Guides
How much to charge for commercial cleaning work
How to price commercial cleaning services for a fair margin: a twelve-step method from walkthrough sheet to monthly quote, with sanity checks that catch underbids.
What to take away
- Price one building at a time, from a walkthrough sheet, in a fixed order: tasks, minutes, hours, loaded cost, supplies, overhead share, margin. Skipping a step is how underbids happen.
- Time your own crews for production rates. Published rates are for other people's buildings and other people's workers.
- Add a bad-night allowance before the margin, not instead of it. The margin is what you keep; the allowance is what the building takes back on the nights it misbehaves.
- Every number on the quote should trace to a line on the walkthrough sheet, so a scope dispute can be settled by reading rather than arguing.
- A fair margin is one the account still earns after a wage rise and a lost key.
- Run the eight sanity checks before the quote goes out. They catch a missing bad-night allowance and a margin that only works on a good month.
What fair means here
Fair to the customer means the price reflects the work the building needs. Fair to you means the account still contributes after a year's ordinary bad nights.
This page does not name a rate, because no page knows your wage or your buildings. It gives the sequence that produces a defensible rate from your own inputs.
The decision framework behind the sequence is in the pricing and profit guide.
The procedure, one building
- Walk the building with a standard sheet. Record cleanable square footage by area type, fixture counts per restroom, floor types, trash stations, kitchen count, access hours, where the closet is, and who supplies consumables. If the sheet has a blank, go back.
- Write the scope as tasks with frequencieswhat happens nightly, weekly, monthly, and on a longer cycle. Every task is a line. "General cleaning" is not a line.
- Attach minutes to each nightly task using your own production rates. If you have none yet, clean the building yourself for a week on a trial basis and time each area. The equipment you bring changes the rate, so time with the kit you will actually use.
- Add travel and setup minutes per visitdrive from the previous stop, parking, sign-in, elevator, closet, and the reverse at the end.
- Multiply nightly minutes by service nights per month and divide by sixty for monthly hours.
- Multiply monthly hours by loaded hourly labor cost. Loaded means wage plus payroll taxes plus payroll-linked insurance plus paid non-productive time. Ask your accountant for the loading; do not use the wage alone. The BLS wage tables can tell you whether your wage assumption is in the local range, and nothing more.
- Add a bad-night allowancere-estimate minutes for a night with a spill, a party, or a missing crew member, and add a share of the difference to the monthly hours. How large a share depends on the building's history, which the walkthrough conversation should have uncovered.
- Add monthly supplieschemicals and liners you will always carry, plus consumables if the contract puts them on you. If the customer supplies paper and soap, say so on the quote.
- Add an overhead sharea portion of vehicles, software, insurance not tied to payroll, and your own unpaid inspection time. Your general ledger sets this; the IRS page on what records a business should keep describes the kind of records that make an overhead figure real rather than remembered.
- Apply the margin you decided on before you opened the sheet. Divide total cost by one minus the margin. Round to something a facility manager can read.
- Price periodics separatelystrip and wax, carpet extraction, high dusting, window interiors. Each gets a frequency and its own line, or an explicit exclusion.
- Sanity-check the result with the list below before it leaves your desk.
Sanity checks before the quote goes out
Quote Sanity Checks
- Price per hour above loaded labor cost
- Bad-night price still above cost
- Every task has minutes from walkthrough
- Consumables named as supplied or included
- Access constraints priced or in contract
- Closet situation known or hauling priced
- Periodics listed or excluded in writing
- Account fits the route or declined
- Compare total monthly hours to your own records for a similar building. Use a square-foot benchmark only as a screen.
- Check the price per service hour. Compare it to the local range you know. It must clear loaded wage divided by one minus margin. At a $20 loaded wage and a 20 percent margin, the floor is $25 per hour. That is an example, not a market rate.
- Re-run the price with the wage up 5 percent. Does the margin still hold?
- Confirm the bad-night allowance is present and separate from the margin.
- Confirm who buys paper, soap, and liners. Is it on the quote?
- Confirm periodics are priced separately or explicitly excluded.
- Confirm the overhead share covers vehicles, software, insurance, and inspection time.
- Confirm every number traces to a line on the walkthrough sheet.
Worked example. A 12,000 square foot office, three restrooms, nightly service 22 nights a month.
- 75minutesTasks
- 15minutesTravel and setup
- 90minutesTotal per visit
- 90Monthly hours
- 10percentBad-night allowance
- $20Loaded labor
- $80Supplies: .
- $120Overhead share
- $920Total cost
- 20percentMargin
- $1,150Per visit
These figures are an example only. Your wage, your production rates, and your building decide the real numbers.
Where new owners go wrong
The common failure is pricing from the outside in: starting with what the customer said the last contractor charged, then working backward to a fitting scope. That yields a number with no defense the first time a restroom is missed.
The second failure is skipping step seven: the price is right for a good month, wrong for the year.
The third is forgetting that a claim on a flyer about price or savings has to be true. The Federal Trade Commission's advertising guidance for small businesses says advertising claims must be truthful and supported, which includes "best value" on a door hanger.
The licensing and compliance guide explains how to find out before you quote it.
A price that only works if you personally clean is not a price. The hiring and training guide covers what a crew actually costs to keep.
When the price is right and you still lose
Sometimes the walkthrough is thorough, the arithmetic is sound, and the incumbent is cheaper. Ask what they include, because scope is where low bids hide; ask when the contract renews, put that date in your calendar, and then move to the next building.
Winning an underbid is a slow loss. The expansion and market guide starts by declining accounts that cannot pay.
Common questions
Can I price by square foot instead of by task?
For screening, yes. For the number on the quote, task time is the only method that survives a dispute about what was included.
How do I get production rates with no crew yet?
Clean the first building yourself and time each area for a week. Those minutes are worth more than any table, because they are your minutes with your kit.
What if the customer wants a per-visit price?
Give it, derived the same way: nightly minutes plus travel, times loaded cost, plus supplies and overhead share per visit, with the margin applied. Then state the monthly total so nobody is surprised.
Should the first account be priced low to get a reference?
Price it correctly and deliver it perfectly. A reference from an account that loses money is a reference for the wrong price.
