Pricing cleaning jobs is hard because every home is different. A 1,500 sq ft house with one bathroom and a single occupant takes about two hours. The same square footage with three bathrooms, a dog, two kids, and three weeks since the last clean takes four. Customers don't see that difference. You have to.
Most small cleaning businesses don't lose money because they're bad cleaners. They lose it because their quoting process is inconsistent. One customer gets charged for the inside of the oven. The next gets it for free. One quote accounts for pets. The next forgets. Across a year, those gaps add up to real money.
Here are the seven pricing mistakes that show up most often, in roughly the order they cost the most.
The Cleaning Quote Kit includes an editable pricing calculator, client intake form, quote tracker, and follow-up scripts so you stop quoting from memory.
Get the Kit · $39$39 one-time purchase. Instant download. No subscription.
Square footage matters. It's just not the whole job.
Two homes at 2,000 sq ft can take wildly different amounts of time. Factors that move the number:
Use square footage as one input among several, not as the entire pricing method.
Deep cleans take longer. Sometimes a lot longer. The customer often doesn't know the difference, so they ask for a "good clean" and you have to figure out which kind of job they're really describing.
What makes a deep clean a deep clean:
If your quote tool doesn't bake in a multiplier for deep cleans, you'll underprice them. Often by a lot.
Add-ons get forgotten on quotes the same way they get forgotten on grocery lists. The customer didn't mention the inside of the oven, so you didn't price it, so when you arrive and they ask if you'll "just do the oven too while you're at it," you say yes and spend forty minutes you didn't get paid for.
Items that should always be priced explicitly:
The quote should show each add-on the customer selected and what it costs. If you want to catch them before the quote happens, see our guide on the cleaning client intake form.
Some jobs aren't worth taking below a certain number. A $60 quote for a tiny one-bedroom apartment forty minutes from your last job is a job that loses you money once you account for drive time and supplies.
A minimum job price (commonly $125 to $175, varies by market) covers the real costs of showing up:
Even a small job consumes more of your day than the cleaning time alone.
Recurring clients can be more efficient. The home stays in better condition between visits, you learn the layout, the customer learns the routine. That's worth a discount. The mistake is making the discount up on the fly.
Decide your frequency discounts ahead of time so you're not negotiating against yourself in front of every new customer:
Whatever numbers you pick, write them down and use them every time. Inconsistent discounts confuse customers and erode your margins.
"Normal" means different things to different people. One customer's normal kitchen is wiped down weekly. Another customer's normal kitchen has dishes from last weekend and a stove that hasn't been cleaned since they moved in.
Conditions that should add to the price:
None of these should be discoveries when you arrive. Capture them on the intake form, price them on the quote.
If you don't track quotes, you're flying blind on five questions at once:
A simple quote tracker, even just a spreadsheet, lets you spot patterns after twenty or thirty quotes. After a hundred, it's the difference between guessing at your pricing and knowing.
The Cleaning Quote Kit includes a quote tracker so you can see what was sent, when to follow up, and whether the client accepted.
Get the Kit · $39$39 one-time purchase. Instant download. No subscription.
If you want to fix all seven mistakes at once, build your quotes around a structure instead of memory. A cleaner workflow looks like this:
For exactly what goes in each of these, our cleaning quote template guide covers the structure end to end.
You can see how a few of these variables move the price using the sample cleaning pricing calculator on the homepage. It's a lightweight demo. The full editable version lives inside the kit.
Get the Cleaning Quote Checklist before sending your next estimate. PDF, instant download.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.