Cleaning price increase letter: three templates you can send today

Send these in writing rather than saying it in person. A written notice gives the client room to react privately, and privately is where nearly everyone simply accepts it. Talk it through only if they reply asking to.

Four things every one of these does, and every failed price increase leaves out: a named date, the old price and the new price side by side, one honest reason, and an explicit promise that nothing about the service is being reduced. That last one carries more weight than owners expect — the fear behind most objections is that a higher price buys the same clean, done faster.

1. The standard notice

For a normal annual adjustment, or any increase under about ten per cent. Send it thirty days before the first affected visit.

Subject: a small change to your cleaning price from 14 October

Hi Sarah,

A quick note about your cleaning. Starting with your visit on 14 October, the price for your biweekly clean will be $155, up from $145.

Wages and insurance have both risen this year, and I would rather adjust the price than cut corners on the time your house gets. Everything else stays the same: same team, same day, same checklist.

Thank you for being with us — happy to talk it through if you would like.

Nadia

Do not apologise in the first sentence, do not write three paragraphs about inflation, and do not ask for permission. This is a notice, not a request.

2. The long-overdue increase

For the client you have not repriced in two or three years, where the jump is twenty per cent or more. Naming the delay yourself is what stops it becoming an argument.

Subject: your cleaning price, and an overdue correction

Hi Michael,

I owe you a straight explanation along with this. Starting with your visit on 14 October, your weekly clean will be $185, up from $150.

That is a bigger jump than it should be, and that part is my fault: I have not adjusted your price since 2023, while what I pay my cleaners has gone up twice. This brings you in line with what a new client with the same house would pay today, and nothing about your service changes.

Going forward I am reviewing prices once a year, by a few per cent, so this never lands as one big jump again.

You have been with us a long time and I would like to keep it that way. If the timing is hard, tell me and we will find something that works.

Nadia

3. When they ask for the old price back

The most common reply, and it is a gift rather than a problem, because less time honestly is a lower price honestly.

I understand, and there is a version of this that works at your old number — it just has to be a smaller job. Any one of these keeps you close to $150:

— moving from weekly to every two weeks
— keeping weekly, with the two spare bedrooms on a monthly rotation instead of every visit
— one cleaner for a longer window rather than two

Tell me which sounds best and I will confirm the price for it. What I cannot do is keep the same three hours at the old rate, because that is where the increase came from.

Reprice the smaller job from your cost floor before you confirm anything. A concession you have not costed is just a discount with extra steps.

Before you send any of them

Two rules of sequencing that matter more than the wording. Start with the smallest increases. A client who needs six per cent almost always says yes without a word, and three quick yeses make the twenty-five per cent conversation much easier to open. Send three to five a week, not the whole book in a day — that keeps any single bad reaction from feeling like a referendum on your business.

Which means the wording is the easy half. The hard half is knowing which clients need what, in order, with a figure attached — that is your cost floor (the free calculator works it out in about a minute) applied to every recurring client you have. If a client is already at or above your floor, do not send them anything at all.

And when someone does say no: a client below your floor is consuming crew hours a properly priced client could use, so losing one is not a straight loss. The number to watch is not how many said no, but how much of the monthly gap you closed. The full guide to raising prices with existing clients covers the objections in more depth.