | $3,073.3M | 100% |
The filing states plainly that profit "is lower in the first and fourth quarters and higher in the second and third quarters." True. But look at the size of the gap. The peak quarter is 1.25 times the trough quarter. In 2024 it was 1.22x and in 2023 it was 1.28x. Three straight years of the same shape.
That is not a business that collapses in winter. That is a business that is about 12% below its own average in its worst quarter.
By the numbers
If pest control were as seasonal as the marketing advice implies, Q1 would be somewhere near 10% of the year. It is 21.9%. The quietest quarter of the year still carries more than a fifth of the revenue.
The obvious objection: Rollins is national, so a mild winter in Atlanta offsets a hard one in Minneapolis, and it is heavily contracted, telling investors that "the contracted and recurring nature of our services" gives it visibility into future revenue. Both flatten the curve.
That is the second lesson, not a reason to dismiss the first. Rollins' curve is flat because of the recurring book. Your curve is spiky because you sell one-time jobs into an emergency. Flatness is not a property of being big. It is a property of what you sold, and in which month you sold it.
The cost curve is the one that actually moves
Here is the same year from the auction side. An operator with eleven years in the trade, who ran a full-menu company in Quebec covering residential, commercial, wildlife and bed bugs, described it this way on r/PestControlIndustry:
"Every spring Orkin and Terminix would flood my zip codes on Google Ads and my cost-per-click would jump from $8 to $22 overnight. Same keywords, same neighborhoods. But their budget was my entire revenue."
That is 2.75x. One market, one operator, so treat it as a data point rather than a national average. But the direction is corroborated by everyone who buys this inventory for a living. A media buyer who runs Google Ads for regional and national pest control companies put the constraint bluntly in the same subreddit: the real question is "can you afford to compete with whatever the larger companies have driven the cost / lead up to in your area. You'd be surprised how high the cost can go."
Now put the two curves side by side, which is something no ranking page for this keyword does.
| Q1 | Q3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Share of annual revenue (Rollins, 2025) | 21.9% | 27.3% |
| Indexed demand | 1.00 | 1.25 |
| Indexed click price (operator report) | 1.00 | 2.75 |
| Demand bought per ad dollar | 1.00 | 0.45 |
Treat the bottom row as a model, not a measurement, because it splices an audited revenue series onto one operator's reported click prices. But the gap is not close enough for the caveat to rescue peak season. You would need the summer demand lift to be roughly three times what Rollins actually books before buying in Q3 caught up with buying in Q1.
This is the whole argument. Peak season is when your customers are loudest, and it is also when your competitors' budgets are loudest. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them shows up on your card statement.
Watch out
The trap is that peak season feels like it works. Your phone rings more in July, so the ads look successful. They are not producing that demand. The demand exists in July regardless, and you paid a spring premium to intercept a share of it that word of mouth and your Google Business Profile would have picked up anyway.
The contract-year math nobody runs
Here is a second reason Q1 wins that has nothing to do with auction prices.
A recurring plan sold on February 10 bills for the remaining eleven months of that calendar year. The identical plan, at the identical price, sold on August 10 bills for five. Same customer, same close, same acquisition effort. Less than half the revenue lands inside your fiscal year.
Almost every pest control company runs a single, flat cost-per-acquisition ceiling all year. That is arithmetically wrong. If February revenue-per-signup is roughly twice August revenue-per-signup on the same contract, then your February ceiling should be materially higher than your August ceiling, not equal to it. Most operators do the exact reverse: they hold back budget in the cheap months to save up for the expensive ones.
Compounding it, the acquisition months and the price months are inverted. You are permitted to pay the most, per contract, in exactly the quarter when clicks are cheapest.
This is also why the peak-season panic is a strategic error rather than just an expensive one. An operator on r/PestControlIndustry described the pattern for a company in its second year watching bookings drop: "if you built your first year's expectations around peak-season residential demand, the first real slow season can be a pretty brutal reality check." His fix was not more summer ad spend. It was recurring commercial work as a base, "so when peak season comes back, the residential work lands on top of an existing revenue base instead of having to carry the entire company."
Most pest control owners cannot answer the one question this calendar depends on: what did a booked, retained customer actually cost you, by month, by channel? If your leads live in a phone log and your contracts live in your field software, that number does not exist anywhere. We build lead generation that reports it, then set the seasonal ceiling off your real numbers instead of a flat guess.
