House cleaning pricing guide: what to charge.

The formula every price here comes from

Most pricing advice starts at the answer: charge $150, charge $0.10 a square foot, charge what the competition charges. That is backwards. A price is an output. Five inputs decide it, and four of them are yours.

1. Labor

   2 cleaners × 2.6 hrs × $17.80

   Crew size times hours times the wage you actually pay. Not the wage you wish you paid, and not a solo-operator daydream if you employ people.

2. Burden

   × 1.30

   Payroll taxes, workers' comp, unpaid drive time and paid time off add roughly 30% on top of the wage. That makes a $17.80 cleaner cost you $23.14 an hour. Skipping this one line is the single most common reason a "profitable" cleaning company runs out of cash.

3. Effort

   × 1.0 / 1.5 / 2.0

   A standard clean is the baseline. A deep clean runs about 1.5× the labor, a move-out about 2×. Pets, smokers and heavy clutter stack on top of that — they are not favors, they are hours.

4. Overhead

   + 15%

   Insurance, software, fuel, phone, the hour you spend quoting. It gets paid out of every job or it gets paid out of you.

5. Margin

   ÷ 0.75

   You divide by 0.75 rather than adding 25% — a markup of 25% only leaves a 20% margin. That gap is how owners quietly work at half the profit they think they're making.

Run the reference job through it and you get $185: 2 × 2.6 × $17.80 × 1.30 of loaded labor, plus 15% overhead, divided by 0.75. Change one input and the answer moves — which is the point. The guide gives you the shape of the number; your own wage and overhead give you the number.

House cleaning price list, by home size

At the national mean wage, with a two-person crew and hours drawn from standard production rates of roughly 500–700 sq ft per cleaner-hour. Use it as a starting price list, then replace the wage with yours.

These are one-time prices. Recurring work earns a discount because it is faster and cheaper to sell — about 3% monthly, 7% biweekly, 12% weekly. Take the discount off a price that was already profitable, never off the margin.

Reading your own market off that table

Find the metro nearest you and look at the true cost per hour, not the price. That figure is your floor. If a competitor is quoting below the floor, they are not beating you on efficiency — they are paying under the table, skipping insurance, or losing money without knowing it. None of those are strategies you can copy for long.

In the high-wage half of the table — San Francisco, New York, Seattle — the danger is anchoring to national articles. A “$150 standard clean” from a generic guide is below your cost in San Francisco, where the same job needs $262 to clear 25%. In the low-wage half — Houston, Dallas, Austin — the danger is the opposite: cheap labor invites a race to the bottom, and the clients you win at the bottom are the ones who nitpick, cancel and ghost. Lower cost is permission to hold a healthy margin at a price that still undercuts the franchises, not an excuse to give the difference away.

Two companies in the same ZIP code can be 20–30% apart on true cost once drive time, crew speed and overhead are honest. That is why this guide stops at the baseline: it can tell you the shape of a profitable price in your market, and it cannot tell you yours.

Pricing questions owners actually ask

How much should I charge for house cleaning?

Price from cost, not from a competitor's flyer. At the national mean cleaner wage of $17.80/hour, a 3-bed / 2-bath, two-person crew, 2.6 hours each standard clean supports a price of about $185 with a 25% margin intact. In a high-wage metro like San Francisco the same job needs $262; in Houston it works at $152.

What is the formula for pricing a cleaning job?

Labor × burden, plus overhead, divided by one minus your margin. Concretely: crew size × hours × wage × 1.30, add 15% overhead and any supplies, then divide the total by 0.75 to leave 25% margin. Deep cleans multiply the labor by 1.5, move-outs by 2.0.

What profit margin should a cleaning business target?

25% on the job is a working target for residential cleaning, and it is what every price on this page is built to protect. Below 15% a single re-clean, a cancellation or one bad drive day erases the profit on the whole visit.

How much more should I charge for a deep clean or a move-out?

Deep cleans take about 1.5× the labor of a standard clean and move-outs about 2×, so the price scales with them: $185 standard becomes $277 deep and $369 move-out on the same house at the national mean wage.

Should I charge a flat rate or by the hour?

Quote flat, cost hourly. Clients want one number they can say yes to, but you still need the hours behind it to know the job is profitable. Hourly billing also caps your upside the moment your crew gets faster.

Why do the prices in my city differ from national pricing guides?

Because cleaner wages differ by up to 59 percentage points across the metros in the table below. A national "average price" article quietly assumes an average wage, which is why it under-quotes high-cost markets and leaves money on the table in low-cost ones.

Do I discount recurring clients?

A modest recurring discount is normal — roughly 3% monthly, 7% biweekly, 12% weekly — because repeat homes are faster and cost less to sell. Discount the price, never the margin: take it off a number that was profitable to begin with.