How Much to Charge for House Cleaning (2026 Pricing Guide)

The Moil Team · 5 min read · Published 2026-09-02

How to price house cleaning by the job instead of the hour, what to charge for a deep clean and a move-out, and a calculator built on your own costs.

How Much Should You Charge for House Cleaning?

Price the job, not the hour — but build the job price from an hourly figure that covers your loaded labor cost, your overhead and a profit margin. For a two-person crew that usually means a recurring three-bedroom clean priced somewhere between $140 and $200, and a first-time deep clean at roughly twice the recurring rate. Quoting by the hour punishes your fastest cleaners and invites arguments about pace; quoting flat rewards a crew that gets quicker. The test any price sheet has to pass is the one below: at the price you charge and the crew cost you carry, how many visits a month actually cover your fixed costs.

Those defaults describe a two-person crew: a $160 recurring clean, about $72 of loaded crew wage and supplies, and $2,800 of monthly fixed costs. Cleaning has lower overhead than the trades — no van full of parts, no licensing board — so the fixed-cost side is small. What it does have is a labor cost that most owners understate, which is the next section, and that cost is the difference between a full schedule and a profitable one.

Your Real Labor Cost Is Not the Wage

If you pay a cleaner $18 an hour, that hour costs you well above $18 once employer payroll taxes, insurance and paid drive time between homes are counted. Plan on 1.25 to 1.4 times the wage. Two cleaners at $18 in a house for 90 minutes is three crew-hours at a loaded cost of roughly $68 to $76 before you have bought a single bottle of anything.

• $18/hourWage
• $22-25/hourLoaded cost
• $3-6Supplies per visit
• Paid, unbilledDrive time between homes

Drive time is the one that decides whether a route is profitable. Four homes on one street and four homes across a metro are the same billable hours and completely different days. Price by route density, or at least stop taking the outlying job at the same price as the one next door.

A Price Sheet That Holds

Two rules make this sheet survive contact with reality. Charge more for the first clean, always — a house that has never been professionally cleaned takes roughly twice as long, and pricing it at the recurring rate turns your best new customer into your worst first day. And quote from square footage plus condition, not bedrooms alone; a cluttered two-bedroom beats an empty four-bedroom for hours every time.

Recurring Customers Are the Business

One-off deep cleans are marketing. Recurring biweekly customers are the business: predictable revenue, a route you can optimise, and a crew you can actually schedule. Price to make the recurring work attractive — a visible discount against the one-time rate — because a customer who books every fortnight for two years is worth many times a single deep clean.

• Quote a range on the phone, confirm on arrival. The condition of the house is the variable, and pretending otherwise creates the awkward conversation later.
• Never price against a solo cleaner working cash. They are not carrying insurance, a bond or payroll, and the customer who chooses purely on that number is not your customer.
• Raise recurring prices annually, in writing, with notice. Silence for three years then a 20% jump loses people; 5% a year does not.
• Charge for what nobody wants to do. Inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows, baseboards. These are add-ons, not inclusions.

For the full financial picture behind the sheet, the cleaning business plan walkthrough has the startup costs and break-even, and cómo iniciar un negocio de limpieza covers the same ground in Spanish.

Getting the Price Accepted

Cleaning is bought on trust more than on price, because the customer is handing over a key. Insurance and a janitorial bond, named cleaners rather than anonymous staff, a written checklist per room, and photographs of the finished work all justify a price a cheaper competitor cannot match. In a bilingual service area, quoting and confirming in the customer's own language does more for close rates than a discount would.

Office and Commercial Cleaning Prices Differently

Residential cleaning is priced per visit and sold on trust. Commercial cleaning is priced per month against a scope of work, and sold on reliability and paperwork. If you take an office contract using residential arithmetic you will almost certainly underprice it, because the things that make commercial work expensive are invisible on a walkthrough.

• It happens after hours. Evening and overnight work commands a wage premium, and your loaded cost per hour rises accordingly.
• The scope is contractual. What counts as done is written down, and anything omitted from the scope is work you will do for free for the length of the contract.
• Supplies are often yours to provide. Restroom consumables, liners and paper are a recurring cost most first-time bids forget entirely.
• Payment is on terms. Thirty days is normal, so you pay your crew three or four times before the first invoice clears.
• Insurance requirements are higher. Many buildings require specific liability limits and a bond before you can hold keys.

Price a commercial contract by building it up from crew hours per visit, visits per month, the loaded after-hours wage, supplies, and then your margin — never by quoting a monthly number that feels competitive. And read the cancellation clause before signing: a thirty-day termination on a contract you bought equipment for is a real risk that belongs in the price.