The short answer: price cleaning from production rates, not from a feeling about the building. Work out how much floor area your crew genuinely cleans in an hour, apply it to the actual square footage and the visit frequency, and cost the supplies and travel on top. A contract priced on vibes still looks fine in month one and hurts by month eight.
The contract that sinks a cleaning company is almost never the one it loses. It is the one it wins at the wrong number and then must service five nights a week for a year, because a cleaning contract is a price you pay repeatedly. A painting quote that is 15 percent low hurts once. A nightly office contract that is 15 percent low hurts 250 times before you can reprice it.
That repetition is the entire character of cleaning economics, and it dictates the method. You are not pricing a job, you are pricing a recurring hour of labor, delivered hundreds of times. The margin has to survive month eight, when the novelty is gone, the scope has quietly grown, and a team member has quit twice.
Price from production rates, not vibes
The professional method is five steps, and none of them is guessing.
1. Measure the space and classify it. Cleanable square footage, split by type: open office, private offices, washrooms, kitchen/break room, lobby, hard floors versus carpet. A washroom square foot costs a multiple of an open-office square foot; a bid that treats them the same is wrong in one direction or the other.
2. Apply production rates. A production rate is how many square feet one worker cleans per hour for a given service level. General office cleaning commonly runs somewhere in the 2,500 to 4,000 sq ft per hour range for routine nightly service with modern equipment; washrooms and kitchens far slower; detail vacuuming of dense carpet slower again. Your own timed numbers beat any published table, so start with industry ranges and correct them with a stopwatch during your first weeks on every new contract.
3. Convert to time per visit. Space ÷ production rate, per area, summed. This gives you the honest number the whole bid rests on: crew-hours per visit.
4. Load the hour. Wages are the start, not the cost. Add payroll burden and any required coverages, supplies (typically a few percent of the contract), equipment depreciation, supervision and inspection time, travel, and the cost of covering absences, because on a nightly contract, absence coverage is not an "if."
5. Add margin and multiply by frequency. A defensible net margin on commercial contracts is often in the 10 to 25 percent range; below that, one scope-creep incident erases the contract's point. Then price per visit, and present per month.
The markup vs margin calculator converts one into the other and shows the price and profit behind both.
A worked example: a 9,000 sq ft office, five nights a week
Walkthrough findings: 6,200 sq ft open office and private offices, 600 sq ft of washrooms (four), 700 sq ft kitchen and break room, 1,500 sq ft lobby, corridors, and meeting rooms.
- Office areas at 3,200 sq ft/hr: 1.9 hrs
- Washrooms at 500 sq ft/hr: 1.2 hrs
- Kitchen/break at 800 sq ft/hr: 0.9 hrs
- Lobby, corridors, meeting rooms at 2,800 sq ft/hr: 0.5 hrs
Call it 4.5 crew-hours per visit. Loaded cost per hour (wage $19, burden and coverage, supplies, equipment, supervision, travel) lands at $27.50. Cost per visit ≈ $124. At a 20 percent margin, the visit prices at $155. Five nights a week averaging 21.7 visits a month gives a contract price of about $3,360 a month, tax as applicable.
Alongside the base contract, quote the periodic work separately, each with its own price: carpet extraction twice a year, strip-and-wax for the hard floors, interior glass quarterly. Periodics are where the margin often lives, and bundling them invisibly into the monthly number is how they end up delivered free.
What goes wrong by month three?
Scope creep with a friendly face. "Could you also do the fridge Fridays?" "The boardroom needs resetting after events." Individually trivial; compounded, they can add half an hour a night, which is 10 percent of this contract's labor, which is nearly half its margin. The defense is a written scope attached to the contract, area by area and frequency by frequency, plus a habit: every "could you also" gets a warm yes with a price. Zero-cost extras teach the client that scope is free.
"Happy to add the fridge and the boardroom resets. That's about 25 minutes a week, so it would add $65 a month. Want me to start this Friday?"
Bidding off the tour instead of the traffic. The Tuesday 2 p.m. walkthrough shows you a tidy office. The contract is serviced at 9 p.m. after a product-launch pizza day. Ask about headcount, shift patterns, and event frequency; a 40-person office and a 90-person office can occupy identical square footage and produce wildly different washrooms.
Ignoring turnover in the labor price. Cleaning has high staff turnover as a structural fact. Every departure costs recruiting, training hours, and quality dips you will spend supervision time catching. If your loaded rate assumes a stable crew that never needs retraining, your real margin is thinner than your spreadsheet's. Price coverage and training in, and the good months feel like the plan instead of luck.
One deep-clean price for every "deep clean." Residential and one-off work dies on this word. A move-out clean of an empty, maintained condo and a post-renovation clean with drywall dust in every cabinet are different days entirely. Price one-offs from a walkthrough or detailed photos, with stated conditions, or quote hourly with a cap. Never text a flat "deep clean" price to an address you have not seen.
The walkthrough is where the bid is won or lost
Production rates are only as good as the walkthrough that feeds them, so treat the walkthrough as a measurement exercise with a fixed checklist, not a tour with small talk. What to capture, every time:
- Areas by type, measured or paced, not estimated from the lobby. Note floor surfaces per area, because vacuuming, damp mopping, and dust mopping are three different production rates.
