How Much Should a Cleaning Business Charge?

What actually goes into a defensible cleaning price

Work from cost to price, not from a competitor's website back to your cost. A price that holds up has five parts, and skipping any one of them is how an operator ends up busy and broke.

• Direct labor: every paid hour on the job, loaded with employer payroll taxes and any other employer burden — not the bare wage.
• Owner labor: the hours you personally work, valued at what it would cost to replace you.
• Other direct cost: supplies consumed, vehicle and travel cost for that job, and anything else that only exists because the job exists.
• Overhead share: insurance, phone, software, marketing and the rest of the monthly fixed cost, divided across the billable hours you actually expect to work.
• Margin: what is left after all of the above, expressed as a share of the price. This is a decision you make, not a number the market hands you.

The formula, in plain arithmetic

Two numbers matter. The break-even price is where the job stops losing money. The target price is where the job earns the margin you chose.

• Total job cost = loaded labor + owner labor value + supplies + vehicle/travel + allocated overhead.
• Break-even price = total job cost ÷ (1 − payment fee rate).
• Target price = total job cost ÷ (1 − payment fee rate − target margin).
• The payment fee sits in the denominator because it is charged on the price you collect, not on the cost you incurred.
• If the payment fee rate plus your target margin reaches 1, there is no solvable price. Lower the target or the assumption is broken.

Hourly, flat rate or square footage?

These are quoting methods. Customers see the format; you still need the cost model underneath. Pick the format that fits how the customer buys and how predictable the work is.

Why copying local prices goes wrong

The cleaner charging $120 for a job you would quote at $165 may have lower overhead, a tighter route, an unpaid family member on the crew, no insurance, or a business that is quietly failing. You cannot see their cost structure from their price list. Use local pricing to understand what you will have to justify — then justify it with scope, reliability and finish quality rather than by cutting to match.

An illustrative example

Illustrative only — not a benchmark or a recommended price. A recurring clean takes three productive hours of owner time plus half an hour of nonbillable drive and admin. Owner replacement value is $30/hr, supplies are $8, vehicle cost is $7, payment fees are 2.9%, and overhead allocation works out to about $7.14 per billable hour at $2,000 monthly overhead over 280 target billable hours. Direct cost is $105 ($30 × 3.5 hours) plus $15 of supplies and vehicle. Overhead on three billable hours adds roughly $21.43. Total cost is about $141.43, so break-even is about $145.66 and a 25% target margin needs about $196.43. If the market in that area pays $160, the gap is not a pricing mystery — it is a scope, time or overhead problem to solve deliberately.