Why cleaning is quoted two different ways
Cleaners quote by the hour or by the square foot, and the two methods disagree in opposite directions at opposite ends of the market. Hourly pricing tracks the actual work and protects the cleaner on a difficult house, but it is hard for a customer to compare and invites the suspicion that the clock is being padded. Per-square-foot pricing is easy to quote over the phone and easy to compare, but it ignores everything except floor area — and floor area is only part of what takes time.
The thing that makes a house slow to clean is not square footage; it is surfaces and fixtures. A bathroom is the densest room in the house: a toilet, a shower, a bath, a basin, a mirror, glass and tile grout in perhaps 40 square feet. A bedroom is bed-making and dusting in 150. And a 3,000 square foot open-plan living space with no fixtures at all is mostly floor, which a good machine covers quickly.
That is why the estimate here has three separate terms — hours per thousand square feet, hours per bathroom, hours per bedroom — rather than one rate per square foot. A 2,000 square foot house with two bathrooms and three bedrooms comes to six labour hours; the same 2,000 square feet as a one-bedroom loft comes to four and a quarter.
Then the quote takes the higher of the two methods. That is deliberately conservative and is what most established firms do in practice: the hourly figure protects you on a fixture-heavy house, and the per-square-foot figure protects you on a big empty one.
Every multiplier, and what it is doing
The three time coefficients are estimating rules of thumb, not measured constants: 1.5 hours per 1,000 square feet, 0.75 hours per bathroom, 0.5 hours per bedroom. They are the shape of the estimate. If your own crew consistently comes in under or over, the honest fix is to adjust the hourly rate rather than to argue with the coefficients, because it is the product of the two that you actually charge.
Condition multiplies the hours, not the price, because condition is a time problem. The multipliers run from 0.85 for a tidy home cleaned recently to 1.8 for post-construction. Note that clutter costs more than dirt: everything on a surface must be lifted, the surface cleaned and the item replaced, which is three operations where an empty surface is one. That is also why move-out cleans on an empty house are efficient per square foot despite the higher multiplier.
Service type multiplies both the hours and the per-square-foot price, so the two methods stay comparable. A deep clean at 1.75 adds baseboards, door frames, light fittings, inside the microwave, under furniture and detail work on grout. A move-out at 2.0 adds every cupboard and drawer interior, the inside of the oven and fridge, and the expectation of an inspection.
The recurring discount comes off the calculated price. It is not purely a concession: a house cleaned fortnightly genuinely takes less time than the same house cleaned once, so part of the discount is a real cost saving passed on. The calculator applies it before the minimum charge, so the minimum still holds on small recurring jobs.
The minimum charge is a floor, and it exists because travel, loading, setup and packing down do not scale with house size. On a small job those fixed costs dominate, which is why a 500 square foot flat rarely costs proportionally less than a 1,500 square foot house.
Crew size changes elapsed time, not price. Six labour hours is six labour hours; two cleaners simply deliver them in three hours on site. Customers frequently expect two cleaners to cost the same as one, and the crew-hours output exists to make that conversation explicit.
Worked example: a 2,000 sq ft, 3-bed, 2-bath home cleaned fortnightly
Standard lived-in condition, a recurring fortnightly clean, $45 per cleaner-hour, $0.12 per square foot as the cross-check, a $150 minimum, and a 10% recurring discount. Two cleaners attend. The business pays $22 an hour fully loaded and spends $25 a visit on supplies and travel.
- Floor area component. 2,000 ÷ 1,000 × 1.5 = 3.00 hours.
- Bathrooms. 2 × 0.75 = 1.50 hours.
- Bedrooms. 3 × 0.5 = 1.50 hours.
- Base hours. 3.00 + 1.50 + 1.50 = 6.00 labour hours, unchanged by the 1.0 condition and service multipliers.
- Hourly method. 6.00 × $45 = $270.00.
- Per-square-foot method. 2,000 × $0.12 = $240.00.
- Take the higher, apply the discount. $270.00 × 0.90 = $243.00, which is above the $150 minimum, so it stands.
- On site. 6.00 ÷ 2 cleaners = 3.00 hours.
- Annual. $243.00 × 26 = $6,318.
- Margin. $243.00 − (6.00 × $22 + $25) = $243.00 − $157.00 = $86.00, or 35% of the quote.
Now make it a deep clean. Hours become 6.00 × 1.75 = 10.50, the hourly method gives $472.50, the per-square-foot method gives 2,000 × 0.12 × 1.75 = $420.00, and after the discount the quote is $425.25. The job costs 75% more and takes 75% longer, which is the point of the multiplier: a deep clean is not a better clean done at the same speed, it is more surfaces touched.
Reading the quote, from either side of it
If you are hiring: compare quotes on cost per hour rather than cost per visit, because that is the number that reveals what you are buying. A $180 quote for a three-hour visit and a $243 quote for a six-hour visit are $60 and $40.50 an hour respectively, and the cheaper-looking one is the more expensive service. Ask how many cleaners and how long, and divide.
