How Much To Charge For House Cleaning

Two pricing structures cover almost everything in residential cleaning: hourly, and flat fee. Flat fee is what most clients want, and it is built from estimated labor hours.

Start with cleaning times, not competitor prices

Take industry average times for each component, add them up, and price the total at your hourly rate. Rough working averages for an average-condition home, per room, for one cleaner:

• Kitchen, no inside appliances: 45 minutes occupied, 90 minutes vacant
• Full bathroom: 30 minutes occupied, 90 minutes vacant
• Bedroom: 20 minutes occupied, 30 minutes vacant
• Living or common area: 20 minutes occupied, 30 minutes vacant

Calibrate these to your market. The best data source is free: ask every cleaner you interview how long each of those takes them, and build your averages from the answers.

Define labor hours out loud

Six labor hours means six hours of one cleaner, or three hours for a two person team. Somebody will misunderstand this at least once, so put it in your schedule of fees with an example.

Price to the top of the range

If a job estimates at four to six hours, build the flat fee on six.

You are pricing sight unseen, over the phone or through a web form. The range exists because homes vary. Pricing to the top means the cleaner comes out ahead on most jobs and roughly even on the bad ones, which is the experience that keeps good cleaners working with you. Pricing to the bottom turns every difficult house into a fight.

When the house is worse than quoted

Renegotiate early in the appointment, never at the end. Being asked at the start whether you want to approve a higher fee or keep the original scope is a real choice. Being told at the end that it took two extra hours is a bill you did not agree to, and that is a chargeback.

State the new total in dollars and get an explicit yes to that number. “It might take a bit longer” answered with “okay” is not approval.

Recurring should be visibly cheaper

Weekly, biweekly and monthly should each be priced below one-time, and shown that way on the booking form. If you paid for ads to win the customer, a one-time clean may barely cover that cost. Recurring work gives the business its baseline, which is why converting one-time into recurring matters so much.

Move-out jobs price differently again. See move out cleaning pricing.

Hourly versus flat fee

Hourly is simpler and protects you on bad houses. It also makes clients anxious, because they cannot predict the bill, and it makes the cleaner look slow if they are thorough.

Flat fee is what the market wants. It is predictable for the client, it rewards an efficient professional, and it lets you quote online without a phone call, which is the single biggest conversion advantage available in this business.

Most operators quote flat fee to residential clients and keep hourly for one-off oddities, hoarding situations and jobs that genuinely cannot be estimated.

Building the number, step by step

Take a three bedroom, two bathroom occupied home. Kitchen at 45 minutes, two full bathrooms at 30 each, three bedrooms at 20 each, and two common areas at 20 each. That totals roughly 3.6 hours. Round to the top of the range at four hours.

At a $50 hourly value, that is a $200 flat fee. The cleaner at sixty percent receives $120, which is $30 an hour for a four hour job. If that number is below what local independents charge privately, your split does not work and your recruiting will fail before your marketing does.

Where to set recurring discounts

Common structure is a modest discount for monthly, more for biweekly, most for weekly. The differential matters more than the absolute number, because it is what nudges someone from monthly to biweekly, and biweekly clients are worth roughly twice as much per acquisition dollar.

Raising prices on existing clients

You will need to eventually. Give at least 30 days notice, explain it once without over-apologising, and decide up front whether existing clients move to the new price or keep the one they signed up for. When I changed recurring discounts at Patriot Maids, some existing customers kept their old pricing in our booking software. Whichever you choose, be consistent. Expect to lose a small percentage. The ones who leave over a modest increase were usually the ones generating the most complaints anyway.

The pricing mistake that is hardest to undo

Launching cheap to fill the schedule. It works, which is the problem. You end up with a book of price-sensitive clients, a cleaner roster earning below market, and no way to raise prices without losing most of both at once.

From my experience

I build Patriot Maids pricing backwards. I start with what a good cleaning professional expects to earn, which in my experience is usually around $30 to $35 an hour. That varies by market, so find out what it is where you are. Then I build a price that gets them there after their percentage.

I don't price off competitors. When I open in a new city, I charge what I charge in my other cities. One price list keeps things simple across many locations. My prices end up about 30% to 40% above the market, because that's what lets the revenue share work for both sides.

At Blank Canvas Cleaning, my newer brand, the planning numbers are about $50 per hour of cleaning work, with 65% to the cleaner. A 3 bed, 2 bath standard clean up to 2,000 square feet comes out around 4.1 hours and $209. Those are planning numbers, not results yet.

Discounts are shared. The split is on the discounted total, so both sides absorb it. About a year ago I switched Patriot Maids from percentage recurring discounts (20%, 15% and 10%) to flat ones: $20 off weekly, $15 off every two weeks and $10 off every four weeks. That raised cleaner pay, and the complaints went away.

Common questions

Should I charge hourly or a flat fee?

Flat fee for residential. It converts better because clients can predict the bill, and it lets you quote online without a phone call.

What if the house takes longer than estimated?

Renegotiate at the start of the visit, never at the end, and get explicit approval of a specific dollar figure. An unapproved increase discovered on the invoice is a chargeback.

How often should I raise prices?

When your data tells you to. At Patriot Maids I have raised prices a couple of percentage points when teams told us the pay was not good enough. Give 30 days notice and expect to lose a small percentage.