What to sell in each window
The demand does not disappear in the off-season. It changes species. Advertise against the biology, roughly four to six weeks ahead of the trigger in your market, and shift everything earlier in the South.
| Window | Biological trigger | What to advertise | Why then |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan to Feb | Rodents indoors, pre-swarm in the Gulf | Annual plans, termite inspections, commercial contracts | Cheapest inventory of the year, and the contract bills for eleven more months |
| Mar to Apr | Termite swarms begin, ants emerge, overwintering pests exit walls | Termite inspection, ant plans | The swarm sells itself; get in before the national budgets land |
| May to Jun | Mosquitoes ramp, wasp queens building | Mosquito programs, seasonal add-ons | Highest willingness to pay, worst auction prices, so sell to existing customers first |
| Jul to Aug | Peak pressure everywhere | Upsell, referral asks, review generation | Do not buy new customers at peak price when your schedule is already full |
| Sep to Oct | Fall invasion: rodents, spiders, overwintering pests | Exclusion and sealing, rodent plans | Highest-leverage work of the year and a natural annual-plan conversion |
| Nov to Dec | Rodents settling in, wildlife | Wildlife, exclusion, attic and crawlspace, commercial | Nationals go quiet, and this work is physically easier in the cold |
On termites specifically, do not use a national date. The LSU AgCenter reports that Formosan subterranean termite swarm season "starts as early as April and lasts through June, with a peak in early to mid May," conveniently anchored to Mother's Day. Orkin notes that in the eastern US the major species swarm roughly a month apart, Eastern subterranean first in April and dark Southern in May, and that one species, R. hageni, swarms in the fall from August along the eastern seaboard through November in the Deep South. If you are in Miami, which held the top spot on Orkin's 2026 termite cities list, your calendar is not the calendar of an operator in Ohio.
The winter column is not a consolation prize either. A Midwest operator described the off-season as "a great time to do rodent trapping and exclusion as well as wildlife," and specifically treats attics and crawlspaces in November because the cooler months make that work possible, reporting "tremendous success" against brown recluse that way. An Ontario operator running five-plus years said his winter book is mice, rodents, the odd bed bug and cockroach job, plus commercial, and added the part that matters: "once the slow season hits if you don't have any word of mouth or community presence you will struggle."
That is the real off-season risk. Not that the work is gone. That you have no standing demand when the paid tap is the only thing you ever turned on. We wrote more on that pattern across trades in how to get work in the slow season.
The 2026 problem: your seasonal baseline is about to be deleted
This is the timing issue nobody writing about pest control seasonality has caught up with yet, and it lands in the middle of the fall push.
Starting August 2026, Google began moving US Local Services Ads accounts out of the standalone LSA dashboard into Google Ads, where they run as a pay-per-lead campaign type. Pest control is named in the first migration group. Per Google's own migration documentation, three details matter for anyone running a seasonal calendar:
Your historical performance reports do not transfer. Impressions, weekly spend, lead totals and cost-per-lead trends stay behind, and the old dashboard redirects on migration day. One agency that backed up 37 client accounts covering January 2023 through July 2026 reported the export path Google's guidance describes did not exist in any of them. If you lose your monthly baseline right before the September rodent surge, a completely normal seasonal dip becomes indistinguishable from a broken campaign, and the standard response to a broken campaign is to start changing things.
Weekly budgets become daily budgets. Google divides your historical average weekly budget by seven, and the monthly ceiling becomes that daily figure times 30.4. Plenty of operators set a deliberately inflated weekly LSA cap to avoid limiting delivery. Converted mechanically, a $10,000 weekly cap becomes roughly $1,429 a day and a monthly ceiling above $43,000. Google will not necessarily spend it. The guardrail is simply gone, and it goes away heading into the most expensive months.
Manual max cost-per-lead is removed, and per-category targets collapse into one. A blended target across your whole account is a real problem in this trade, because your service lines do not share a season or an economic profile. Termite and general pest peak months apart and carry different margins. One target will overpay for the easy leads and underbid the expensive ones.
Worth noting: Google has native seasonality adjustment tools in Google Ads, and whether they apply to this new campaign type is not documented. Do not assume it.
Tip
Before your migration date arrives, export the lead list, save the Reports view as a PDF at last 30 days, last 90 days, last 12 months and all time, and screenshot the impression charts. Ad impressions and top impression rate are on the dashboard but exposed by no API, so a screenshot is the only way to keep them. That saved history is what tells you next February whether the campaign broke or the season did.
