A job you underprice costs you once. A contract you underprice bleeds every month for a year.
Get it on Payhip →Same 5,000 sq ft office. Same weekly service. Only the production rate changes.
Most operators quote the footage and guess the hours. This sheet makes you state the rate, then checks it against the ISSA-published band for that kind of building — and prices the gap in dollars a year.
On 5,000 sq ft, being wrong by one cent a square foot a month is $50 a month and $600 over the term.
That is why contracts are priced per square foot and not by feel.
5,000 sq ft office, once a week, 4,000 sq ft per cleaner-hour, 6 restroom fixtures, one cleaner, 12 miles round trip:
Break-even $69.69 a visit / $301.99 a month → charge $107.22 a visit / $464.60 a month.
Annual contract value $5,575.
25-second demo — real numbers from the sheet, with audio 🔊
Prefer it built around your business — your rates, line items and branding? Done-for-you custom build →
Same method, costed for the work you actually do. All of them are in the $49 bundle.
Get the free Job Pricing Starter — loaded labour cost, overhead, break-even and the price to quote, on one sheet. It also shows what pricing on markup instead of margin costs you per job. No card.
Work up from your own costs, then convert to a month. Take the cleanable square footage and divide it by your production rate in square feet per cleaner-hour to get the cleaning hours. Add restroom time, which is counted per fixture and not per square foot, plus any extra task hours, plus drive time for every cleaner. Multiply by your fully loaded cleaner cost, add supplies, vehicle and overhead, and that is your break-even per visit. Multiply by visits per week and by 52 divided by 12 — not by 4 — and you have your break-even per month. Your price is the break-even divided by one minus your target margin. The Cleaning Contract Pricing Calculator does all of this and shows the break-even separately, per visit and per month, so you know your floor before the proposal goes out.
It is how much floor one cleaner covers in one hour. It decides whether a contract makes money, because it converts square footage into paid hours. The same office at the same price per square foot is profitable at 5,000 square feet per cleaner-hour and loses money at 2,500. Published ISSA 612 rates run about 3,500 to 5,000 square feet per cleaner-hour for open-plan office, 5,000 to 6,000 for corridors and lobbies, 3,500 to 4,200 for classrooms, 4,000 to 5,500 for retail floor and 6,000 to 8,000 for light-soil warehouse. Restrooms are timed per fixture instead: roughly four to five minutes a toilet, three to four a urinal and two to three a sink. The calculator takes your assumed rate as an input, compares it to the published band for that building type, and tells you in dollars a year what the difference is worth.
Published US ranges run about $0.05 to $0.35 per square foot per month across all commercial work, with standard offices at the cheaper end around $0.08 to $0.15, retail about $0.12 to $0.20, schools about $0.07 to $0.15, warehouses about $0.03 to $0.12, and medical or dental at $0.22 to $0.55 because of the protocol, training and compliance documentation. Most businesses pay somewhere between $715 and $2,800 a month. Homes are quoted differently — per visit, at roughly $0.06 to $0.16 per square foot, or $120 to $280 for a standard clean. Those are national averages, so the calculator prices from your own inputs first and only then checks the answer against the published band for that building type.
There are several, and some of them work well — but every one is built for the customer, to answer what will it cost me to hire a cleaner. None of them answers the operator's question, which is whether a recurring contract still makes money in month nine. This one prices the contract rather than the clean: break-even per visit and per month, the monthly figure to quote, the annual contract value, and what being wrong by a cent a square foot costs over a twelve-month term.
Labour is the largest line in the trade and typically runs 40 to 60 percent of revenue. BSCAI's benchmarking puts well-run commercial contractors at 50 to 65 percent, and one commonly quoted rule sets a tighter ceiling of 45 percent for direct labour. Above that band there is nothing left for supervision, equipment, training or a bad month. A cleaner earning around $17 an hour — close to the BLS median of $17.27 — actually costs about $21 to $22 an hour once payroll tax, workers comp, liability and paid time off are added, and $24 to $32 once vehicle and equipment share are included. The calculator shows labour as a share of your price on every contract and flags it when it goes over.
Yes — Excel and Google Sheets. Nothing to install.
Yes, $39 one-time. Field-service software covering the same job costs $29 to $79 every month.
