What is the minimum you should charge for a house cleaning job

The minimum for a particular job

This one is arithmetic. Work out your cost floor per crew hour, then multiply it by the paid crew hours the job actually consumes:

minimum price = cost floor per crew hour × ((hours on site + drive time) × crew size)

Drive time counts because you pay for it, and crew size counts because two cleaners for two hours is four hours of wages. The worked example in how to work out your cost per crew hour lands on a floor of $35.68 at $20 cleaner pay, 22% burden, $6 of supplies and $1,200 of monthly overhead. At that floor:

Every row assumes 20 minutes of paid drive per cleaner. Your floor will not be $35.68 — it depends on your wages and your overhead — so run the calculator and rebuild this table with your own number. It takes two minutes and it becomes the only quoting reference you need.

A price below the line does not mean you lose money on the day. It means the job funds less than its share of your overhead and your margin. Do enough of them and you are busy and broke at the same time, which is the most common way a cleaning company fails.

The minimum visit charge

The second minimum is a floor under the whole schedule: the least you will accept for showing up at all, regardless of how small the job is. Most established residential companies have one, and the reason is not greed. It is that a job’s cost is not proportional to its size.

• Drive time does not shrink with the job. A one-bedroom condo forty minutes away costs the same travel as a five-bedroom house forty minutes away.
• Setup and packing down are fixed. Unloading, briefing, the walkthrough, reloading — that is fifteen to twenty minutes whatever the square footage.
• A small job blocks a slot. Take a $60 clean at 9am and you have spent a morning slot that a $170 clean needed. The real cost of a too-small job is the job you could not fit.

Set the minimum visit charge at whatever your shortest sensible job costs at your floor — for many two-person operations that lands somewhere between $120 and $180 — and quote it plainly: “our minimum for any visit is $150, and for your place I would expect about two and a half hours, so $150 is the price.” Said without apology it almost never causes a problem. Buried and discovered later, it always does.

Three ways owners undercut their own minimum

• Quoting the recurring rate for the first deep clean. The first visit is a different job with different hours. Price it separately or you start the relationship below your floor.
• Charging by square footage alone. Two identical-sized houses take different times when one has three dogs, four children and a gated entry. You sell time, not floor area.
• Letting a job grow without repricing it. A dog arrives, a room gets finished, a baby is born — the visit quietly runs forty minutes longer and the price never moves. This is the single most common reason a client that used to be fine is now the worst one on the book.

Then check the jobs you already sold

A minimum only protects work you have not quoted yet. The clients who are hurting you now were priced two or three years ago, at a wage that no longer exists, and they have been renewing on autopilot ever since — so their price is below a minimum that did not exist when you set it.

Working out which ones, and by how much a month, is what auditing your recurring book means. When you know the list, the wording for fixing it is in the price increase letters.