How to Bid a Commercial Cleaning Contract: the Square-Footage Math, Worked End to End

To bid a commercial cleaning contract, you measure the cleanable square footage, divide by a production rate to get labor hours, multiply by your loaded labor cost, then add supplies, overhead and profit. That produces a monthly price you can defend line by line — instead of a guess that either loses the job or loses money for a year.

That is the whole method. The rest of this article is the actual math, worked on a real building, with the numbers most owners have to learn the expensive way.

Key takeaways

• Never price from a walkthrough gut feel. Price from square footage ÷ production rate = hours, because hours are where every dollar hides.
• For general office space, start your workloading at 3,000 sq ft per labor hour and correct it with your own timesheets.
• Loaded labor cost is wage × 1.25–1.45, not the wage. Payroll taxes, insurance and paid time exist whether you price them or not.
• Recurring office work in 2026 mostly clears at $0.10–$0.25 per sq ft per month. If your math lands far outside that band, re-check the frequency and the rate before you re-check the client's patience.
• Target 10–20% profit. A bid below 10% is a job you will regret winning.

What actually determines the price of a cleaning contract?

Four numbers, and only four: the cleanable area, the service frequency, the production rate, and your loaded labor cost. Everything else — supplies, equipment amortization, overhead, profit — stacks on top as percentages.

The one that owners most often skip is the production rate: how many square feet one cleaner can service in one hour, at the agreed scope. The industry has measured this for decades — ISSA's 612 Cleaning Times catalog hundreds of task-level rates, and they exist precisely so a bid is arithmetic rather than optimism.

Typical blended rates for recurring service:

Space type	Production rate (sq ft / labor hour)
Open office, low density	4,000 – 5,000
General office, mixed (real-world blended)	2,500 – 4,200
Restrooms	800 – 1,000
Lobbies & entrances (detail level)	1,500 – 2,500
Medical / clinical space	2,000 – 2,500
Warehouse / industrial (machine work)	6,000 – 12,000

The ISSA benchmark for general office space sits near the top of these bands (~4,200 sq ft/hr); real buildings blend lower once restrooms, kitchens and detail areas pull on the average.

Two cautions. First, these are maintained-building rates — an initial clean of a neglected space can run at half of them, which is why first-month deep cleans are priced separately. Second, scope moves the rate more than square footage does: the same office at APPA Level 2 "ordinary tidiness" staffing costs meaningfully more per foot than Level 3, because Level 2 means detail work every visit.

How do I workload a building, step by step?

Take a real example: a 20,000 sq ft office building, service five nights a week, standard office scope — trash, restrooms, kitchens, vacuuming, touch-point wiping.

Step 1 — measure cleanable area. Cleanable is not rentable. Strip mechanical rooms, elevator shafts and storage you will never enter. On a typical office floor plate, cleanable runs 85–95% of rentable. Call it 19,000 sq ft here. If the client can hand you floor plans, use them — the plans carry the real numbers, and measuring from plans beats pacing hallways with a clipboard every time.

Step 2 — pick the blended rate. Mixed office with a normal restroom load: 3,000 sq ft per hour is the honest middle. 19,000 ÷ 3,000 = 6.3 labor hours per night.

Step 3 — convert to monthly hours. Five nights a week is about 21.7 service days a month: 6.3 × 21.7 ≈ 137 labor hours per month.

Step 4 — load the wage. The BLS puts the median U.S. janitorial wage at $17.27/hour (May 2024); in most metros you will pay $17–20 to keep people. But the wage is not your cost. Payroll taxes (7.65% FICA alone), workers' comp (from ~$1 to $8 per $100 of payroll depending on state), liability insurance and paid time typically add 25–45% to the gross wage — the labor burden. At $17.25 × 1.35, your loaded cost is $23.29/hour.

Step 5 — direct labor. 137 hours × $23.29 ≈ $3,191 per month. In the finished bid below, that single number is 73% of the price — which is why the production rate deserves more attention than anything else on the page.

What goes on top of labor?

Line	Rule of thumb*	This bid
Direct labor (loaded)	the biggest line	$3,191
Supplies & consumables	4 – 6% of labor	$160
Equipment amortization	2 – 4% of labor	$96
Overhead (office, insurance, software, fuel)	8 – 12% of price	$440
Cost subtotal		$3,887
Profit at 13%	10 – 20%	$505
Monthly bid		≈ $4,392

*The percentage columns are operator rules of thumb, not published standards — validate them against your own P&L. The dollars are arithmetic from the steps above.

Sanity check: $4,392 ÷ 19,000 sq ft = $0.23 per sq ft per month at five nights a week — inside the market band for that frequency. If your math had produced $0.45, the production rate is wrong or the scope is gold-plated. If it produced $0.06, you forgot the burden or the overhead, and the contract will spend a year reminding you monthly.

Where do bids go wrong?

Three places, in order of damage:

1. Unburdened labor. Pricing at the wage instead of the loaded cost silently gives away 25–45% of your biggest line. On the example building that error is over $800 a month — your entire profit, twice.
2. One rate for the whole building. A building that is 15% restroom by area is not a 3,000 ft/hr building. Restrooms at 600 ft/hr drag the blend down hard; workload them separately.
3. Frequency mismatch at renewal. Contracts drift — "can you also…" — and five small scope additions later the hours are 15% over plan with the price unchanged. Track actual hours against workloaded hours monthly, per site, and you will see the drift in week two instead of at renewal.

That third failure is an information problem, not a math problem. The operators who protect margin are the ones who can see, every week, what a contract actually costs in hours against what it was bid at. A spreadsheet can do it if someone maintains it; most don't survive the season.

How do I present the bid to the client?

Give the client one number per month per site, a scope sheet, and the service calendar. Do not itemize your labor rates or margins — the itemization invites negotiation on lines that are not negotiable, and your production-rate advantage is yours to keep. Internally, keep the whole stack: area, rate, hours, burden, overhead, profit. When the client asks for a sixth night, you re-run one formula instead of re-guessing the account.

Operators who bid this way quote in under an hour from floor plans. That speed is itself a sales weapon — the first credible number in the client's inbox anchors every number that follows.

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