How to Price a Cleaning Job (Without Guessing)

A step-by-step method to price house and office cleaning jobs from your hourly target, time estimates and supply costs, with a worked example.

Pricing by looking at a competitor's website and knocking off ten dollars is the easy way to start. That copies someone else's costs and someone else's speed. Price from your own numbers instead. It takes one evening and you only do it once.

Step 1: Set your hourly target

Start with what the business has to bring in per hour of cleaning, before anything else. Add up your monthly costs: insurance, supplies, fuel, phone, software, equipment wear. Add what you want to pay yourself. Divide by the hours you can actually bill in a month.

Billable hours are lower than you think. Driving, quoting, buying supplies and answering messages eat time no client pays for. Track a normal week and count how many of your working hours a client actually paid for. Use that number, not a hopeful one.

Worked example (example numbers only): $900 a month in costs plus $3,000 in owner pay is $3,900. At 100 billable hours a month, the target is $39 an hour. At 80 billable hours it jumps to $48.75. That gap is why billable hours matter more than the competitor's price list.

Step 2: Estimate the time, not the house

A quote is your hourly target times your time estimate. So the real skill is estimating time. Collect these before you quote:

• Bedrooms and bathrooms
• Square footage, roughly
• One-time, deep, move-out or recurring
• Pets, and how many
• When it was last professionally cleaned
• Add-ons: oven, fridge, inside cabinets, windows, baseboards

A home cleaned every two weeks and one untouched for a year are different jobs at the same size. Build a condition multiplier. As a starting point (our suggestion, not an industry standard): 1.0 for maintained, 1.25 for average, 1.5 or more for neglected. Then time yourself on every job for the first month and correct your estimates.

Step 3: Add supplies and travel

Put a per-job supply charge in your price, not in your head. Add travel if the job sits outside your normal area. A flat zone fee is easier to explain than a per-kilometre rate.

Step 4: Price recurring work lower, on purpose

Recurring clients are cheaper to serve: no quoting, faster cleans, steady schedule. That is the only reason to discount them. Price the first clean as a deep clean, then drop to the recurring rate. Say it in the quote so nobody is surprised.

Step 5: Put a floor under every job

Set a minimum charge. Small jobs still cost you the drive and the setup. A minimum stops a one-hour job from costing you money.

Flat rate or hourly

Clients prefer flat rates because they know the total. Flat rates also reward you for getting faster. Quote flat, but build every flat rate from the hourly method above. Hourly billing works for open-ended jobs like post-construction cleanup, where you can't see the end.

Say the price

Send the number with what it includes, what it doesn't, and when the quote expires. Then stop typing. Explaining your price before anyone pushes back tells the client it's negotiable.

Here's the move

Write down your monthly costs and your real billable hours tonight. Divide. That number is your floor for every quote you send this week.

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