Check whether one cleaning client is underpriced
Three numbers you already know — what the client pays, how long the visit takes, how many cleaners go — and you have the rate that client really earns you per crew hour.
Pick a client you have not repriced in a while. Three numbers, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser.
Hours on site plus 20 minutes of paid drive, multiplied by crew size. Leaving drive time out is the commonest error.
Running on our starting cost figures, not yours. This is where nearly all of the error lives — change them below and the verdict moves.
This client sits $7.82 an hour below your floor.
$1,042 a year, on this one client. It never shows up as a loss — it shows up as a full schedule and no cash.
That was one client and four numbers. RateRescue runs the same arithmetic down your whole list and names every recurring client under your floor, with the price to move each one to.
The Leak Report is free and takes about four minutes. No account, no card.
Every figure here is an estimate built from what you typed and the formulas on this page. It is not accounting profit, and it is not a claim about what your market pays. The arithmetic runs in your browser.
What the check is doing
An underpriced client is not one who pays less than average. It is one whose price, divided by the paid crew hours the visit consumes, lands below what an hour of your crew costs you plus the margin you mean to keep.
Paid crew hours first. Two cleaners for two hours is four hours of wages before anyone drives anywhere. Add twenty minutes of paid drive each and the visit costs you 4.67 paid crew hours. A $130 visit that looks like $65 an hour is really earning $27.86.
Then the floor. Wage plus payroll burden, plus supplies and overhead spread across the crew hours they cover, gives cost per crew hour. Margin is applied as a division:
cost floor = cost per crew hour ÷ (1 − target margin)
Adding twenty per cent to cost gives a smaller number than dividing by 0.80, and the difference is margin lost on every job forever.
Why the floor matters more than the client
The client’s three numbers are easy and close to exact. The floor is the hard part, and it is where nearly all of the error sits. Until you replace the starting figures with your own, treat the verdict as a direction rather than a dollar amount. The full rate calculator works the floor through line by line.
One client is not the problem
A single client rarely decides anything. The pattern does: the clients priced two or three years ago, at a wage that no longer exists, sitting quietly under a floor that has moved. Checking them by hand works, and the audit-by-hand guide lays out the five columns you need. It takes an evening for a book of ninety.
When a client is below the floor
Knowing the number is not the same as sending the letter. Three guides cover what comes next:
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.