How to Price House Cleaning in 2026

Here’s the short answer: your price is your true cost per man-hour multiplied by how long the clean actually takes. Everything else is detail.

The longer answer is where cleaners get stuck, because most of them try to do that calculation fresh for every lead, and they can’t do it at all without seeing the home. So they schedule a walkthrough, drive across town, spend twenty minutes counting rooms, and days later send a number to someone who already booked the cleaner who answered first.

There’s a better way to do this: do the hard math once, then quote from it in seconds.

This article covers both halves: the costing work you do at the kitchen table one time, and the rate card it produces that prices any home by bedrooms, bathrooms and size, without a walkthrough.

Part 1: Find your true man-hour rate

Every price you’ll ever quote comes out of one number: what an hour of your productive time has to earn. Three things go into it.

Your monthly overhead

Overhead is the money that leaves your account whether or not you clean a single home this month. It doesn’t include job costs.

Line item	Example
Supplies & products	$180
Equipment reserve & repair (vacuums, mops)	$80
Vehicle & mileage	$300
Insurance & bonding	$110
Phone, software, website	$100
Marketing	$200
Accounting, licenses	$80
Monthly overhead	$1,050

Use your own numbers. Most cleaners have never added this up, and the real total is almost always higher than the guess. Bonding and liability insurance in particular get forgotten until a client asks whether you carry them.

Your actual billable hours

This is the number that surprises people. A solo cleaner working 40 hours a week is not billing 40 hours a week. Drive time between homes, restocking the caddy, laundering cloths, quoting, invoicing, and the run to the supply store all come out of the same 40.

A realistic billable share is 60–70% of hours worked. Be honest here, because inflating it is the fastest way to underprice everything downstream.

40 hrs/week × 4.33 weeks = 173 hours worked × 65% billable = 112 billable man-hours per month

Your loaded labor cost

Labor cost is your wage plus employer taxes, unemployment, and workers’ comp. If you clean solo, put a real number in for yourself anyway. “The owner works free” is how you build a business that can never hire a second cleaner.

$18/hour wage × 1.22 burden = $21.96 per man-hour

Putting it together

Overhead per billable man-hour = $1,050 ÷ 112 = $9.38 Loaded labor = $21.96 Break-even = $31.34 per man-hour

Below that number you are paying for the privilege of cleaning. Now add margin:

Price = Break-even ÷ (1 − target margin) $31.34 ÷ (1 − 0.30) = $44.77 per man-hour

Call it $45 per billable man-hour. That’s your number. Every price in your business comes from it.

About the “charge 3× your labor cost” rule

You’ll hear this one everywhere, and it’s a decent sanity check: 3× an $18 wage lands at $54, in the same neighborhood as a real calculation. It works because 3× roughly bakes in burden, overhead, and margin all at once.

But it only works when your overhead is roughly average. If you run out of your own home with a paid-off car, 3× overcharges. If you’re carrying a vehicle payment, bonding, and a marketing budget, 3× undercharges, and you’ll never know which, because the rule hides the reason. Use it to check your math.

Part 2: Learn what your cleans actually take

You now know what an hour must earn. The other half is how many hours a home eats, and this is the part almost nobody measures.

Time ten real cleans with a phone stopwatch, door to door, including setup and pack-down. You want what it actually takes.

A standard clean of an average three-bed, two-bath home runs about three man-hours once you include the bathrooms, the kitchen, and the floors. That single number, multiplied by your $45 rate, says that home needs to bill about $135. A deep clean of the same house takes far longer, and a move-out longer still, which is why those get their own prices.

The fastest way to get your average: on a normal day, how many homes do you finish and how long was the day? Eight hours across three standard cleans is 2.67 man-hours a home. If your average ticket doesn’t cover that at your rate, you’ve found the problem. Working faster won’t fix it, because the shortfall is in the price.

Part 3: Turn it into a rate card

Most advice stops here, and this is where the leverage is. You’ve got a rate and you’ve got clean times. Convert them into prices you can publish, built on the three things every cleaner already asks about: bedrooms, bathrooms, and home size.

Scale your average man-hours per clean by home size, and price each at your rate. A standard clean, before any adjustment:

Home	Man-hours	Standard @ $45/hr
1 bed / 1 bath	1.75	$100 (floor)
2 bed / 2 bath	2.25	$101
3 bed / 2 bath	3.0	$135
4 bed / 3 bath	4.0	$180
5 bed / 3 bath	5.0	$225

Then add a small set of adjustments, and only these:

Clean type works as a multiplier on the standard price. A deep clean is more work than a standard, and a move-out or post-construction clean more still. A workable structure is deep ×1.5, move-out ×1.75, post-construction ×2.0. So the 3-bed standard at $135 becomes about $203 as a deep clean and $236 as a move-out. Set the multipliers to match how much longer each actually takes you.

