How to quote your first commercial cleaning job

One building, worked end to end — including the part where the number you were going to say costs you $6,600 a year.

Somebody has asked you to price an office. You have walked it, you have a square footage, and now you have to put a number in an email. The temptation is to pick something that sounds right — nine hundred, a thousand, whatever the last guy was charging — and hope.

Don't. A commercial cleaning contract is an annual commitment. A residential job you misprice is one bad Tuesday; a commercial contract you misprice is twelve months of losing money on a schedule, and you usually don't find out until the year is nearly over.

Here is the whole thing on one building. Eight thousand four hundred square feet, private offices and cubicles, three nights a week, nine restroom fixtures, standard soil, fifteen minutes each way of travel and lock-up.

Step one: how long it takes

Price follows hours. Everything else is downstream of this number, so get it first and get it honestly.

Start from a production rate — square feet one person cleans per hour for that kind of space. Commonly published ranges put open-plan office somewhere around 3,000–4,000 sq ft/hour. Private offices and cubicles run slower, because the work is doors, corners and desks rather than long clear runs. Take 2,800 for this one.

Count fixtures, not restroom floor area. A restroom's workload tracks the number of toilets, urinals and sinks. Two buildings of identical square footage can differ by an hour a night on fixtures alone, and square footage will never tell you that.

Count the travel. It is the most commonly omitted line on a first bid, and omitting it does not make it free — it just moves the cost from the customer to you.

Three visits a week is 13 visits a month (3 × 4.33 weeks). So this building is 4.00 labor hours a visit and 51.96 labor hours a month.

Step two: what an hour costs you

Not the wage. The wage is the biggest part of what an hour costs, and treating the part as the whole is the single most expensive arithmetic error in this trade — because it doesn't give you a wrong answer once, it gives you a wrong answer on every bid you make until you fix it.

Then overhead. Insurance, vehicle, fuel, phone, software, the accountant, and the hours you spend quoting and invoicing instead of cleaning — all of it comes out of the hours you can actually bill. Spread $1,800 a month across 300 billable hours and each hour carries $6.00.

Billable hours are the hours you invoice, not the hours you work. Drive time, quoting, supply runs and the Saturday you spent fixing a machine are all real hours that no customer pays for.

Almost everyone sets this number too high, which makes overhead per hour look smaller, which makes their floor look lower than it is. If you are not sure, count one month honestly — invoice hours only — and use that.

So an hour of this crew's time costs $22.17 + $6.00 = $28.17 before you have earned a cent.

Step three: the floor

Add consumables. Liners, paper, chemical, gloves — call it $7 a visit for a building this size.

$1,555 a month is the floor. Not the price — the floor. At exactly that number you have covered wages, burden, overhead and supplies, and worked a year for nothing.

Step four: the price

To clear a 22% net margin you divide by 0.78. You do not multiply by 1.22. Those give different answers and the difference is real money — see the next section.

That is $1,993 a month, or $153 a visit, and it leaves about $438 a month — $5,262 over the year — as actual profit.

Step five: the sanity check

One check, and it is not the one you will see most often online. Divide your price by the labor hours it has to pay for:

That sits inside the $30–75 per labor hour range that multiple independent sources publish for commercial cleaning. It is a number you can defend in a walkthrough, because you know exactly what is underneath it.

You will be tempted to check the rate per square foot instead. Resist it. Published per-square-foot bands are quoted inconsistently — some sources mean per visit, some mean per month, many don't say — and they frequently fail their own arithmetic. A source putting an office at roughly $0.09 per square foot per visit is describing well over $150 per labor hour on the same page it quotes $30–75 an hour. For the record this contract runs about $0.018 per square foot per visit, and that number tells you very little on its own.

What the gut number would have cost

Now the part that matters. A round, reasonable-sounding thousand dollars a month on this building:

That is $6,656 over a twelve-month contract, and it works out to $19.25 per labor hour — below what the hour costs you, and below what most states would let you pay someone before burden. You would work the entire year, do the job properly, keep the client happy, and finish poorer than when you started.

Nobody underbids on purpose. They underbid because $1,000 sounded like a fair price for a small office, and nothing in the process ever asked what the hours cost.

Before you send it

1. Walk the building and count fixtures. Square footage alone will not give you the hours.
2. Use your own wage and your own burden percentages off a payroll report and your comp declarations page. Stop estimating what you can look up.
3. Write down your floor and do not let a negotiation take you below it. A contract you lose costs you nothing; a contract you win below your floor costs you every month for a year.
4. Divide for margin. Never multiply.