Commercial cleaning bid calculator from production rates

Divide each area’s cleanable square feet by the square feet your crew cleans in an hour, then add the areas up.

Hours per visit = cleanable sq ft ÷ production rate (sq ft per hour)

Monthly hours = hours per week × 52 ÷ 12

Areas cleaned less often (conference rooms three times a week, say) count only on the days they are cleaned. Setup, trash runs and travel go in as minutes per visit.

Example: a 6,000 sq ft open office at 3,500 sq ft an hour takes 1.7 hours a visit. Five visits a week is 8.6 hours a week, or 37.1 hours a month.

Add wages, labor burden and supplies, then divide by what is left after overhead and profit.

1. Labor cost = monthly hours × hourly wage × (1 + burden %)
2. Direct cost = labor cost × (1 + supplies %)
3. Monthly price = direct cost ÷ (1 − overhead % − profit %)

Overhead and profit here are shares of the price, so a 15% profit is 15 cents of every dollar billed.

Example: 111.5 hours a month at 17 dollars with 20% burden is 2,275 dollars of labor. Supplies at 5% bring it to 2,389 dollars. With 15% overhead and 15% profit, the price is 2,389 ÷ 0.70 = 3,413 dollars a month.

Work out the price from hours first, then divide by the square feet to get the rate.

Price per sq ft a month = monthly price ÷ total cleanable sq ft

Two buildings of the same size can need very different hours: restrooms, carpet and clutter change the time, so a flat rate per square foot underprices the hard buildings and overprices the easy ones. Use the rate as a check against contracts you have already won.

Example: 3,413 dollars a month on 12,400 cleanable sq ft is about 27.5 cents per sq ft.

Labor burden is what you pay on top of the wage: payroll taxes, workers comp, insurance and any benefits, as a percent of wages.

• Social Security: 6.2% employer share (IRS)
• Medicare: 1.45% employer share (IRS)
• Federal unemployment (FUTA): 6.0% on the first 7,000 dollars of each worker’s wages, with a credit of up to 5.4% for state unemployment tax paid (IRS)
• State unemployment, workers comp and benefits: set by your state and your carrier

The federal minimum wage is 7.25 dollars an hour; many states and cities set a higher one. Our labor burden calculator works out the percent for your crew.

Yes. Copy the rows (area, sq ft, production rate, times per week) and paste them into the box, or save the sheet as CSV and drop it in.

A header row is optional, and title lines above it are skipped. Without a header, columns are read in that order; with one, names like “Sq ft” and “Rate” are matched.

Copy the one-line summary into your proposal, a Jobber quote or a QuickBooks Online estimate, and download the full bid sheet as CSV.