Commercial cleaning bid calculator

The production rate is the bid

Two contractors can walk the same building, agree on the same scope, pay the same wage, and hand in bids that are 60% apart. They are not disagreeing about price. They are disagreeing about how fast the work goes. Square footage per cleaner-hour is the only number in a janitorial bid that is simultaneously the most important and the one nobody writes down.

Facility type moves it further than anything else. The same 10,000 sq ft floor plate is a 2.5-cleaner-hour job as general office and a 5-cleaner-hour job as a clinic, because exam rooms, disinfection protocols and regulated waste do not go faster just because the square footage is familiar. That difference is $2,007 a month on an identical piece of paper.

Use the calculator's default rates to get in range, then replace them with your own the first month you hold the contract. Time three real visits, divide the cleanable footage by the crew-hours you actually burned, and you have a number no competitor can guess at — which is exactly what lets you bid tight without bidding blind.

Walk the building before you price the building

Leasable square footage is not cleanable square footage. Elevator shafts, stairwells, mechanical rooms and unfinished storage all appear on the lease and none of them get vacuumed nightly. Ask for the floor plan, subtract what you will never touch, and bid the remainder. Contractors who skip this step routinely bid 15–20% more space than they will ever clean, then wonder why they lost.

Then count the things that break a rate: restroom fixtures, entrance glass, hard-floor square footage that needs scrubbing rather than vacuuming, and the number of trash points per floor. A building with four restrooms and thirty desks is a different job from a building with one restroom and thirty desks, and the square footage will not tell you which one you are standing in.

Write the scope down and get it signed. Every unpriced request — a day porter hour here, a stripped-and-waxed lobby there — arrives later as a favour that costs you a night of labor, and favours do not appear in the monthly invoice.

The small-site trap: the drive is longer than the clean

Run 2,000 sq ft of open office through the calculator and it comes back at 0.5 cleaner-hours — $19 of floor time, $401 a month at five nights. Nobody sends a crew across town for that. The number is not wrong; it is just incomplete, because it prices only the minutes spent inside the building.

Add the round trip. Thirty minutes of drive time per cleaner takes that same suite from $19 to $56 a visit and $401 to $1,204 a month, and that is before you decide whether a stop that small is worth a route slot at all. Paid drive time is labor. It belongs in the bid, not in your evening.

This is why most janitorial contractors carry a minimum visit charge — usually somewhere between one and two crew-hours. The calculator will not invent one for you, because the right minimum depends on your route density, but the moment your floor time drops under an hour the minimum is the real price and the square footage is a formality.

What the monthly number actually has to cover

A five-night contract is not four visits a month, it is 21.65. That is the number the calculator multiplies by, and it is where a lot of first-time bidders lose a fortnight of revenue a year by assuming a four-week month.

The monthly figure also has to absorb the parts of the job nobody quotes: liners, chemicals, paper if it is in scope, the supervisor drive-by, and the night somebody calls in sick and you cover the building yourself. At 10,000 sq ft five nights a week the bid comes to $2,007 a month, $24,081 a year — a real contract, and one worth protecting with a margin rather than winning with a discount.

At the top end the arithmetic stops being casual: 40,000 sq ft at the same scope is $8,027 a month and $96,323 a year. A five-point error in the production rate on a contract that size is worth more than most owners' salary, which is the whole argument for measuring it instead of estimating it.

Where janitorial bids quietly go wrong

The most common failure is copying a per-square-foot price off a forum. That number encodes somebody else's wage, somebody else's building, and somebody else's scope, and it will be wrong for you in a direction you cannot see. Price per square foot is an output worth checking your bid against — never an input to build it from.

The second failure is bidding a five-night contract at a discount because it is 'volume'. Recurring residential work earns a discount because it is faster and cheaper to sell. A janitorial contract already priced at market has no room to give twelve points away, which is why every visit in this calculator is priced at your full target margin and the volume shows up in the monthly total instead.

The third is a contract with no escalation clause. Wages move every year, and a three-year agreement written at today's labor cost is a slow-motion loss. Put the increase in writing at signature, when you have leverage, rather than asking for it in month twenty when you do not.

Commercial bidding questions owners ask

How do I calculate a commercial cleaning bid?

Divide the cleanable square footage by your production rate to get cleaner-hours per visit, cost those hours at the wage you pay times your payroll burden, add supplies and overhead, then divide by one minus your target margin. Multiply the per-visit price by the visits in a month for the contract value.

What should I charge per square foot for office cleaning?

Per square foot is a check, not a starting point. The default scope in this calculator — general office, five nights a week, two cleaners — lands around $0.20 per square foot per month at 10,000 sq ft. If your bid comes out far from that, look at your production rate and your wage before you change the price.

How many square feet can one cleaner cover in an hour?

For general office space, roughly 3,000–5,000 square feet per cleaner-hour on a nightly scope. Medical runs far slower, restaurants slower still, and warehouses much faster because most of the leased area is open floor nobody details.

Should I bid janitorial work monthly or hourly?

Quote a monthly figure and cost it hourly. Facility managers budget in months and want one number to approve, but you still need the hours behind it to know whether the contract is profitable and to price any change in scope without renegotiating everything.

How do I bid a building I have not walked?

You do not, if you can avoid it. If you must, price from the floor plan at a conservative production rate, exclude hard-floor refinishing and anything you cannot see, and state clearly in the bid that the price assumes the scope you listed. An unseen building is where the surprises live.

What margin should a janitorial contract hold?

This calculator defaults to 25% on the job, the same target the rest of BidCalc uses. Commercial contracts are usually bid thinner than residential work, but under about 15% a single sick night, a supply price increase or one round of unpriced scope wipes out the profit for the month.

Do I discount a contract for cleaning five nights a week?

No — and the calculator deliberately will not do it for you. Every visit is priced at your full target margin because a recurring discount comes straight off that margin. Volume in commercial work shows up as a larger monthly total and a denser route, not as a lower per-visit price.