What to charge for house cleaning
Price the visit that repeats, because that is the price your customer pays again and again. Take a home you already clean, work out the square feet you cover in an hour, and size the new home at that pace. Hours at what an hour costs you, plus supplies and the trip, is what one visit costs. Your price sits above that.
By TailGateBid. .
By the house, by the room, or by the square foot
If you quote by the house or by the room, nothing here says to stop. Hold the figure up against this sum first, so you know what it leaves you in this home and not in the last one.
Rooms are how your customer describes a home. Square feet are what you cover. Two homes with three bedrooms and two bathrooms can be a thousand square feet apart, and a price by the room is the same for both.
So this page prices by the 1,000 square feet and keeps the rooms as a check. Write the bedrooms and bathrooms beside the square feet and the hours of every home you clean. When two homes of one size take different hours, that record shows you which rooms did it.
The sum
- Take a home you clean now. The people on it, times the hours they are inside on a regular visit, are the hours of work.
- Its square feet divided by those hours is your pace: the square feet you cover in an hour of work.
- The new home's square feet divided by your pace are the hours of work for one regular visit there.
- Those hours at what an hour costs you, plus supplies, plus the trip, is what one visit costs you.
- Pick a price above it. Divided by the home's thousands of square feet, that is your price for each 1,000.
Work out what a job costs you
Start with the home, and one you already clean
These boxes take a home you clean now, work out your own pace from it, and size a regular visit to the new home at that pace. The size, the hours, the supplies and the trip go in the calculator below.
One you clean on a regular round, of the same kind.
Leave it empty if you clean it alone.
Not the first clean. An hour and a half is 1.5.
Cleaners, cloths, bags, pads. Leave it empty when the customer supplies them.
Type the square feet of the home you are pricing. The size shows here.
Two people for a day of 8 hours is 16.
A rental, dump fees, a sub.
Type the size of the job to see a price for each 1,000 square feet.
If you want it checked. Leave it empty if not.
Type your hours and what an hour costs you, or your materials. The answer shows here.
One regular visit, worked through
An example with made-up numbers, not a going rate
Say you clean a home of 1,800 square feet with 2 people in 1.5 hours on a regular visit: 3 hours of work, which is 600 square feet an hour. Say the new home is 2,400 square feet. At that pace it is 4 hours of work, 2 hours in the home for the same 2 people, and at $57.05 an hour that is $228.20. Say supplies come to $6 and the trip costs you $18. One visit costs you $252.20. Charge $361 and you keep $108.80, which is $30 of every $100. That is $150.42 for each 1,000 square feet, every time you come.
The same visit at five prices
An example with made-up numbers, not a going rate
| Price | You keep | Of every $100 |
|---|---|---|
| $281 | $28.80 | $10 |
| $316 | $63.80 | $20 |
| $361 | $108.80 | $30 |
| $421 | $168.80 | $40 |
| $505 | $252.80 | $50 |
The first clean is a different job
The first visit to a home is not a regular visit that happens to come first. Do not price one from the other.
On the page for house cleaning businesses, the first clean of a made-up home of 1,800 square feet takes 9 hours of work. On this page a regular visit to a home that size takes 3. Both figures are made up. The gap between your own two is what matters, and only your own jobs can tell you what it is.
To price a first clean, type its hours straight into the box for hours in the calculator, over what the boxes above put there. Every other box stays as it is.
The regular visit is the one to get right. An hour short on a first clean is an hour lost once. An hour short on a visit that repeats every two weeks is an hour lost every two weeks.
Cleaning or disinfecting: say which, and price which
- A regular visit is cleaning. The CDC says that in most situations cleaning regularly is enough to prevent the spread of germs, and that sanitizing or disinfecting at home is likely not needed unless someone in the home is sick: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, When and How to Clean and Disinfect Your Home.
- Disinfecting is more minutes on the same surface. The same page says to clean the surface first, then to leave the disinfectant on for the contact time in its directions, with the surface staying wet the whole time. That is a second pass and a wait.
- So when a customer asks for it, it is an extra with its own price, and the product is a supply. Do not fold it into a regular visit for nothing.
What gets missed
- The drive between homes. It is in every visit, for everyone in the car: what a trip costs you. A home at the far end of your round costs more to reach than one next door to another customer.
- Hours of work, not hours on the clock. Two people for two hours are four hours. Price the four.
- Supplies and machines. If the cleaners, the cloths and the vacuum are yours, they are a cost of every visit.
- The extras a customer asks for by name: the inside of the oven, the refrigerator, the laundry. Each is its own line with its own price. Windows have a page of their own: what to charge for window cleaning.
- The visit that does not happen. Decide what a locked door or a late cancellation costs your customer, and say it on the quote.
On the schedule
In TailGateBid a clean can be a job that repeats every week, every two weeks, every month or every so many days, and a visit can send its own invoice when it is marked complete: how scheduling works.
Everything here hangs on the hour. If yours is still a guess, work out what an hour costs you before you set a price for any home.
Where each number comes from
- When this page works out a price for you, it never aims to leave you more than $90 of every $100. TailGateBid's own price suggestions stop at the same place. A price you type yourself can leave more.
- The ladder shows the prices that leave about $10, $20, $30, $40, $50 of every $100. The steps are our choice: a ladder to read across, not advice.
A calculator works from the numbers you type. Check the answer against your own books.
This page is about one kind of job. TailGateBid works for any trade, and Bid Partner is built to price a job in any of them: how it works for your trade.
Sources
Related
- House cleaningA quote for the first clean, then visits that repeat and can send their own invoices.
- Trip and minimum chargeIn the example, a job 25 minutes away costs $93.92 before any work is done. See what your smallest job costs with the trip in it.
- What an hour costs youIn the example, $25 an hour of pay turns into $57.05 for every hour you can bill.
- SchedulingDay, week and month, jobs that repeat, and an email when you are on your way.
- Window cleaningPanes counted by kind, each at your own minutes, with the set-up and the trip, worked into a price for a pane.
Quote the first clean in TailGateBid, then set the regular one to repeat.
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