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Most cleaning bids are lost the same way: the operator guesses a number, wins the job, then finds out three months in that the price never covered the labor. This calculator kills the guess. Punch in the square footage, how often you clean, and your real costs — it hands back your price, your monthly profit, and how that price compares to what the local market actually pays.
It runs on the same math a seasoned estimator uses, not a generic online formula. You'll see two numbers side by side: what it costs you to do the job right, and what the market is paying for it. The gap between them is where you win or lose the bid.
12,000 ft² medical · 5×/wk · Dallas–Fort Worth
Three inputs. Instant market range — no email required.
You know your local rates better than any database. We make sure the price covers every cost most operators miss.
See how the monthly price changes with how often you clean.
Crews clock in, timesheets track real hours per visit, and every bid gets scored against reality — so your next bid is sharper than your last.
A calculator built by one company reflects one company's habits. Before this went public, the pricing model was reviewed by owner-operators running commercial contracts outside our own book of business — including Mark Brown, owner-operator of Verdant Building Service, who uses it on live bids. Their pushback is the reason three things work the way they do:
This commercial cleaning cost calculator runs on three inputs: the space, the frequency, and your labor.
Monthly price = (hours per visit × visits per month × burdened hourly cost) ÷ (1 − overhead% − margin%)
Visits per month = visits per week × 4.33. Burdened hourly cost = wage × burden multiplier.
Worked at the calculator's defaults: 40 labor hours a month at a $25.00 loaded cost is $1,000 of labor. At 15% overhead and a 20% target margin the divisor is 0.65, so the price is $1,538 per month.
This is the single most common arithmetic error in cleaning bids, and it is worth being precise about. If you take $1,000 of labor and add 15% overhead and 20% profit, you get $1,350 — and you have not actually earned a 20% margin, because the 20% was calculated against cost rather than against price. Dividing by 0.65 gives $1,538, out of which overhead and profit are recovered as a share of revenue. That is a $188 difference on one small job, repeated across every contract you hold.
The output is a monthly price and your monthly profit in real dollars. If your numbers push the job below cost — or below a sustainable margin — the profit turns red before you ever send the bid. That is the check most operators run after they have lost money, not before. Once the job is won, proof of service and reporting are what tell you whether the hours you bid were the hours you actually spent.
The fastest way to judge a commercial cleaning bid calculator is to make it show its work. Every figure below is produced by the calculator on this page, at its default settings — 1.25 burden multiplier, 15% overhead, 20% target margin, moderate soil unless noted — with the operator's wage set equal to the local benchmark wage so the comparison is like for like. All three run at five nights a week.
| The job | Metro & wage | Hours / visit | Your price / mo | Your profit / mo | Market range / mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12,000 ft² medical office 5×/week, moderate soil |
Dallas–Fort Worth $15.00/hr |
5.45 | $3,406 | $681 | $4,258–$4,613 |
| 8,000 ft² office 5×/week, moderate soil |
New York City $20.60/hr |
2.42 | $2,079 | $416 | $2,599–$2,816 |
| 25,000 ft² warehouse 5×/week, light soil |
Chicago $18.00/hr |
4.09 | $3,066 | $613 | $3,832–$4,152 |
That is not a rounding artifact and it is not a bug. It repeats across all three jobs because the two numbers are built differently on purpose. Your price is your labor plus your overhead and your target margin. The market figure grosses the same labor up by the labor-to-revenue ratio we use to model the market — roughly half of contract revenue going to direct labor, the share we assume an established contractor carrying full overhead, management, insurance, and supervision runs at.
So a 23% gap means one of two things, and only you know which: you have real room to raise your price, or you have a real cost advantage and can win lean while keeping the margin. What it does not mean is that you are underpricing by definition. An operator with genuinely lower overhead should sit below the benchmark. An operator who is below it and running a 6% margin has a different problem.
Anyone can put a "$0.10 per square foot" number on a webpage. We don't, because reliable per-square-foot market data for cleaning does not exist in a licensable form — quoting it would be guessing dressed up as fact.
