How Much to Charge for House Cleaning: Per Hour, Per Room or Flat Rate

Compare hourly, per-room, per-square-foot and flat-rate pricing for house cleaning, and how to build a rate that covers your real costs in Canada or the US.

Search this question and you get a range so wide it's useless. Rates swing by city, by clean type and by whether you carry insurance. The useful question is narrower: what do you need to charge to keep doing this. Start there, then check it against your local market.

Four ways to charge

Per hour. Easy to set, hard to sell. The client carries the risk that you're slow, so they watch the clock. Good for open-ended jobs.

Per room. Easy for clients to understand. Breaks down when one bathroom is spotless and the other hasn't been touched since spring.

Per square foot. Scales with size, ignores condition. Fine for move-out and empty homes, weak for lived-in ones.

Flat rate by package. A fixed price for a defined clean of a defined home. Clients like it most. You carry the risk of underestimating, so it only works if your time estimates are good.

A workable middle ground is a flat rate built from an hourly target. The client sees one number. You know what's inside it.

Build your hourly target first

Monthly costs plus the pay you want, divided by billable hours. Billable hours means time spent cleaning for a paying client, not time driving or quoting.

Example only: $1,200 in costs plus $3,500 in pay is $4,700. Divided by 110 billable hours, that's about $43 an hour. If a standard clean of a three-bedroom home takes you three hours, your floor for that clean is about $128 before supplies.

Check it against the market

Look up three to five local cleaning businesses that publish prices. Note what their price includes. If your number is far below theirs, you're leaving money behind. If it's far above, check your time estimates before you cut your price. Slow cleans are a training problem, not a pricing one.

Canada and US notes

Sales tax rules on cleaning services differ by province and state, and registration thresholds differ too. Look up your own rules or ask an accountant. Show tax as its own line on the quote so the client sees your price and the tax separately.

Price the clean types differently

• Standard or recurring maintenance: your base rate
• Deep clean: base time times 1.5 to 2, depending on condition
• Move-out: price empty-home time plus appliances and inside cabinets
• Add-ons: oven, fridge, windows, baseboards, each with its own price

Here's the move

Pick the home size you clean most. Time yourself on the next one. Multiply by your hourly target and add supplies. That's your published starting price for that size.

General information for small service businesses. Not legal, tax or financial advice. No particular results are promised. Example numbers are illustrations, not market rates.