How much to charge for house cleaning in 2026
The pricing formulas cleaning companies actually use, with the arithmetic worked out: an hourly target, square footage, and a bed and bath matrix.
Petru Amortoae · July 28, 2026 · 8 min read
Most cleaning companies set prices by asking around. Someone charges $130 for a three bedroom, so you charge $130 for a three bedroom. That holds up until the day a cleaner asks for a raise, or gas goes up, or you look at your bank balance in February and cannot work out where the money went.
The fix is not a bigger number. It is a number you can explain. Everything below builds from one figure you calculate once, then reuse for square footage pricing, bed and bath pricing, deep cleans, add-ons and your next price increase.
Start with what an hour on site has to earn
Your price is not built from what clients will pay. It is built from what an hour of cleaning costs you, plus the margin you want. Work it out in four parts.
Direct labor. Say you pay a cleaner $18 an hour. That is not what the hour costs you. Employer payroll taxes, workers compensation and paid time off add somewhere around 15 to 25 percent depending on your state and your policies. At 15 percent, an $18 hour costs $20.70.
Overhead. Add up everything you pay whether or not you clean a house this week. A small company might look like this per month: general liability and bonding $95, vehicle payment and fuel $520, phone and internet $110, software $59, supplies and equipment $240, advertising $400, accounting $150, and your own admin time valued at $825. That is $2,399. Call it $2,400.
Billable hours. Two cleaners, 30 on site hours a week each, four weeks: 240 billable hours a month. Overhead per billable hour is 2,400 divided by 240, which is $10.
Margin. Direct labor plus overhead is 20.70 plus 10.00, so $30.70 per cleaner hour. That is your break even. If you want 25 percent net margin, you do not add 25 percent, you divide: 30.70 divided by 0.75 is $40.93.
Round up to $42 per cleaner hour. That is the number. A two person team on site for two hours has to bill $168.
Two things about it. First, recalculate it every time your pay rates or your fixed costs move, which in practice means once a year and again after any hire. Second, never quote it to a client. Clients do not buy hours, they buy a clean house, and an hourly quote invites them to watch the clock and argue about it. Price by the hour internally, quote a flat price externally.
Square footage pricing, derived rather than copied
Square footage pricing is popular because it is easy to collect from a booking form and easy to check on a real estate listing. The mistake is copying a rate per square foot from someone else's website. Derive your own.
Time your own crews on ten homes. Suppose the average works out to one cleaner covering about 570 square feet of maintenance level cleaning per hour. At $42 per cleaner hour, that is 42 divided by 570, or $0.074 per square foot. A 2,000 square foot home prices at $148. Round to $150.
Do not run that rate in a straight line, though. The second thousand square feet is faster than the first, because kitchens and bathrooms carry most of the work and a bigger house does not usually have proportionally more of them. Use tiers instead.
| Home size | Recurring price | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1,000 sq ft | $110 | $0.110 |
| 1,001 to 1,500 sq ft | $135 | $0.090 |
| 1,501 to 2,000 sq ft | $155 | $0.078 |
| 2,001 to 2,500 sq ft | $180 | $0.072 |
| 2,501 to 3,000 sq ft | $205 | $0.068 |
| 3,001 to 3,500 sq ft | $235 | $0.067 |
Above roughly 3,500 square feet, stop using the table and go look at the house. Very large homes vary too much to price sight unseen.
Square footage pricing has one real weakness worth knowing: it says nothing about bathrooms. A 1,600 square foot home with three and a half baths is a different job from a 1,600 square foot home with one. Either add a per bathroom line on top of the tier, or use the next method.
The bed and bath matrix
This method prices from the rooms that actually consume time. Build it from minutes, not from feel.
- Base for kitchen, entry, hallways, living and dining: 90 minutes
- Each bedroom: 20 minutes
- Each full bathroom: 30 minutes
- Each half bathroom: 15 minutes
A three bedroom, two bathroom home is 90 plus 60 plus 60, which is 210 minutes, or 3.5 cleaner hours. At $42 that is $147. Round to $150 and it agrees with the square footage table, which is the point: both methods are the same hourly target wearing different clothes.
| Home | Cleaner hours | Recurring price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 bed, 1 bath | 2.25 | $95 |
| 2 bed, 1 bath | 2.6 | $110 |
| 2 bed, 2 bath | 3.1 | $130 |
| 3 bed, 2 bath | 3.5 | $150 |
| 3 bed, 2.5 bath | 3.75 | $160 |
| 4 bed, 2.5 bath | 4.1 | $175 |
| 4 bed, 3 bath | 4.35 | $185 |
| 5 bed, 3 bath | 4.7 | $200 |
Set a minimum too. Below about $95 a visit, drive time and admin eat the job. A minimum is not rudeness, it is the reason you can still afford to show up.