Instead the market rate here is built up from labor. It starts with the median hourly wage for Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners — occupation code SOC 37-2011 in the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov OEWS 37-2011). That wage gets a standard payroll burden, is multiplied by the hours your job takes, then grossed up by a labor-to-revenue ratio — the share of contract revenue that goes to direct labor, which we model at roughly half. That ratio is a ProTeams modelling assumption, not a published industry figure, and the labor share itself varies between contractors, so the result is a range rather than a point.
The calculator carries 29 U.S. metro areas, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Washington DC, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Detroit, San Diego, Portland, Charlotte, Nashville, and Austin, plus a national median. If your city is not listed, the "my local janitor wage" field overrides the benchmark directly — no multiplier, no adjustment. That field is the honest answer to a metro we have not seeded.
Four of the 29 metro wages are exact published OEWS medians: the national figure, New York City, New Jersey, and Dallas–Fort Worth. The remaining metro wages are approximate seeds pending a full OEWS refresh, and we would rather say so than let you cite a number we have not pulled. If the benchmark matters to your bid, look up your metro directly on bls.gov and type the real figure into the local wage field — it takes about a minute and it overrides everything.
ISSA, the worldwide cleaning industry association, publishes widely used cleaning time standards. The production rates in this calculator are not ISSA figures and should not be cited as such; they are our own defaults, described below.
Outside the United States there is no BLS-equivalent wage source wired up yet. In Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand the calculator still builds your full price and profit — it simply hides the market comparison, because an invented benchmark helps no one.
A production rate is how much floor area one cleaner covers in an hour. It is the number that turns square footage into labor hours, and labor hours are what you are actually selling. Below are the default rates this calculator uses — our own starting assumptions, drawn from the area types in the ProTeams bid workspace. They are a defensible starting point, not an industry standard, and the tool lets you override the resulting hours at any time.
| Area type | Rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Warehouse floor | 6,000 ft²/hr | Large open runs, mostly machine work |
| Hallways / corridors | 5,000 ft²/hr | Uninterrupted floor, few obstacles |
| Gym floor | 4,500 ft²/hr | Open span, equipment adds detail work |
| Retail floor | 4,000 ft²/hr | Fixtures and displays slow the pass |
| Offices — open plan | 3,800 ft²/hr | Fewer walls, fewer stops |
| Common area | 3,500 ft²/hr | Mixed-use shared space |
| Other / miscellaneous room | 3,300 ft²/hr | Generic catch-all default |
| Conference rooms | 3,200 ft²/hr | Table and chair reset each visit |
| Offices — private | 3,000 ft²/hr | Door-to-door slows the route |
| Classrooms | 3,000 ft²/hr | Desk reset, high touch-point count |
| Stairwells | 2,600 ft²/hr | Handrails, landings, no machine access |
| Lobby / entrance | 2,500 ft²/hr | Glass, matting, highest visibility |
| Cafeteria | 2,400 ft²/hr | Food residue, table and chair reset |
| Kitchen / break room | 2,200 ft²/hr | Appliances, sinks, waste |
| Exam rooms | 1,800 ft²/hr | Disinfection protocol, slowest per foot |
| Restrooms | 7.5 min/fixture | Estimated per fixture — count, not floor area, drives the time |
The same room in a quiet professional office and in a busy urban lobby are not the same job. The calculator applies a multiplier to the time:
| Soil level | Time multiplier | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 0.90× | Low-traffic professional offices, partial occupancy |
| Moderate | 1.00× | Normal daily use — the default |
| Heavy | 1.15× | Busy lobbies, gyms, food service, ground-floor entries |
Whichever rate you start from, the hours you can prove are worth more than the hours you estimated. GPS check-in and timesheets turn your next bid into an evidence-based number instead of another estimate.
