Cleaning business hourly rate calculator
Two numbers decide whether a cleaning company is busy or profitable: what an hour of crew time costs you, and what each client actually pays for one. Work out both here.
What one hour of crew time has to earn before any of it is profit. Change any figure; the readout moves as you type.
What an hour of cleaner time costs you once employer taxes, insurance and paid time off are counted.
Cost divided by 0.80, not cost plus margin — adding the percentage instead quietly costs you margin on every job.
Take a recurring client you have not repriced in a while. The drive time and margin from step one carry over.
Hours on site plus drive time, multiplied by crew size. This is the number owners leave out.
$7.82 an hour below your floor.
One client. It never appears in your accounts as a loss — it appears as being fully booked and still short.
Estimates built from the figures you typed and the formulas above. Not accounting profit. Nothing you enter here is sent anywhere — the arithmetic runs in your browser.
How the calculation works
Every figure comes from three steps, and you can check all of them on paper.
One. An hour of cleaner time costs the wage plus payroll burden — employer taxes, workers compensation, paid time off, anything you fund. Twenty to thirty per cent is the usual band for a company with employees.
Two. Supplies and overhead are converted to an hourly figure by dividing them by the paid crew hours they are spread across: supplies over the crew hours of an average job, monthly overhead over the crew hours you actually run in a month. Run fewer hours and overhead lands harder on each one, which is the real reason a slow month hurts more than the drop in revenue suggests.
Three. Margin is a division, not an addition:
cost floor = cost per crew hour ÷ (1 − target margin)
Adding twenty per cent to cost gives you a smaller number than dividing by 0.80, and the difference is margin you lose on every job forever.
Why paid crew hours, not billed hours
Two cleaners for two hours is four hours of wages before anyone drives anywhere. Add twenty minutes of paid drive each and the visit consumes 4.67 paid crew hours, not four and certainly not two. Leaving drive time out is the single most common reason an owner’s numbers look healthier than the bank account.
What to do with the answer
New quotes take care of themselves once you have a floor, because you do the arithmetic while the price is still in your mouth. The expensive clients are the ones you priced two or three years ago at a wage that no longer exists. Working through them one at a time in this calculator is slow but it works; the guides below cover the conversations:
Paste or upload the client list you already keep. RateRescue works out what each recurring client earns you per crew hour against your own cost floor, and names the ones below it. The Leak Report is free and takes about four minutes. No account, no card.