The off-season channel that beats every paid one
One operator published his 2025 retention rates broken out by how the customer was acquired:
| Acquisition source | 2025 retention |
|---|---|
| Winback / renewal | 84% |
| Referral | 83% |
| Upsell / cross-sell | 81% |
| Third-party lead gen | 81% |
| Organic / website | 80% |
| Paid search | 76% |
| Door to door | 73% |
The gap between best and worst source is eleven points, which over a multi-year contract is real money. And the top line, winback and renewal, is the only one with no media cost attached at all.
That reframes the off-season. The cheapest customer you will acquire all year is one you already had. Q1 and late fall are exactly when your techs and CSRs have time to work a cancelled-customer list, and exactly when paid alternatives cost the most. Door to door, meanwhile, sits at the bottom of the retention table while carrying the highest acquisition cost in the trade, and it is the channel the industry leans on hardest in spring.
None of this means turn ads off. It means the ratio of paid to owned effort should invert across the year, and almost nobody's does. The unit economics are in how much pest control leads cost, and the Meta-specific version of this seasonality argument is in pest control Meta ads that actually work.
The calendar in this article is only worth building if you can see what each month actually returned. That means lead source, booked job and retained contract tied together in one place, which is the thing most pest control companies genuinely do not have. That is where we start.
Build your calendar in five steps
- Pull your own quarterly revenue split and index it the way the Rollins table above is indexed. If your Q1 is far below 21.9% of your year, your problem is a thin recurring book, not a bad season.
- Pull your cost per booked job by month, not cost per lead. If you cannot, fix the tracking before you touch the budget. Everything downstream is guesswork without it.
- Set two acquisition ceilings, not one. A high one for January through April, when a signed plan still bills most of the year. A low one for July and August, when it bills a third of it.
- Assign each month a job. Q1 and Q4 acquire. Q2 and Q3 upsell, retain and collect reviews. Write it down, because the temptation to buy at peak is strongest exactly when it is most expensive.
- Protect your baseline through the LSA migration. Export before the date, then compare post-migration months against saved history rather than against feel.
Three mistakes this prevents
Cutting spend in January to save up for spring. Backwards on both curves at once. You go dark in the cheapest month of the year, then compete in the most expensive one, for contracts worth less because half the billing year is already gone.
Reading a seasonal dip as a broken campaign. Bookings fall in Q4 because pest activity falls in Q4. Rollins says so in an SEC filing. If your response every autumn is to rebuild the campaign, you are resetting the learning phase annually, right before the migration deletes the history that would have proven it was seasonal.
Selling one-time jobs in peak season. July is the month customers are most willing to buy, so it is the worst month to sell them a single treatment. The company that converts summer emergencies into annual plans is the company whose next Q1 does not hurt.
The honest take
"Best time of year to advertise pest control" is close to the right question. The right one is which month buys a retained contract for the least money, and once you ask it that way, the audited numbers point somewhere the marketing calendars do not.
Demand moves 1.25x across the year. Price moves more. Contract value moves with the calendar. Stack those three and the quiet quarter wins on all three counts. Peak season is for serving the customers you already bought, not for buying new ones at the exact moment every national in your market is bidding against you with a budget bigger than your revenue.
Sources
- Rollins, Inc. FY2025 Form 10-K, Seasonality and Consolidated Net Revenues table: https://www.rollins.com/investors/financial-information/sec-filings/content/0000084839-26-000008/rol-20251231.htm
- LSU AgCenter, Dr. Qian Sun, "Preparing for the Termite Swarms": https://www.lsuagcenter.com/profiles/qsun/articles/page1620966062329
- Orkin, "When is Termite Season?": https://www.orkin.com/pests/termites/termite-season
- Orkin 2026 Top 50 Termite Cities press release: https://www.orkin.com/press-room/most-termite-infested-cities-miami-florida
- Google Ads Help, Local Services Ads migration documentation: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17213585
- Pesty Marketing, "Google Is Moving Local Services Ads Into Google Ads": https://pestymarketing.com/local-services-ads-moving-to-google-ads-pest-control/
- r/PestControlIndustry, "The life of an operator!": https://reddit.com/r/PestControlIndustry/comments/1sajman/the_life_of_an_operator/
- r/PestControlIndustry, "How much worse are customers acquired through D2D?": https://reddit.com/r/PestControlIndustry/comments/1su389e/how_much_worse_are_customers_acquired_through_d2d/
- r/PestControlIndustry, "The slow season, however can we get more work?!": https://reddit.com/r/PestControlIndustry/comments/1vmsqzf/the_slow_season_however_can_we_get_more_work/
- r/PestControlIndustry, "New pest control business struggling to get customers": https://reddit.com/r/PestControlIndustry/comments/1uqbdkg/new_pest_control_business_struggling_to_get/