Operators consistently underestimate this. Frequency does not just scale the bill — it changes the shape of the job. Halving visits does not halve the work, because a meaningful share of each visit is fixed: restrooms get serviced, waste goes out, entries get walked, regardless of how much soil has accumulated since the last visit.
The calculator handles this in two deliberately different ways, and you should know which is which:
The practical consequence, stated plainly: the two hour bases agree exactly at five visits per week, and diverge as frequency drops. At three visits a week the market side assumes about 20% more time per month than your linear cost side; at one visit a week, about 50% more. So the market gap you see on a 1× or 2× per week job is partly a modelling difference, not purely a pricing difference. Read the gap on low-frequency work as directional, not precise. On five-nights-a-week work, which is the bulk of commercial janitorial contracts, the two are directly comparable.
We would rather flag that than let you carry an inflated number into a negotiation. The frequency comparison table in the calculator shows the monthly price at one, two, three, five, and seven visits a week so you can find the version of the bid that is both winnable and worth winning. Once the schedule is set, scheduling and dispatch and no-show alerts are what keep the frequency you priced the frequency you actually deliver.
Used as a janitorial bid calculator, the same square footage prices very differently depending on what happens inside it. Here is how each type behaves in the calculator, and what tends to catch people out.
The most common commercial bid and the most competitive. Open-plan space runs fast; private offices, conference rooms, and multi-floor layouts slow the route more than the floor area suggests. Watch the restroom count rather than the square footage — it is usually the real driver of time. Software built for this segment: office cleaning software.
The slowest per square foot of any type in the calculator. Exam rooms carry a disinfection protocol and a high touch-point count, and the standard is not negotiable. If you bid medical at office production rates you will lose money on the contract and you will still fail the inspection. Pair the bid with a documented janitorial inspection checklist so the standard you priced is the standard you can evidence.
The fastest per square foot — large uninterrupted runs suit machine work. The trap is bidding the whole building at warehouse rates when the site includes offices, restrooms, and a break room that clean at less than half the speed. Break the site into areas rather than applying one blended rate.
Fixtures, displays, and entrance matting slow the pass, and the visible-standard bar is high because customers are the ones looking at it. Frequency is often the negotiation point rather than price.
High touch-point density, heavy restroom load, and a calendar with long shutdown periods that need separate treatment. Bid the term schedule and the summer schedule as different jobs.
Food residue, grease, and a compressed service window make this slower and less forgiving than the floor area implies. Access hours are often the binding constraint.
Carpet extraction, hard-floor refinishing, and window cleaning are priced as separate line items, not folded into the recurring rate. Blending them into the monthly figure is how a profitable contract quietly turns into an unprofitable one over an annual cycle. See carpet cleaning, flooring, and window cleaning operations software for the delivery side.
Below 12% net margin, one round of turnover or a couple of re-cleans can wipe out the job's profit entirely. That is why the calculator flags anything under that line. It is not telling you what to charge — it is telling you when the number you are about to send leaves no room to absorb the things that always go wrong.
Most stable janitorial operators run somewhere between 15% and 25%, with specialized or compliance-heavy work sitting higher. Overhead is the other half of the equation and it is routinely understated: insurance, bonding, equipment and consumables, vehicles, admin time, software, and the cost of finding the next client all exist whether or not you win this job. Ten to twenty-five percent is the common range; 15% is a reasonable starting assumption if you have never measured yours.
Margin protects you at the moment of failure. Retention protects you the rest of the time — and losing a contract you priced correctly is a more expensive mistake than pricing one slightly low. Client management and issue escalation exist for exactly that gap between a good bid and a renewed contract.
A tool that only tells you what it is good at is a sales page. These are the real limits, and knowing them is the difference between using the number and trusting it blindly.
The last one is the honest reason ProTeams exists. Bidding well gets you the contract; proving the work is what keeps it. If you want to see how competing tools handle the estimating side, we keep an honest comparison with Clean Guru and a broader software comparison index.
