Janitorial Pricing Calculator
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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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 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.
3. Ground-floor window cleaning, inside and out — three hours, $15 in supplies
Labor $66 + overhead $24 + supplies charged at $21 = $111 base → about $148. Windows are the classic janitorial add-on sold below cost to "round out" a bid. Priced from real hours, it's a profitable service; thrown in free, it's three hours of labor donated every month for the life of the contract.
What Does Janitorial Overhead Actually Cost?
Overhead is every cost of being in business that isn't a specific building: general liability insurance, the janitorial bond most commercial clients require before handing over keys and alarm codes, workers' comp, vehicle and fuel, commercial vacuums and backpack units that live hard lives, a floor machine and autoscrubber if you run floor care, chemical dilution systems, uniforms and badging, background checks on every hire, scheduling software, phone, 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 — and janitorial is unusual among the trades here because most worked hours are billable: the crew is in a client building nearly the whole shift. A small operation might run 1,600–1,900 billable hours per cleaner per year. Divide annual overhead by those hours: roughly $14,000 ÷ 1,750 billable hours ≈ $8 per billable hour — the default this calculator starts with. It looks small next to the mechanical trades, but on thin janitorial margins, forgetting it is the difference between profit and payroll-only.
Common Janitorial Pricing Mistakes
Recommended Profit Margins for Janitorial
These are working benchmarks, not laws. Big contracts run thinner because they're won against multiple bidders on volume; small-commercial accounts and project work — floor care, post-construction, move-outs — carry more because they're skilled, scheduled, equipment-heavy work. What matters is that the margin is a decision you made, visible in your price — not whatever survived the walkthrough you never did.
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.