Watch the effective cost per square foot too. Somewhere between about $0.08 and $0.20 covers most standard residential work, but the number is only meaningful alongside the bathroom count. A house with four bathrooms in 1,800 square feet should sit at the top of any range.
If you are quoting: read the margin figure, and read it before overheads you have not entered. The margin here subtracts only wages and per-visit supplies. Administration, insurance, marketing, vehicle costs, unbilled travel between jobs and the time you spend quoting all come out of it. A 35% margin on that basis is a normal-looking job; a 15% one is a job that stops being viable the first time a visit runs long.
Also check where the crossover between your two rates falls. In the worked example the hourly method wins below about 2,571 square feet and the per-square-foot method wins above it, because the hourly price at $45 an hour is 0.0675 × area + $135 while the area price is 0.12 × area, and those two lines cross where 0.0525 × area = 135. If almost all your work sits on one side of that crossover, one of your two rates is doing nothing and should be repriced.
The tip figure is offered at 15% of the quote. Tipping is customary for one-off and deep cleans and for individual cleaners rather than large franchises, and is more often skipped on a recurring contract in favour of a holiday bonus. It is a convention, not a rule.
Standard clean hours and price by house size
| Floor area | Labour hours | Hourly method | Per sq ft method | Quote before discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 sq ft | 4.50 | $202.50 | $120.00 | $202.50 |
| 1,500 sq ft | 5.25 | $236.25 | $180.00 | $236.25 |
| 2,000 sq ft | 6.00 | $270.00 | $240.00 | $270.00 |
| 2,500 sq ft | 6.75 | $303.75 | $300.00 | $303.75 |
| 3,000 sq ft | 7.50 | $337.50 | $360.00 | $360.00 |
| 4,000 sq ft | 9.00 | $405.00 | $480.00 | $480.00 |
The binding method flips between 2,500 and 3,000 sq ft: the crossover is where 0.0675 × area + 135 = 0.12 × area, which is 2,571 sq ft. Above it the per-square-foot rate sets the quote.
What makes a quote go wrong
- Quoting from square footage alone. Bathrooms are the labour-dense rooms. Two houses of identical area with two and five bathrooms are not the same job.
- Quoting an unseen house as standard condition. Condition is the single largest multiplier on this page, running from 0.85 to 1.8. Walk it, or quote a first visit hourly and a schedule thereafter.
- Confusing labour hours with time on site. Two cleaners for three hours is six labour hours. Quoting it as three is a 50% error and it is the most common one.
- Forgetting travel between jobs. Unbilled drive time is real labour cost. The minimum charge is what covers it, which is why discounting below the minimum destroys small-job economics.
- Applying a recurring discount to a one-off deep clean. The discount is payment for a booked schedule. There is no schedule on a move-out.
- Ignoring stairs, pets and high ceilings. None of the three appears in floor area, and all three add real time. Treat them as add-ons or bump the condition factor.
- Pricing at a competitor's rate without their cost base. The margin figure tells you what a rate leaves after wages and supplies. A rate that works for a solo owner-operator with no payroll may not survive an employee at $22 an hour loaded.
Where a cleaning quote sits among household services
Cleaning is priced the way most skilled trade services are: an hours estimate multiplied by a rate, with a minimum charge covering the fixed cost of showing up. The same shape governs almost every quote you will receive for work at a house, which is why an hours-based sanity check is the most useful thing a customer can do with any of them.
For move-out cleaning specifically, the quote is usually a negotiation with a tenancy deposit rather than a purchase, so compare it against the deduction the landlord would otherwise make. If a move-out clean sits alongside redecoration, the baseboard and trim linear feet calculator and the wallpaper roll calculator price the two most common accompanying jobs.
If you are financing a large one-off clean, the buy now pay later true APR calculator will tell you what an instalment plan actually costs, and the credit card cash back calculator covers the cheaper alternative. Owners running a cleaning business alongside other equipment decisions will find the same annualised-cost logic in the appliance repair vs replace calculator.
What each service level normally includes
- Standard or recurring clean
- Floors, surfaces, kitchen exteriors and sink, bathrooms in full, dusting reachable surfaces, beds made, bins emptied. The assumption is that the house was cleaned recently.
- Deep clean
- Everything in a standard clean plus baseboards, door frames and doors, light switches, inside the microwave, behind and under movable furniture, detail work on grout and taps, and reachable light fittings.
- Move-in or move-out clean
- A deep clean on an empty property plus the inside of every cupboard, drawer, wardrobe, the oven and the fridge. Usually inspected against a checklist, which is why it carries the highest multiplier.
- Add-on
- Work outside the agreed scope, priced separately: interior windows, laundry, blinds, walls, garage, patio, or inside appliances on a standard visit.