Updated October 21, 2026
Whether you clean homes, rentals or offices, how to price cleaning jobs comes down to one number: what a cleaner-hour costs you, marked up to a profitable rate. Every flat price you quote is cleaner-hours times that rate, and the skill is estimating cleaner-hours correctly for the type of clean.
Quick answer: Add wages and payroll costs, supplies, travel and overhead to get your cost per cleaner-hour, then divide by one minus your profit target. Estimate cleaner-hours from the home's size and condition or the office's square footage and frequency, multiply, and quote a flat price. First-time deep cleans take much longer than maintenance cleans, so price them separately.
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Customers prefer a flat price per visit, and flat pricing rewards an efficient team. Hourly pricing still makes sense for move-out cleans in unknown condition or for one-off jobs where scope is hard to see. Either way, the math underneath is cleaner-hours.
| Line | Assumption | Per cleaner-hour |
|---|---|---|
| Wage plus payroll costs | $18 + 18% | $21.24 |
| Supplies | chemicals, cloths, vacuum wear | $1.50 |
| Travel share | mileage and drive time between homes | $3.00 |
| Overhead | insurance, bonding, software, office, marketing | $8.00 |
| Cost | $33.74 | |
| Rate at 25% profit | $33.74 ÷ 0.75 | $44.99, use $45 |
Illustrative numbers. Plug in your wages and overhead.
| Job | Cleaner-hours estimate | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 2,200 sq ft home, biweekly maintenance clean | 2,200 ÷ 550 sq ft per cleaner-hour = 4.0 | 4 × $45 = $180 per visit |
| Same home, first-time deep clean | about 1.75 × the maintenance time = 7.0 | 7 × $45 = $315 |
| Same home, move-out clean (empty, inside appliances and cabinets) | about 2 × = 8.0 | 8 × $45 = $360, or hourly if condition unknown |
Speeds are assumptions; time your own teams. Pets, clutter and number of bathrooms change them.
A two-person team does the 4 cleaner-hours in about 2 hours on site. Quoting by cleaner-hours keeps your price right whether you send one cleaner or three.
A 5,000 sq ft office cleaned five nights a week. Office cleaning goes faster per square foot than homes (open areas, fewer surfaces); assume 2,500 sq ft per cleaner-hour.
| Step | Calculation |
|---|---|
| Hours per night | 5,000 ÷ 2,500 = 2 cleaner-hours |
| Nights per month | 5 × 52 ÷ 12 = about 21.7 |
| Monthly hours | 2 × 21.7 = 43.4 |
| Monthly price | 43.4 × $45 = $1,953 |
| As a rate | $1,953 ÷ 5,000 = about $0.39 per sq ft per month |
Restrooms, kitchens and high-traffic entrances take longer than open office floor. Walk the site, count restrooms and fixtures, and adjust hours before quoting.
Price turnovers as a flat fee per turnover by bedroom count, with laundry, restocking and damage photos listed separately. Same-day turnover windows are tight, so build in a premium for back-to-back check-outs.
List what a standard clean includes room by room, what costs extra (inside the oven or fridge, interior windows, laundry), how often you visit, and your policy for cancellations and lockouts. Clear inclusions prevent the most common complaint in residential cleaning, which is a client expecting something the price never covered.
Recurring cleaning prices tend to stay the same for years while wages and supply costs rise. Review every recurring client once a year. Check how long their cleans actually take now, recalculate the price at your current rate, and give at least a month's notice of any change with a short explanation. Most clients accept a fair, explained increase; the ones who leave over a modest increase were often unprofitable already.
People looking for a cleaner often message several companies at once, and the first clear price with an open slot tends to win. Unmanually is a 24/7 AI Office Manager: it replies to new requests in about a minute, asks for size, bathrooms, pets and frequency, quotes from your rates and books the first clean, then sends reminders and invoices. You approve anything that spends money. See what it does for cleaning companies, or run the calculator to see how many hours of booking and billing turn into minutes of talking.
Flat rates per visit are easier for customers and reward efficient teams; build them from estimated cleaner-hours times your rate. Use hourly for move-outs or one-offs where condition is unknown.
Estimate it from time. A first deep clean often takes well over the maintenance time; in this guide's example it is 1.75 times, so it is priced at 1.75 times the cleaner-hours.
Estimate cleaner-hours per visit from square footage and fixture count, multiply by visits per month and your hourly rate, then divide by the square footage to express it as a monthly rate.
Home service businesses answer only about half their calls (Invoca, July 2026), and owners spend about 11 to 16 hours/week on admin. Knowing what to do is the easy part; the money leaks out in the calls you can't take, the quotes nobody chases and the invoices that sit unpaid. Unmanually is a 24/7 AI Office Manager for cleaning companies that you run by voice from your phone:
Sources: Invoca, July 2026 (52% of home-service calls answered by a person, 60M+ calls); admin hours: Time etc / Censuswide 2023 and Amex SME Barometer 2026.
Unmanually is an AI Office Manager that works 24/7 and that you run by voice from your phone. Leave your mobile number and the AI Office Manager calls you right away, the same way it would call back one of your customers. That call is the demo: it answers, books you a 15-minute time with the founder and follows up.
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