Know Your Number Before You Send the Bid
The pricing guide tells you what the market pays. This worksheet tells you what the job actually costs you to run — labor hours, true hourly cost, supplies, and the margin you need to protect. Work through it once and you'll never quote from a gut feeling again.
The four-step labor cost worksheet
Do these in order. Each step feeds the next, so don't skip to the price at the end.
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1. Turn square footage into cleaning hours
Take the cleanable square footage and divide by a production rate — how much space one cleaner covers per hour. General office space with light daily cleaning typically runs 2,500–3,500 sq ft per hour for one person; dense areas like restrooms, breakrooms, and heavy-traffic lobbies run far slower, closer to 800–1,500 sq ft per hour. Split the building into zones, apply the right rate to each, and add the hours together — that total is your labor hours per visit.
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2. Price the hour honestly, not just the wage
Your real hourly cost is never just what you pay the cleaner. Add payroll tax, workers' comp, any insurance you carry per employee, and paid time off if you offer it — most independents land somewhere between 18% and 35% on top of base wage once all of that is counted. Multiply your loaded hourly cost by the labor hours from step 1 to get labor cost per visit.
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3. Add what the labor number leaves out
Supplies and consumables (typically 3–6% of the contract price for standard office work), equipment wear, fuel or drive time between sites, and a management or supervision allowance if you're not cleaning it yourself. None of this shows up in step 2, and skipping it is the single most common reason independents underprice.
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4. Set the price from your margin, not the other way around
Add steps 2 and 3 together for your true cost per visit. Decide the margin you need — most independent commercial cleaners target 15–30% net, higher on smaller or harder-to-service accounts. Divide cost by (1 minus your target margin as a decimal) to get the price per visit. Multiply by visits per month for the monthly contract value.
Zone your production rates instead of averaging the whole building
A single average rate across an entire building flatters open office floors and buries you on restrooms and kitchens. Break the space into zones before you calculate hours:
- Open office / cubicles: fastest to clean, highest production rate
- Private offices / conference rooms: slower — more surfaces, more furniture per square foot
- Restrooms: slowest zone by far, and the one facilities managers notice first if it's rushed
- Break rooms / kitchens: slow, and frequency-sensitive — daily use means daily attention regardless of overall contract frequency
- Lobbies / high-traffic common areas: moderate speed but disproportionate visibility
Pull square footage for each zone off the floor plan if you have one, or pace it off on a walkthrough. This is the ten minutes of work that separates a bid built on evidence from one built on a guess.
Where independents usually leave money on the table
Two mistakes show up constantly in underpriced bids. The first is using the owner's own working speed as the production rate — if you personally clean fast because you've done it for a decade, your quote is only sustainable as long as you're the one on the floor. Price for the labor rate of the person who will actually be assigned the account, not your best day.
The second is treating supplies and drive time as rounding error. On a small contract, five or six percent for consumables and twenty minutes of unpaid drive time between two nearby sites can be the entire margin on the job. Put both into the worksheet every time, even on small accounts — the habit matters more than the dollar amount on any single bid.
Worksheet questions
What if I don't know my exact loaded labor cost yet?
Start with base wage plus 20% as a placeholder — it's a reasonable floor for payroll tax and basic workers' comp — and refine it once you've checked your actual insurance and tax rates. An estimated loaded rate beats using raw wage, which understates cost every time.
How do I know if my production rate assumption is realistic?
Time an actual walkthrough of a comparable space, or time your own team on the next similar job and log square footage against minutes worked. Two or three real timings will correct a bad assumption faster than any published average, including the ranges on this page.
Should the margin target change by contract size?
Yes — smaller contracts usually need a higher percentage margin because fixed costs (supervision, drive time, minimum staffing) don't shrink proportionally with square footage. A 50,000 sq ft account can often run a thinner margin than a 5,000 sq ft one and still produce more net dollars.
This gives me a cost-based price. How does that compare to the market rate guide?
Run both. If your cost-based number comes in well above the market rate range on the pricing guide, either your production assumptions are too conservative or the account isn't a good fit at that size. If it comes in well below, you're underpricing relative to what the market already supports — raise it.
Send us the numbers and we'll sanity-check the math
Building type, square footage, frequency, and your worked total — we'll tell you if the price holds up against typical market rates for that kind of job.