Pricing the first deep clean
The first visit to a home that has not been professionally cleaned is a different job. You are paying down years of build up in baseboards, shower door tracks, ceiling fans, and the tops of everything. Charging your recurring price for it is the single most common way new companies lose money.
Use a multiplier on the recurring price. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 covers most homes, and 1.75 is a sensible default. On that 3 bed, 2 bath at $150, the first clean is $263. Round to $265.
When you cannot see the home first, quote it by the hour with a ceiling, and say so plainly:
The first visit is billed at $42 per cleaner hour with a cap of four hours per cleaner. Most homes this size finish in three. If we get there and it needs more than the cap, we will call you before we keep going, not after.
That sentence does two jobs. It protects you from the house that turns out to have three cats and a smoker, and it tells the client you will not spring a bill on them. Put the cap in writing on the quote.
For move out cleans, price them separately and higher again. Empty homes are faster in some ways and much slower in others, because everything inside every cabinet is now in scope.
Add-ons, priced the same way
Add-ons are the easiest margin in the business, and most companies underprice them because they guess. Time them once, apply the same $42, then round up a little for the setup and pack down that never shows on a stopwatch.
| Add-on | Minutes | Math | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inside oven | 45 | 42 x 0.75 = 31.50 | $35 |
| Inside fridge | 30 | 42 x 0.50 = 21.00 | $25 |
| Interior windows, per pane | 6 | 42 x 0.10 = 4.20 | $5 |
| Inside cabinets, per kitchen | 60 | 42 x 1.00 = 42.00 | $45 |
| Load of laundry, wash and fold | 25 | 42 x 0.42 = 17.50 | $20 |
| Garage sweep out | 30 | 42 x 0.50 = 21.00 | $25 |
| Change bed linens, per bed | 8 | 42 x 0.13 = 5.60 | $8 |
Laundry deserves a warning. The cleaner minutes are low but the wash and dry cycle is long, and if your crew waits on a dryer you have paid for an hour you cannot bill. Either fold laundry already in the machine when you arrive, or set the rule that you start one load and fold what is dry at the end.
Frequency discounts you can actually afford
A weekly home is genuinely cheaper to clean than a one time job: less soil, no re learning the house, and a slot that stays full. So the discount is not a bribe, it is a real cost difference passed on.
| Frequency | Discount off the standard price | 3 bed, 2 bath example |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | 15 percent | $128 |
| Every 2 weeks | 10 percent | $135 |
| Every 4 weeks | 5 percent | $143 |
| One time | 0 percent | $150 |
Two rules keep this honest. Apply the discount to the recurring visit only, never to the first deep clean. And if a client on a weekly discount skips more than they keep, move them to the every 4 weeks rate. Say it in the terms up front so it is never a surprise.
Raising prices without losing the business
Prices go up. Yours should go up on a schedule you choose, not in a panic after a bad month.
Do the arithmetic before you get nervous about it. Say you have 120 recurring clients averaging $150 a visit, most of them every two weeks, so about 26 visits a year each. A 6 percent increase is $9 a visit, $234 per client per year, and $28,080 a year across the book. If the increase costs you four clients, you lose about $936 a year of revenue from them and keep more than $27,000. The arithmetic is not close.
Send it 30 days ahead, in writing, one paragraph, no apology:
Starting March 1 your visit price moves from $150 to $159. Our cleaners got a raise in January and this keeps that sustainable. Everything else stays the same, including your Tuesday slot and your team. If that does not work for you, reply and we will talk it through.
Raise annually rather than every three years. A 5 to 8 percent step passes almost unnoticed. A 25 percent correction after four years of holding still is the one that costs you clients.
Put the formula where it will actually get used
A formula on a notepad becomes a guess by the third quote of the week. Whatever software you run, get your hourly target into the price list once so that quotes, your booking form and your team all produce the same number.
That is what the pricing engine in BroomDesk is for: flat, bed and bath, tiered square footage, or hourly, plus add-ons, per frequency discounts, a first clean multiplier and zone surcharges for the addresses that are further out. The booking widget and the price calculator on your website read the same rules, so a visitor at 9pm gets the price you would have quoted yourself.
Whatever you use, the discipline matters more than the tool. Know your cost per cleaner hour, price from it, and check it once a year.