How to price house cleaning jobs

Price per clean = (cleaning hours × your hourly rate + supplies) × (1 − regular-client discount) + travel.

A dependable way to price a clean is from your own time: how long each room takes you, what an hour of your work needs to earn, and what each visit costs you in supplies and travel. This guide builds a price that way. It does not tell you what other cleaners charge; your rates come from your own costs and goals.

Step 1: estimate the cleaning time

Time yourself (or your team) on a few real cleans and note the minutes per bedroom, per bathroom and per other room, such as the kitchen and living room. Then add minutes for extras the client asks for, like the inside of the oven or fridge. Cleaning time = rooms × minutes per room, added up for each room type, + extra minutes. Count cleaner-minutes: two people working for an hour is two cleaner-hours. Two cleaners halve the time on site, but not the labor you are paying for.

Step 2: choose your hourly rate

Your rate per cleaner-hour has to cover the pay for that hour plus a share of everything else: insurance, equipment, phone, marketing, admin time and profit. If you employ cleaners, it also has to cover their wages and any employer costs. The cleaning business profit calculator shows whether a month of jobs at your rate covers your fixed costs.

Step 3: add supplies and travel

A supplies charge covers the products you use up on each clean. A travel charge covers getting there; you could set it by distance zones. Both are your own figures, from your receipts and your mileage.

Step 4: decide on a regular-client discount

If you offer regular clients a lower price, take the discount off labor and supplies and add travel afterwards, so the discount does not shrink your travel charge. Set it to 0 for one-off cleans. Whether to offer a discount at all is your choice.

Worked example (fictional numbers)

A two-bedroom home, cleaned by a team of two. These are example numbers, not suggested or typical prices:

2 bedrooms × 20 minutes = 40 minutes
1 bathroom × 40 minutes = 40 minutes
Kitchen and living room: 2 × 25 minutes = 50 minutes
Inside the fridge: 20 minutes

That is 150 cleaner-minutes, or 2 h 30 min of cleaning, which is 1 h 15 min on site with two cleaners.

At $44 per cleaner-hour, labor is 2.5 × $44 = $110.00. With an $8.00 supplies charge, the price before discount is $118.00. Adding a $6.00 travel charge, a one-off clean is $124.00, which is $49.60 per cleaner-hour.

For a regular client with a 10% discount: $118.00 × 10% = $11.80 off, so $106.20 + $6.00 travel = $112.20, or $44.88 per cleaner-hour.

Check the result

Per cleaner-hour. Divide the price by the cleaning hours. If that figure is below what an hour costs you, the job loses money however busy you are.
Minimum price. Very small jobs can come out low once travel and setup time are counted. You can set a minimum price per visit and charge whichever is higher.
Re-time after the first visit. If a clean takes longer than you estimated, update your minutes before you quote the next visit.
Review your rate. When your costs go up, your hourly rate has to follow, or your profit shrinks.

Enter your own rooms, minutes and rates in the house cleaning price calculator. If you are deciding whether to quote by the hour or a flat price, read flat rate vs hourly pricing or use the hourly vs flat rate calculator.