Commercial Cleaning & Janitorial Pricing Calculator
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Price commercial cleaning from your real costs — cleaner labor, insurance & equipment overhead, supplies and consumables — with your profit margin built in, not diluted away. Price the visit honestly, and the monthly contract is just multiplication.
Your Company Setup
Set these once — they reflect your business, not the job.
Price a Job
Enter one visit or one project — the price updates as you type.
Instant Rate Card — Common Janitorial Jobs
Twelve common commercial 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 — adjust them to your buildings, your fixture counts, and your production rates. Recurring visits multiply into the monthly contract.
| Job | Typical hours | Typical supplies | Your flat rate |
|---|
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Worked Examples: Two Real Janitorial Jobs
Using the default company settings above ($22/hr loaded cleaner rate, $8/hr overhead, 40% supplies markup, 20% target margin, 3% card fee, 2% re-clean reserve):
1. Small office nightly clean — an hour and a half, $8 in supplies per visit
Labor $33 + overhead $12 + supplies charged at $11 (your $8 cost with markup) = $56 base → about $75 per visit. Five nights a week is roughly 21 visits a month — about $1,575 per month. That's the whole discipline of janitorial pricing in one line: the monthly contract is the visit price times the visit count, and any monthly number that wasn't built that way is a guess with a signature on it.
2. Day porter — four-hour shift, $5 in supplies
Labor $88 + overhead $32 + supplies charged at $7 = $127 base → about $169 per shift, which works out to roughly $42 per porter hour. Porters get scope-crept harder than any other service — spills, deliveries, conference-room resets, "while you're here." The shift price buys a defined task list; everything beyond it is an add, and the contract should say so.
Pricing doesn't have to be hard. We make it Easy.
You've seen what's involved — building the job, pricing the visit, and turning it into a monthly contract. Professional pricing has a lot going on. We understand the complicated stuff. So YOU don't have to!
You don't have to figure this out from scratch every time you bid a job. That's what MPC PRO is for.
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How to Bid a Commercial Cleaning Job
Every accurate commercial cleaning bid follows the same order of operations. Skip a step and it shows up later as a loss — on the first invoice, or by month six of the contract.
1. Walk and scope the building
The floor plan tells you the size; the walkthrough tells you the work. Measure cleanable square footage, then count what actually consumes labor: restrooms and fixtures, trash points, kitchens, entrances, floor types and how much of each, and any special requirements the client mentions.
2. Determine your production rate
A production rate is what turns "a 5,000 sq ft office" into "2 labor hours." Apply it to your counts to get honest hours per visit — see production rates below for how to set yours.
Cleanable square feet ÷ production rate = labor hours
That works for open, square-foot-driven tasks like vacuuming. It works poorly for restrooms and other fixture-heavy work, which is estimated per fixture instead — a restroom's labor tracks its toilet and sink count, not its square footage.
3. Calculate real loaded labor
The wage on the paycheck is not your labor cost. Payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits, and training all ride on top of it — that fully loaded number is what belongs in a bid. This calculator's "loaded lead cleaner rate" field is exactly that number.
4. Add overhead, supplies, and profit
Insurance, bonding, vehicles, equipment, chemicals, and administration ride on the hourly price too (see what janitorial overhead actually costs). Then build in profit as a number you decide on — divide by (1 − target margin) rather than adding a markup on top; the two are not the same math.
5. Convert the visit price into the contract price
Per-visit price × service frequency = recurring contract price
Price the work first. Then price the contract. A monthly number that skips the visit math — a square-foot average, a competitor's bid minus ten percent — is a guess with a signature on it.
Commercial Cleaning Production Rates
A production rate is how much area one cleaner can service per hour. If 5,000 square feet takes 2 labor hours:
5,000 ÷ 2 = 2,500 square feet per labor hour
ISSA publishes this same square-footage-÷-production-rate method, built from time-and-motion studies of specific tasks — but no primary source publishes a single sq-ft-per-hour number for "general office space." A real building mixes open-area work with fixture-based tasks like restrooms, which run much slower per square foot. A single blanket production rate never represents a whole building, so treat any published task rate as a starting point, not a target.
The best production rate is eventually your production rate. Benchmarks are a reasonable place to start before you've serviced a building. Your own measured history — actual hours against actual square footage, building by building — beats them as it grows. Measure it. Learn it. Price from it.
What Does Janitorial Overhead Actually Cost?