- Fixture counts in washrooms: stalls, sinks, urinals. Washroom time scales with fixtures more than with floor area, and four small washrooms clean slower than one large one of equal footage.
- Waste points: every bin you will empty, and where the dumpster is. Thirty bins with a long carry to a locked compactor is real minutes, invisible on a floor plan.
- The building's frictions: alarm and key procedures, elevator access for your cart, water source locations, where supplies can be stored on site. A contract without a locked janitor closet means your crew hauls everything, every visit, forever.
- Standards and sensitivities: does the client care most about the lobby glass, the boardroom, the executive floor? Every building has two or three surfaces that generate all the complaints. Find them at the walkthrough and put extra minutes on them deliberately; those minutes buy the renewal.
- The current state. Photograph what "clean" looks like under the incumbent. If the space is being handed over rough, that first-visit catch-up price gets set now, with evidence, not discovered on night one.
Ask one question before leaving: "What made you go to market?" The answer tells you what the last company failed at, which is the standard you will actually be judged against, whatever the specification says. If the answer is "price," listen carefully; buildings that churn cleaners annually on price will churn you on price too, and the bid should be sustainable enough that losing it is fine.
Then write the specification from your checklist and attach it to the quote. The specification is not paperwork for its own sake; it is the physical boundary of the price, and the only thing that makes "that's outside the contract" an observation instead of an argument.
When should a clean be hourly instead of fixed?
Recurring commercial and residential service should be fixed per-visit or monthly pricing: clients budget monthly, and your production rates make fixed pricing safe. Keep hourly (time-and-materials) pricing for the genuinely unknowable: post-construction cleans, hoarding-scale resets, first-time cleans in poor condition, disaster cleanup. Even then, structure it: an hourly rate, a walkthrough-based estimate range, and a not-to-exceed number after which you call before continuing.
One special case: many companies price a first-visit catch-up clean at 1.5 to 2 times the regular visit price when taking over a neglected space. This is correct and worth defending plainly: the contract price maintains a standard; the first visit has to create it.
Contracts age; your numbers should not
The bid that was right in January is wrong by September if wages moved, the client added twelve staff, or the scope grew three favors deep. Cleaning pricing is not an annual event; it is a quiet ongoing comparison between the hours you assumed and the hours you actually spend.
That comparison only happens if the actuals get captured. With Zeus, each site's scope and per-visit price live as Price Book items, visits sit on the schedule, and your team's clock-in/out per site builds the real hours-per-visit record without a separate timesheet ritual. When renewal comes, you are negotiating from a year of actual minutes, and the quote revision goes out with an on-site signature instead of a handshake and hope.
Where Zeus fits
A cleaning contract is a price you pay hundreds of times, so what protects month eight is not a better spreadsheet in January, it is a record of what the site actually took. In Zeus each site's scope and per-visit price live as Price Book items, so the specification you attach to the bid and the number you charge come off one list. The periodics price as their own items, carpet extraction, strip and wax, quarterly glass, instead of disappearing into the monthly figure. Visits sit on the schedule against that site's job, and the supplies and costs you spend get counted on the job that caused them, so you can see which contracts made money. When the fridge request arrives, you add the line, price it, and the client signs the revision on your phone in the lobby, or through a link if the manager is off site. Bidding and getting it signed is Win the Work; the full feature list covers the rest. Quoting, invoicing and the record for every address cost nothing to start and do not run out; what each size costs is published in full. It runs on Android, iPhone and in a browser, so you can load it onto the phone you already carry.
The contract that sinks a company is the one it won at the wrong number and then serviced five nights a week for a year. You cannot fix that in month eight from a memory of the walkthrough. You can fix it at renewal, from a year of recorded visits.
Frequently asked questions
What margin should I bid at to win commercial contracts?
Bid at a margin you can service, not a margin that wins everything: for most small operators that means walking away below roughly 10 to 15 percent net after honestly loaded labor. Large facility-services companies can profit at thinner margins through scale you do not have. Losing a bid at a sustainable number is a Tuesday; winning at an unsustainable one is a year-long problem.
How should I price residential cleaning: by the hour, by the visit, or by the house?
Per visit, quoted from bedrooms/bathrooms/square footage and condition, with a higher first-visit price. Hourly pricing punishes your best cleaners and makes clients watch the clock. Publish add-ons (inside oven, inside fridge, interior windows) as flat prices so upsells are frictionless.
What do I do when a client asks me to match a much lower bid?
Requote the scope at the lower price honestly, with fewer visits, lighter service levels and periodics removed, and say what changes. "I can hit that number at three nights instead of five" keeps you professional and often exposes that the low bidder is planning exactly that without saying so. Matching the number while keeping the scope is how month-eight misery gets signed.
Should supplies and consumables be included or billed separately?
Include your cleaning supplies and equipment in the price; bill client-consumed consumables (paper towel, toilet paper, liners, soap) separately, either at cost-plus or by having the client supply them. Consumables scale with the client's headcount, not with your efficiency, so they should never be trapped inside your fixed price.
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