How much should I raise my cleaning prices

The usual answers are a percentage someone else picked — five per cent, cost of living, whatever the last raise was. None of them can tell you whether the result is enough or too much, because the right amount was never a percentage. It is a price: the one this client would be paying today if you had quoted them at today's costs. The notice, the timing and the objections are covered in how to raise prices with existing clients; this page is only about the number on the line that says new price.

The number is a price, not a percentage

Work it in one direction, from your floor. You need two figures you already have if you have done the audit in how to find the underpriced clients in your book: your cost floor per crew hour (wages, burden, drive, supplies, overhead, margin — built out in cost per crew hour), and each client's crew hours per visit (cleaners × hours on site, plus paid drive time for each cleaner).

target price per visit = floor × crew hours per visit

Say your floor works out at $36 and a client pays $150 for a visit that is two cleaners, two hours on site, fifteen minutes of paid drive each. Crew hours: 2 × 2 + 2 × 0.25 = 4.5. The target price is $36 × 4.5 = $162 — an increase of $12 a visit, which happens to be 8 per cent. That is the whole method. The percentage was never chosen; it fell out of the two numbers that decide everything.

The same arithmetic tells you what the increase is worth. This client is biweekly — 2.17 visits a month — and their earned rate today is $150 ÷ 4.5 = $33.33 against the $36 floor, so the gap is $26 a month. If that sounds small for the conversation, it is the figure for one client whose gap is only 8 per cent. A long-standing client on $120 for the same 4.5 crew hours is short $9.33 an hour — $42 a visit, $91 a month.

The second anchor: what a new client pays today

The floor gives you the defensible number, and your own newest quote gives you the check on it. Whatever you quoted your most recent client for a comparable house is today's price, in your own book, for today's costs. If your newest comparable client pays $180 for the same 4.5 crew hours, they are paying an earned rate of $40 — and the $162 you computed for the long-standing client is comfortably inside what you already ask new clients to pay.

That order matters. An increase that lands a client near what a new client would pay today has a precedent you can say out loud: “it brings you to what a new customer with the same house would pay.” An increase past it has no precedent inside your own book, and a client who compares notes with a neighbour on your newer quote will find the crack. If your floor arithmetic says $200 and your newest quote says $180, the floor needs re-checking before any notice goes out.

When the honest number is a shock, split it

The $120 client needs $162 — a 35 per cent jump in one notice. There is no arithmetic that makes 35 per cent gentle, and nobody can tell you a client will accept it; what you can do is split the gap and price the delay:

• One notice to $162. The full $91 a month closes on the day the new price starts, and the conversation is the hard one.
• Half now, half at your next annual review. $120 to $141 is 17.5 per cent now — still a real increase, but a different conversation. It leaves them $4.67 an hour under floor, so about $46 a month of the gap stays open until the second step a year from now.

The arithmetic does not choose between them; both end at the same price. The staged route costs roughly $46 a month and buys the easier first conversation, and the fact you can see the cost of the delay is what makes it a decision instead of a stall. One warning from the other side: staging only works if the second date is written into the first notice and kept. A promise of next year's increase that quietly lapses is how a 35 per cent problem gets rebuilt.

The leave test, in the same numbers

The amount you can defend is also the amount you can survive losing. Take the $150 client at their new $162 price. If they left rather than pay it, you would lose $351 a month of revenue — but those visits occupy 9.8 crew hours a month, and 9.8 hours at your floor should be earning $351. So the honest ledger reads:

• If the hours refill — a new client, a longer job for an existing one — a client who walks rather than pay $12 more is not a loss at all. Their hours were the thing being wasted.
• If the hours do not refill, the cost is the margin inside those hours, not the invoice — and refusing a $12 increase to protect it costs $26 a month, every month, to avoid one awkward email.

Run that test per client before you send, not as a general truth. A client whose hours cannot be refilled — an awkward time slot, a distant suburb — is worth more patience than the same numbers suggest, and that judgement is yours. What the arithmetic buys is knowing which clients are which before the reply lands, not after. For the client the numbers say to let go, what to do when a cleaning client is not profitable covers the keep-or-release decision in the same arithmetic.

How often, so it never shocks again

The reason a 35 per cent gap can build at all is that the price and the costs moved on different clocks. An annual review that brings every client to your current floor turns the whole exercise into the routine notice described in raising prices with existing clients — small, expected, and never an event. The first pass is the expensive one. Do it with the counting: work out the floor (cost per crew hour), rank the book (finding the underpriced clients), and write the notice — the price increase letter is a copy-paste template for exactly that.

The counting above is what RateRescue automates; the business is built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp.