How to price a house cleaning job

Most cleaning businesses price the same way. You look at what two or three local competitors charge, land somewhere just under, and adjust when a client flinches.

That works right up until it doesn't. You end up busy and broke, doing four cleans a day at a number you picked eighteen months ago from someone else's website.

Here is a method that starts from your costs instead.

The only formula you need

Price = (hours on site x your hourly cost) + drive time + supplies + overhead + profit

Everything below is just filling in those five numbers honestly. Do it once properly and you can quote almost anything in your head afterwards.

1. Your real hourly cost

If you clean the job yourself, this is what your time is worth, not what you would settle for. Pick a number you would happily work a full year at.

If an employee cleans it, your cost is their wage plus payroll burden. Payroll taxes, workers' comp and insurance typically add roughly 20 to 30 percent on top of the hourly wage, so someone you pay $20/hr costs you around $24 to $26/hr before anything else.

Use the burdened number. This is the single most common place cleaning businesses lose money: quoting against the wage instead of the true cost.

2. Hours on site

Estimate honestly, then track what actually happens.

The gap between "I think that's a two hour job" and reality is where margin disappears. After you have run a job once, you should be pricing the second one from recorded time, not memory.

This is worth building a habit around early. If your cleaners clock in and out on the job, you end up with a real average per property rather than an impression.

3. Drive time

Unpaid drive time is invisible until you map it.

A 45 minute round trip on a two hour clean means you have really spent 2 hours 45 minutes to earn two hours of revenue. That is a 37 percent pay cut you took without noticing.

Either build drive time into the price, or price a radius and decline outside it. Both are fine. Pretending it is free is not.

4. Supplies and equipment

Per clean this is small, usually a few dollars, but it is not zero. Chemicals, cloths, bags, vacuum bags, and a share of replacing a vacuum every couple of years.

A flat few dollars per clean covers it. The point is that it exists.

5. Overhead and profit

Overhead is everything that does not care whether you worked today. Insurance, phone, software, fuel, accountant, marketing.

Add them up for a year, divide by the number of cleans you expect to do, and you have a per clean overhead figure. If you are unsure, start by adding 15 percent and refine later.

Then profit on top. Profit is not your wage. Your wage was step one. Profit is what makes the business worth owning, and 10 to 20 percent is a reasonable target.

A worked example

These are example numbers. Substitute your own, but keep the structure.

A three bedroom, two bathroom recurring clean. One cleaner, paid $20/hr.

Line	Amount
2.5 hours on site at $26/hr burdened	$65.00
30 minutes drive time at $26/hr	$13.00
Supplies	$4.00
Subtotal, your cost	$82.00
Overhead at 15 percent	$12.30
Profit at 15 percent	$14.15
Price	$108.45

Round to $110.

Now notice what happens if you skip drive time and use the unburdened wage: 2.5 hours at $20 is $50, plus supplies is $54, plus 30 percent for overhead and profit gives you about $70. You would have quoted $70 for a job that costs you $82 to deliver.

That $40 gap, repeated across four cleans a day, five days a week, is roughly $40,000 a year.

Hourly, flat rate, or per square foot

Flat rate is usually right. Clients want a number, not a meter running. It rewards you for getting faster, which hourly actively punishes. And it makes quoting simple.

Hourly makes sense for unpredictable work. First time deep cleans on a property you have not seen, hoarding situations, post construction. Anything where you genuinely cannot estimate.

Per square foot is a starting filter, not a price. It gets you in the right range on the phone, but two houses of identical size can be an hour apart depending on clutter, pets, and whether anyone has cleaned the oven since 2019.

If you use a square foot rate, treat it as the opening estimate you confirm on a walkthrough.

Pricing the three common job types

Recurring cleans

Price these from the formula above and expect them to get faster. A house that takes 3 hours the first time often settles at 2.25 once you know it.

Do not drop the price when that happens. The efficiency is the reward for doing the hard first clean, and the client is buying a clean house, not your hours.

Frequency does justify a difference, because a weekly house is less work per visit than a monthly one. A common structure is weekly cheapest, biweekly slightly higher, monthly higher again.

Deep cleans and first cleans

A first clean is almost always more work than the recurring visits that follow. Baseboards, inside appliances, build up in places nobody has touched.

Charging 1.5 to 2 times the recurring rate is standard, and it protects you from the classic mistake of quoting the ongoing rate for a job that takes twice as long.

Say it plainly in the quote: first clean $X, then $Y per visit after that. Clients accept this readily when they understand why.

Move-outs

Price these separately and higher. Empty houses are faster in some ways and far slower in others, and the client is usually chasing a deposit, which means the standard is higher than normal.

Quote after seeing it, or quote a range and confirm on arrival. More on the specifics in move-out cleaning software.

Four mistakes that cost real money

Pricing off competitors. You have no idea what their costs are, whether they pay their people properly, or whether they are about to go out of business. Half the cheap quotes in any market are from businesses that have not done this arithmetic.

Never raising prices. Your costs went up every year. If your prices did not, you gave yourself a pay cut every year. An annual increase, announced in advance, loses far fewer clients than people fear.

Quoting on the phone for a house you have not seen. Give a range on the phone, confirm after a walkthrough or photos. "It's usually between $110 and $140 for a house that size, I'll confirm once I've seen it" is a perfectly professional answer.

Discounting to win a price shopper. The client who chose you purely on price will leave for someone five dollars cheaper. You have bought a client who costs you money and will not stay.

When to walk away

Some jobs should not be taken at any price you could realistically charge.

If a client is haggling before you have started, wants a deep clean at recurring rates, or the property needs more than cleaning, the job is unlikely to improve after you accept it.

Saying "I don't think we're the right fit for this one" costs you an hour of your evening. Taking it costs you a weekend and a bad review.

Making it repeatable

The arithmetic above only helps if the number you quote is the number you invoice, and if you can see afterwards whether the job actually paid.

That means quoting in a way you can reuse, keeping the line items consistent, and tracking real time against real jobs so your estimates get better instead of staying guesses.

CleanDock does that end to end. Build a quote from saved line items, send it from the driveway, and turn it into an invoice in one tap when the client says yes. Cleaners clock in on site, so after a few weeks you are pricing from recorded time.

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