Overhead is every cost of being in business that isn't tied to one building: general liability insurance, the janitorial bond most commercial clients require, workers' comp, vehicles and fuel, vacuums and floor machines, uniforms, background checks, scheduling software, and marketing. None of it is glamorous, and all of it has to ride on the hourly price.
The number that matters is overhead per billable hour. Janitorial is unusual here: most worked hours are billable, since the crew is in a client building nearly the whole shift. Divide annual overhead by billable hours — roughly $14,000 ÷ 1,750 ≈ $8 per billable hour, the default this calculator starts with. It looks small, but on thin janitorial margins, forgetting it is the difference between profit and payroll-only.
Commercial Cleaning Prices Per Square Foot
Published $/sq-ft figures are a useful reality check — a way to sanity-check a bid against the market. They are not a costing method. ISSA puts standard commercial cleaning at roughly $0.05 to $0.25 per square foot, cautioning that rates vary widely by location, building type, and service level.
The problem with stopping there: two buildings of identical size can carry completely different workloads.
| Building A — 10,000 SF | Building B — 10,000 SF | |
|---|---|---|
| Layout | Open space, light traffic | Dense workstations, heavy traffic |
| Restrooms | Two | Six |
| Kitchens / break rooms | None | Multiple |
| Trash points | Few | Many |
Same square footage, different workload, different labor, different price. Bid both at one $/sq-ft rate and you're overpriced on A or underwater on B.
So how much should you charge for office cleaning? There's no universal price for a 10,000-SF office — workload, fixture counts, traffic, floor types, and service expectations all move the labor. Use a published range to check that your number is in the neighborhood, then build the actual price from the walkthrough, the production rate, and the labor cost, the way the bidding steps above lay out.
How to Price a Janitorial Contract
Recurring pricing magnifies small mistakes. Underprice a single visit by $15 and it looks minor — until you multiply it out:
$15 × 5 nights × 52 weeks ≈ $3,900/year in uncollected price
The contract numbers follow directly from the visit price:
Price per visit × visits per week × service weeks = annual contract value
Annual contract value ÷ 12 = average monthly contract price
Any monthly number that didn't come from that math — a round figure picked to "feel competitive," or last year's price with no review — isn't a price. It's a guess that renews automatically. Put the full scope in writing too (routine service, floor projects, windows, consumables, emergencies); scope gaps are where "while you're here" quietly turns a priced contract into an unpriced one.
Common Janitorial Pricing Mistakes
Recommended Profit Margins for Janitorial
Working benchmarks, not laws: big contracts run thinner because they're won on volume; small-commercial and project work carries more because it's skilled and equipment-heavy. What matters is that the margin is a decision you made, visible in your price.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should I charge for office cleaning?
Build the per-visit price from your numbers: loaded cleaner labor for the visit, plus overhead per billable hour (insurance, janitorial bond, equipment, vehicle), plus supplies with markup, divided by one minus your target margin. Then multiply by the monthly visit count for the contract price. A monthly number built any other way — square-foot averages from the internet, or a competitor's bid minus ten percent — is a guess wearing a contract.
How do I bid a janitorial contract?
Walk the building and count what actually consumes time: restroom fixtures, trash points, floor types and square footage of each, entrances, kitchens, and the security or check-in routine your crew repeats every visit. Apply your own production rates to those counts to get honest hours per visit, then price the hours with this calculator. Square footage alone is a poor predictor — a 5,000-foot office with six restrooms cleans slower than an 8,000-foot warehouse with one.
What profit margin should a janitorial company target?
Common working targets: 20–35% true net margin on small-commercial accounts and project work, and 10–20% on large-volume contracts won competitively, after all costs, card fees, and a re-clean reserve. Consumables supplied to the client are typically marked up 40–100% over cost on top of that.
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 $1,000 monthly cost gives $1,200 — but only a 16.7% margin. To earn a true 20% margin you divide by 0.80, giving $1,250. On a contract that repeats every month, confusing the two repeats the loss every month too.
Should consumables like trash liners, paper, and soap be included in the contract?
Either answer works — priced. If you supply consumables, track usage per building and bill them with markup, because paper and liners are a real monthly cost that scales with headcount you don't control. If the client supplies them, say so in the contract scope. What fails is the silent middle: absorbing a growing consumables bill inside a fixed monthly price that never accounted for it.
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.
About this calculator
MyPricingCalculator's Commercial Cleaning & Janitorial Pricing Calculator helps trade and service businesses price their work with profit built into every quote.
- Publisher: MyPricingCalculator.com
- Primary topic: Pricing, estimating, and profit margin for service businesses
- Last reviewed: October 17, 2026