Cleaning Service Pricing Calculator
Price residential cleaning from your real costs — cleaner labor, insurance and equipment overhead, supplies with markup — with your profit margin built in, not diluted away. Bedroom counts don't set the price; honest hours do. (Pricing offices and commercial contracts instead? Use our janitorial calculator.)
Your Company Setup
Set these once — they reflect your business, not the job.
Price a Job
Enter one clean — the price updates as you type.
Instant Rate Card — Common House Cleaning Jobs
Twelve common residential jobs priced with your company settings above. Change your labor rate or margin and the whole menu reprices instantly. Hours and supplies costs are typical starting points for an average-condition home — adjust them to your market, the home's condition, pets, and clutter. Recurring visits multiply into dependable yearly revenue.
| Job | Typical hours | Typical supplies | Your flat rate |
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We really appreciate feedback from working pros like yourself to get these numbers accurate — to help our fellow trades and businesses succeed, now and for the next generations to come.
Worked Examples: Three Real House Cleaning Jobs
Using the default company settings above ($20/hr loaded cleaner rate, $7/hr overhead, 40% supplies markup, 20% target margin, 3% card fee, 2% re-clean reserve):
1. Standard clean, 3BR/2BA home — team of two, two hours each, $6 in supplies
Labor $74 + overhead $28 + supplies charged at $8 (your $6 cost with markup) = $110 base → about $149. Four labor-hours in and out — that's the residential model working: a tight two-person team, a known home, a flat rate. Notice the second cleaner is priced at 85% of the lead rate, not free — "my helper" is a cost that shows up in payroll whether or not it showed up in the quote.
2. Deep clean, same home — four hours each, $12 in supplies
Labor $148 + overhead $56 + supplies charged at $17 (your $12 with markup) = $221 base → about $299 — roughly double the standard clean, because it's roughly double the work. This is the price every first-time visit should carry: built-up soap scum, baseboards, and neglect are deep-clean work no matter what the booking form called it.
3. Recurring biweekly clean, established client — hour and a half each, $5 in supplies
Labor $56 + overhead $21 + supplies charged at $7 = $84 base → about $119 per visit. Twenty-six visits a year makes this one client worth roughly $3,094 annually — the quiet engine of a cleaning business. That yearly number is also why underpricing a recurring rate "to win the client" hurts so much: the discount renews itself every two weeks, forever.
What Does Cleaning Service Overhead Actually Cost?
Overhead is every cost of being in business that isn't a specific home: general liability insurance, the bond many clients quietly expect before handing over a house key, workers' comp once you hire, vacuums and steam mops that live short hard lives, vehicle and fuel between stops, booking and scheduling software, phone, and — the one residential cleaners underestimate most — marketing. Homes change hands, clients move, budgets tighten; residential churn means the schedule only stays full if lead generation never stops, and those ads and listings are a real cost of every hour you bill.
The number that matters is overhead per billable hour. Drive time between houses is the tax residential pays that commercial doesn't — a cleaner working an eight-hour day might bill six of it. A small operation might run 1,500–1,800 billable hours per cleaner per year. Divide annual overhead by those hours: roughly $12,000 ÷ 1,700 billable hours ≈ $7 per billable hour — the default this calculator starts with. It's the smallest overhead number on this site, and it's also the one most often rounded to zero — which is how cleaning businesses end up profitable on paper and broke in the bank.
Common House Cleaning Pricing Mistakes
Recommended Profit Margins for Cleaning Services
These are working benchmarks, not laws. Solo owner-operators often show higher margins because the labor line is their own paycheck — real, but not the same thing as business profit, and the difference arrives the day you hire your first cleaner at market wages. Deep cleans, move-outs, and post-construction work carry more margin than maintenance visits because they're harder, dirtier, and less comparable. What matters is that the margin is a decision you made, visible in your price — not whatever was left after the drive time nobody billed.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should I charge to clean a house?
Build the price from your numbers: loaded cleaner labor for the honest hours the home takes, plus overhead per billable hour (insurance, bonding, equipment, vehicle, the marketing that keeps the schedule full), plus supplies with markup, divided by one minus your target margin. Bedroom counts and square footage are starting points, not prices — condition, clutter, pets, and bathrooms decide the hours, and the hours decide the price.
Should I charge hourly or a flat rate?
Quote a flat rate — but build it from hours. Estimate the honest hours, price them with this calculator, and present the total. Clients prefer a known number, and a flat rate means your speed belongs to you: as your team gets faster on a recurring home, the margin grows instead of the invoice shrinking. Hourly pricing punishes you for being good at the job.
What profit margin should a cleaning business target?
Common working targets: 20–35% true net margin for team-based companies, and 10–20% where you're competing directly with solo cleaners on price, after all costs, card fees, and a re-clean reserve. Solo owner-operators often run higher effective margins because the labor line is their own paycheck — the trap is confusing that paycheck with profit when it's time to hire.
What's the difference between markup and margin?
Markup is added on top of cost; margin is the share of the final price that's profit. A 20% markup on a $100 cost gives $120 — but only a 16.7% margin. To earn a true 20% margin you divide by 0.80, giving $125. On a recurring client cleaned every two weeks, confusing the two repeats the loss twenty-six times a year.
Should a first-time clean cost more than a recurring clean?
Yes. A first visit is a deep clean wearing a standard clean's name — built-up soap scum, baseboards, and neglect that a maintained home doesn't have. Price the first visit as a deep clean, then quote the recurring rate for the maintained home you'll be walking into afterward. Companies that price the first visit at the maintenance rate donate hours on day one and then wonder why the account never feels profitable.
Is this calculator really free?
Yes. No account, no email, no ads. The calculator runs in your browser and the numbers you enter are never sent to us. We use basic traffic analytics, described in our privacy policy.