Price from labor, not from a flat per-square-foot rate. Work out the hours the job takes, multiply by your true hourly cost (wage plus payroll burden), then divide by one minus your overhead percent minus your margin percent. Forty labor hours a month at a $25.00 loaded cost comes to $1,538/month at 15% overhead and a 20% target margin. The calculator above runs that math and compares the result to your local market rate.
Monthly labor hours × burdened hourly cost = your labor cost. Divide by (1 − overhead% − margin%) to get your price. The two mistakes that sink bids are estimating on raw wage instead of burdened wage — which understates cost by 15–30% — and setting a margin too thin to absorb a re-clean or a round of turnover.
Per-square-foot pricing is a shortcut, not a method. The same 10,000 ft² costs very differently to clean five nights a week versus once, because frequency drives labor hours and labor is roughly half of contract revenue. This office cleaning cost calculator prices by labor hours and frequency, then expresses the result per square foot only as a reference figure.
Yes. Your price, your monthly profit, and the market rate comparison are free with no login. Emailing yourself a PDF breakdown and unlocking the annual profit projection require a free account. Saving bids, generating branded proposals, and tracking a pipeline are part of the paid ProTeams suite.
Your price is built from your costs — your wage, your burden, your overhead, your target margin. The market rate is built from public BLS janitor wages for your metro, grossed up by the labor-to-revenue ratio ProTeams uses to model the market. Because the two use different inputs, the gap between them is real information rather than a reflection of your own numbers.
At the same wage, an operator pricing at 15% overhead and a 20% target margin typically lands about 23% below the market midpoint. That is not an error. The market figure is grossed up from a labor share we model at roughly half of revenue — the share we assume established contractors carrying full overhead run. A lean operator has genuine room to raise price — or a genuine edge to win on.
Frequency decides it. At the U.S. national median janitor wage of $17.56/hr, a 1.25× burden, 15% overhead and a 20% target margin, a 2,000 ft² office at five nights a week comes out near $440/month, and near $180/month at twice a week. Those figures assume the calculator's default office production rate of 3,300 ft²/hr. Your own walkthrough hours are more accurate — and anyone quoting a price for "2,000 sq ft" without asking your frequency or your costs is guessing.
Monthly price = (hours per visit × visits per month × burdened hourly cost) ÷ (1 − overhead% − margin%). Visits per month = visits per week × 4.33. Burdened hourly cost = wage × burden multiplier. The divisor recovers overhead and profit out of the price rather than adding them on top of cost.
Yes — it is a general janitorial calculator. Office, medical and clinic, warehouse and industrial, retail, school and education, gym and fitness, restaurant, and church and worship spaces each carry their own production rate, so the labor-hour estimate reflects the type of space you are actually bidding. Restroom time is estimated per fixture rather than per square foot, because fixture count drives that work — not floor area. See janitorial services software for the operations side.
Labor burden is the multiplier that turns a base wage into the real cost of employing someone: employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, and PTO. Most janitorial operators run 1.15×–1.30×. A cleaner paid $17.50/hr at 1.25× actually costs $21.88/hr. Bidding on the raw wage is the most common reason a contract that looked profitable is not.
The calculator's default for general office space is 3,300 ft²/hr, adjusted for soil level (light 0.90×, heavy 1.15×). At that rate a 10,000 ft² office runs roughly three hours per visit at moderate soil. These are the calculator's starting defaults, not an industry standard — and a walkthrough estimate from the person who will actually service the building beats any table.
The price and profit calculation runs in any market, because labor cost × hours plus overhead and margin is not country-specific. The market rate comparison is U.S.-only, because it is derived from BLS wage data. In Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand the calculator runs in own-rate mode and hides the market comparison rather than showing an invented benchmark.
A commercial cleaning cost calculator gets you to a defensible number. A good price is the start of a contract, not the end of one. The work that keeps it is on the delivery side: schedule every site, confirm the crew arrived, prove the shift happened, and show the client the numbers before they think to ask. Operators use the commercial cleaning audit checklist and the inspection app to hold the standard they priced.
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