The Home Cleaning Pricing & Cost Calculator helps you estimate service costs, project cleaning times, and maximize your profits. Whether you’re a solo cleaner or managing a small housekeeping business with employees this calculator allows you to break down costs by home size, cleaning frequency, specialty services, and labor details, ensuring you’re never underselling your valuable time and skills.
Home Cleaning Price Calculator
Home Details
Service Preferences
Specialty Services Add-Ons
Cost Details
Labor Details
How to use this calculator
Here’s a quick guide on how this calculator works:
1. Home Details
Start by entering some basic information:
- Square Feet: Input the cleanable area (default: 2000 sq ft).
- Bedrooms: Enter the number of bedrooms (default: 3).
- Bathrooms: Select the number of bathrooms (up to 5, default: 2).
2. Service Preferences
Next, customize your service options:
- Cleaning Frequency: Choose between One-Time, Weekly, Bi-weekly, or Monthly services.
- Deep Cleaning Markup: Add a markup for deep cleaning (default is 0% on this setting). This is ideal for those first-time, intensive cleanings.
Mailer from Maid to Clean.
3. Specialty Services
I added some common specialty services like Refrigerators, Windows, Furniture Cleaning. You can add new ones, set custom prices, or easily remove ones you don’t offer.
4. Cost Details
Define your pricing:
- Charge per Square Foot: The default rate is $0.20/sq ft. This aligns with typical market rates ($0.12 – $0.20).
- Supply Cost: Enter the cost of supplies if the client doesn’t provide them (default: $0). Might as well pass long these costs to the customer!
5. Labor Details
- Number of Cleaners: Choose between 0-3 (0 if you’re cleaning yourself).
- Hourly Compensation: Set your rate (default: $20/hr). I also used an average cleaning rate of 300sq ft per hour per cleaner based on online research (My House Cleaning Biz).
6. Calculate & Review
After filling in your details, click Calculate to get:
- Suggested Charges: For the service and for monthly cleaning.
- Estimated Cleaning Time: Per service and per month.
- Projected Earnings and Profit: Including a breakdown of net profit after labor and supply costs.
Formulas used in this calculator
Base Rate Calculation:
Base Charge = Square Footage × Charge per Square Foot
For example: 2,000 sq ft × $0.20 = $400 base charge
Time Estimation
The calculator uses an industry-standard cleaning rate:
Time per Service = Square Footage ÷ (300 sq ft per hour per cleaner)
For example: 2,000 sq ft ÷ 300 = 6.67 hours for one cleaner
Labor Cost Calculation
Labor Cost = Time per Service × Hourly Rate × Number of Cleaners
For example: 6.67 hours × $20/hour × 2 cleaners = $266.80
Deep Cleaning Markup
Final Base Price = Base Charge × (1 + Deep Cleaning Markup %)
For example: $400 × (1 + 20%) = $480
Specialty Services
The total for specialty services is simply the sum of all checked services’ prices.
Monthly Charges
Monthly charges are calculated based on frequency:
- Weekly: Charge per Service × 4
- Bi-weekly: Charge per Service × 2
- Monthly: Charge per Service × 1
- One-time: Shown as single service price
Net Profit Calculation
Net Profit = Total Charge - (Supply Cost + Labor Cost)
Hourly Rate Calculation
Hourly Rate = Total Charge ÷ Time per Service
How much can you make cleaning houses?
You can make a lot more money cleaning other people’s houses than you probably thought. And as long as you’re working solo or with one employee, you’ll be able to keep your margins very strong.
For example, if you use the tool above to enter in 2,000 sq feet for the house size and charge $0.15 per sq foot, you’ll end up brining in $300 per clean pre-tax. If you can get four of these houses per week, you’re already up to $1,200 per week, $4,800 per month, and $57,600 in gross sales. Not bad deal for a 4-day work week!
Allowing customers to book cleaning services online can be a strong differentiator.
As long as you’re operating solo, you’ll can maintain crazy high-margins around 70% – 80%, especially if you get clients to offset the cost of cleaning supplies.
As someone who pays for housekeeping services monthly, I prefer to pay to use my own supplies. This means cleaning equipment like the mop or gloves isn’t used in strangers home. My wife also appreciates knowing the exact products used to clean the house.
So don’t feel bad about passing along the cost to your customers. Just provide them with a shopping list of cleaning supplies to buy.
Hiring Employees and Growing
When you start hiring staff this is when the margins of this business model start to decline. It’s not uncommon for cleaning businesses to operate with a profit margin between 10% – 28%.
Edward Clayton is the owner of Maid to Clean.
This profit-margin checks out with Edward Clayton, the owner of Maid to Clean in Melbourne, Australia. Clayton operates a large cleaning business where they send staff to 40 – 90 locations per day.
Net profit margins for Clayton’s business land between 17% – 20%. But keep in mind, these costs include admin staff of 2 – 3 employees to handle bookings, customer support, and assigning cleaning jobs. In the early days, you’ll be able to keep overhead much lower.
Keep track of how long each job takes, any challenges you run into, and what your clients say. This will help you keep fine-tuning your pricing over time. The calculator gives you a solid starting point, but your experience and understanding of the market are what will really help you create a pricing strategy that works and keeps your business profitable longterm.
Related tools:
Industry-Based Markup & Margin Calculator: Make sure you’re building a strong margin with your cleaning services. This is critical when you start bringing on staff.
About the Author: Brett Lindenberg
