House cleaning has a pricing trap built into it: the job takes time, but customers want a price. Charge purely by the hour and you punish yourself for getting faster and better. Here's how to quote flat rates that hold up and actually pay.
Know your three rate types
- Hourly per cleaner: $25–$75/hour is the common range — your internal building block.
- Per visit: $120–$280 for a standard whole-home clean, driven by size and room count.
- Per square foot: some cleaners use roughly $0.10–$0.30/sq ft as a sanity check.
Price the job, not the hour
Estimate how long the home will take (a walkthrough or the square footage tells you), multiply by your hourly target, then quote that as a flat per-visit price. The customer gets certainty, and when you get faster you earn more per hour instead of billing less. Build the itemized quote in the cleaning estimate tool.
Charge more for the first (deep) clean
A first-time or deep clean takes far longer than upkeep — baseboards, inside the oven and fridge, detail scrubbing. Price it at 1.5–2× your standard visit, then drop to the recurring rate once the home is dialed in. Skipping this is the classic new-cleaner mistake: you eat hours on the hardest visit.
Reward recurring, price one-timers high
Weekly and biweekly homes stay cleaner and go faster, and the steady schedule is worth a discount — offer your best rate there. One-time, move-in/move-out, and post-construction cleans should price highest; they're the most work and won't repeat.
Don't forget overhead
Supplies, travel between homes, insurance, and no-show gaps all cost you. Make sure your per-visit price covers them plus profit — not just your time on the clock. See markup vs. margin for the math. Then turn finished jobs into an invoice to get paid on time.