How to price house cleaning jobs without undercharging

Most new cleaning businesses copy the prices they see on a competitor's website. The problem is that you don't know that competitor's costs, speed or whether they are profitable. A better starting point is the hourly rate your business needs to earn after supplies, travel, insurance and tax.

Add up what you want to pay yourself per year, your yearly business costs and an allowance for tax, then divide by the number of hours you can realistically spend cleaning. Most owner-operators lose a surprising amount of time to driving, quoting and admin, so assume no more than 25 to 30 billable hours a week to begin with. The freelance hourly rate calculator on this site does exactly this sum.

Customers don't like hourly pricing for cleaning because they can't predict the bill. Square-foot pricing solves that, and it tracks the time a job takes better than bedroom count does.

Time yourself on a few standard cleans and note the square footage. If you clean about 600 square feet an hour and you need $70 an hour, your standard rate is $70 ÷ 600 ≈ $0.12 per square foot. If you work with a partner, the maths is the same; you just finish sooner.

A deep clean includes baseboards, door frames, inside cabinets and the build-up a regular visit never gets to. Move-in and move-out cleans add inside appliances and cupboards, and landlords often have a checklist. Both take noticeably longer, so price them as a multiple of your standard rate rather than inventing new numbers.

A home cleaned every week is quicker to clean every week. That time saving is what funds a recurring discount, and recurring clients are worth far more to you than one-off jobs because you stop paying to find new customers. Common discounts are around 20% for weekly service, 10–15% for every two weeks and up to 10% for monthly visits.

Many cleaners require the first visit to be a deep clean at the full deep-clean price. It resets the home so the recurring discount is actually earned.

A studio apartment at $0.12 per square foot is less than $60, which may not cover your travel and setup. A minimum charge, often between $100 and $150, protects small jobs.

Price extras such as inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows and laundry as separate line items. Customers like seeing them itemised, and they are the easiest way to raise your average ticket without raising your headline rate.

Two homes with the same square footage can take very different amounts of time. Quoting a range, such as $410 to $505, sets expectations while leaving room to adjust after a walkthrough or the first visit. An instant-quote calculator on your website can show that range automatically and collect the customer's details when they want a firm price.

A 2,000 square foot home wants a deep clean, has a dog and wants the inside of the oven done. At $0.12 per square foot, the base is 2,000 × 0.12 = $240. The deep-clean multiplier of 1.6 makes it $384, and 10% for pets brings it to $422.40. Adding $35 for the oven gives $457.40, which you might quote as roughly $410 to $505.

You can test your own numbers in the house cleaning price calculator, then put a version with your rates on your own website.