A property manager asks you to quote the common areas of an apartment building. A daycare wants cleaning five nights a week. A small clinic wants three visits a week. None of these look like a house clean, and the usual house-cleaning math (bedrooms, bathrooms, a flat price per visit) does not translate cleanly. So you guess a monthly number, the client says it is too high, and you have no idea whether they are right.
Commercial contracts are worth getting right because they repeat. A price that is $300 a month too low is not one bad job. It is $3,600 a year, every year, until you renegotiate. This guide walks through how to build a monthly price for recurring commercial cleaning from your own hours and costs, so you can defend the number or walk away from it.
Start with the scope, not the square footage
Square footage is useful as a sanity check, but two buildings of the same size can take very different time. A 3,000 sq ft office with carpet and four desks is not the same job as a 3,000 sq ft daycare with classrooms, a kitchen, and kid-height surfaces to sanitize. Before you put a number on anything, write the scope as a list:
- Areas. Offices, classrooms, lobbies, hallways, stairwells, elevators, restrooms, kitchens, break rooms, trash rooms, leasing office.
- Tasks per area. Trash, vacuum, mop, restroom sanitizing, dusting, glass, high-touch surfaces, restocking paper and soap.
- Frequency per task. Daily, weekly, monthly. Not everything needs to happen every visit. Baseboards and high dusting monthly, restrooms every visit.
- Who supplies what. Paper goods, soap, liners, and chemicals. If you supply restroom paper, that is a real monthly cost that grows with traffic.
- Access and timing. After-hours only? Alarm codes? A window you have to finish inside?
This list becomes the scope section of your proposal. It is also the thing that protects you later when the client starts asking for “just one more room.” If you have read how to define regular vs. deep clean scope, it is the same idea applied to a building.
Estimate hours per visit, then hours per month
Walk the space and time it in your head area by area, or better, clean it once and time it for real. Write down hours per visit, then convert to a month:
- Visits per month = visits per week × 52 ÷ 12
- 5 visits a week works out to about 21.7 visits a month, not 20
- 3 visits a week works out to about 13 visits a month
That “not 20” matters. Pricing a five-night contract as 20 visits gives away roughly one and a half free visits every month.
Do not forget drive time. A commercial account you visit 22 times a month is 22 round trips. If the building is 15 minutes away, that is over 10 hours a month of driving you are paying for. Estimating job time covers how to pad estimates for the tasks that always run long.
Build your cost per labor hour
Your cost per hour is not what you pay a cleaner. It is what an hour of cleaning costs your business:
- Wage or what you pay yourself per hour
- Payroll taxes and workers’ comp if you have employees
- Supplies and chemicals used per hour
- A share of insurance, vehicle, phone, software, and equipment like vacuums and floor machines
If you clean the account yourself, still price it as if you were paying someone. Otherwise the day you hire help, the contract stops making money.
Worked example: a five-night daycare contract
Example numbers only. Use your own rates, costs, and timing.
- Scope: offices, classrooms, kitchen, lunchroom, restrooms
- Time on site: 2 hours per visit, 5 visits a week
- Visits per month: about 21.7
- Labor hours per month: 21.7 × 2 = 43.4 hours
- Example loaded labor cost: $28 per hour
Monthly cost:
- Labor on site: 43.4 × $28 = $1,215
- Drive time: 20 minutes round trip × 21.7 visits = about 7.2 hours × $28 = $202
- Supplies and chemicals: $60
- Share of overhead (insurance, vehicle, software): $150
- Total monthly cost: about $1,627
Now set the price for the margin you want, not by adding a percentage on top. For a 25% margin, divide cost by 0.75:
- $1,627 ÷ 0.75 = about $2,170 a month
- That is about $100 per visit
If you had quoted $1,200 for this scope, you would be losing money on every visit once labor and driving were paid. That does not mean $1,200 is always wrong. It means you can now see exactly which part of the scope or frequency would have to change for $1,200 to work.
Markup vs. margin: the mistake that shrinks every contract
Adding 25% to your cost does not give you a 25% margin. In the example above, $1,627 × 1.25 = $2,034, and you keep $407 of $2,034, which is only 20%. Dividing by (1 − margin) is the version that lands where you meant to. On a recurring contract that gap repeats every month. The psychology of service pricing covers why so many service businesses leave money on the table this way.
When the client says it is too expensive
Do not just drop the number. Change the scope or the frequency with them so the price still works:
- Fewer visits. Three nights a week instead of five, with trash and restrooms on the off nights only if they pay for a short visit.
- Split the tasks. Restrooms, trash, and kitchen every visit. Vacuuming and dusting twice a week. Glass and baseboards monthly.
- They supply consumables. If they buy paper goods and liners, take that out of your price.
- Show options. Quote two or three levels side by side. Clients pick an option far more often than they accept a single take-it-or-leave-it number. Itemized vs. lump-sum quotes covers how much detail to show.
Some clients are comparing you to a part-time employee or a cleaner who is not insured. You will not win those on price, and you should not try to.
Put the terms in writing
A one-page agreement saves a lot of arguments on recurring work:
- The scope list, with frequency per task
- Monthly price, billing date, and payment due date
- What counts as extra work and how it is priced (carpet extraction, floor stripping, event cleanups)
- Holidays and closures: are skipped visits credited, or is the monthly price flat?
- Notice period to cancel or change the scope
- A price review date, such as once a year
Check the contract after the first month
The first month tells you whether your estimate was real. Track the actual hours on site, drive time, and supplies used, then compare them to the numbers in your quote. If a two-hour visit is really taking two hours and forty minutes, you know before you have locked in a year of losses, and you have specific numbers to bring to the client when you adjust the scope or price.
For residential work, how much to charge for house cleaning uses the same hours-first approach.
The short version
Write the scope as areas, tasks, and frequency. Estimate hours per visit, convert to about 21.7 visits a month for five nights a week, and include drive time. Build a real cost per hour, divide by (1 − margin) to set the price, and adjust scope rather than cutting your rate when the client pushes back. Then check the first month against the estimate.
SupaHandi keeps your estimates, recurring invoices, expenses, and job profit in one place, so you can see whether a contract is actually paying. See the SupaHandi features, or start free and price your next contract from real numbers.