Frequency needs the direction right. A home cleaned every week stays cleaner, so each visit is faster and the standing booking is worth more to you. Recurring visits should cost less per visit than a one-off, not more. A common structure is weekly ×0.9, biweekly ×0.95, monthly ×1.0, one-time ×1.25. The one-time premium covers the reality that a first clean of an unmaintained home is the hardest visit you’ll make.

Add-ons are priced flat and added on top: inside the fridge, inside the oven, interior windows, laundry by the load. Price each one on its own (for example $25, $30, $40, and $15) and add it after the multipliers. These are the jobs you currently agree to at the door for free; on a rate card they get chosen and paid for before you arrive.

Finally, set a minimum charge. Below a certain ticket, a home isn’t worth the drive and the setup. Set it deliberately (commonly $100–$130) and hold it even when the place is tiny.

That’s your whole pricing system: a size table, three clean-type multipliers, a frequency table, a short add-on list, and a floor. It fits on an index card, and it prices a home you’ve never seen.

Why the rate card beats the in-home estimate

Now the argument, because this is where cleaners push back: every home is different, so every home needs to be seen first.

Every home is different. The question is whether pricing each one in person earns more than it costs. Usually it doesn’t, for four reasons.

The walkthrough is unbilled time

At $45/man-hour, a walkthrough plus the drive there and back costs you an hour of billable time, about $45, win or lose. Do three of those to book one client and you’ve spent $135 in displaced cleaning time to land the job. Most of the first clean’s revenue went to the estimating process.

Doing walkthroughs in the evenings moves the cost from your billable hours to your life.

The slow quote loses to the fast one

The homeowner messaged three cleaners. Roughly 78% of customers hire whoever responds first, and the average business takes more than 40 hours to reply. A price delivered in two minutes beats a better price delivered after a scheduled visit three days out, as a rule. You are competing on being there first.

Your variance is symmetric. Your lost jobs are not.

Price by bedrooms, bathrooms and size and you’ll be wrong sometimes. A cluttered 2-bed with three cats will be underpriced; a sparse, tidy 4-bed will be overpriced. Across a full book of clients, those errors substantially cancel out. A well-set rate card is an average, and averages work at volume.

The client you never got because you were slow does not cancel out against anything. It’s gone, along with every recurring visit it would have produced. One error is self-correcting across your schedule. The other compounds against you forever.

You can’t deliver the precision anyway

A ten-minute walkthrough is not a time-and-motion study. Nobody can price a home to within 3% by glancing at it; doing it in person only feels more certain. Accept ±15%, price from the card, and put the saved hours into either cleaning or booking.

The safeguards that make this safe

Fixed pricing works because it comes with stated conditions, and the conditions are what keep you from getting hurt.

Put the re-confirm in writing. On your site and every quote: “Pricing is based on a home in standard condition. If your home differs substantially, we’ll confirm the price with you before the first clean.” This one sentence lets you quote fast and still adjust for the home that hasn’t been cleaned in two years.

Charge the first clean separately. A home that’s never had a professional clean needs a deep clean. Quote the deep clean first, then start the recurring standard rate after. Folding it into the regular price means you eat the hardest visit and under-earn on every visit after it.

Decide your travel radius and price its edge. Either add a surcharge for the outer ring or don’t serve it. Drive time between homes is the most expensive unbilled hour in this business, and a client forty minutes away can erase the margin on the clean.

Review quarterly and raise annually. Your rate card is a snapshot of costs that will change, because products, wages, fuel, and insurance all move. A cleaner who hasn’t raised prices in three years has taken a real pay cut without ever deciding to.

What to do this week

1. Add up last month’s actual overhead from your bank statement.
2. Count your real billable hours: hours worked × an honest billable percentage.
3. Time ten cleans door to door, including setup and pack-down.
4. Build the card: a size table, clean-type multipliers, a frequency table, add-ons, and a floor.
5. Publish it on your site and in your bio link, and use it when the phone rings.

That last step is the one that separates the cleaners who quote in thirty seconds from the ones still driving out to count bedrooms on a Sunday.

Build your rate card in about five minutes

We built a free tool that runs this exact calculation: put in your per-bedroom, per-bathroom and per-square-foot rates, and it prices any home for a standard, deep, move-out or post-construction clean at any frequency, then prints a house cleaning price list you can publish as-is.

Build your house cleaning price list →

No account needed. Print it or copy it straight out.

Once you have your numbers, the natural next step is letting customers use them without waiting on you. See booking and pricing for house cleaning businesses for how the rate card becomes a page a customer books from.

That’s what Sorvius does: a customer picks bedrooms, bathrooms and home size, adds the extras they want, sees your price calculated from your own rates, picks a date, and leaves a card. The rate card you just built becomes the thing that books cleans while you’re on a job.

The math is the hard part, and you only have to do it once.