How to price cleaning jobs by the hour, job, or square foot – with real invoice benchmarks and a two-part method for pricing recurring plans.
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Most pricing advice for cleaners stops at a national average and a per-hour range. That is fine for a first quote, but it does not help you build the part of the business that actually pays the bills: recurring clients. In Tofu's data, 1,942 of the 3,042 cleaning businesses on the platform (about 64%) bill at least some of their work on a recurring basis, and those accounts do not invoice for less than one-time jobs. They invoice for more at the top end.
Whether you are starting a cleaning business or resetting rates you set years ago, this guide covers the three ways to price a cleaning job, what cleaning work actually invoices for across service types, and how to set a per-visit rate for a recurring plan that holds up over a year of visits. The dollar figures below come from cleaning invoices in Tofu's own dataset (214,077 cleaning invoices), not from survey averages.
There are only three pricing models under everything. Most cleaners use a mix.
Hourly. You charge for time, usually per cleaner per hour. Best for first-time jobs, one-off deep cleans, and any job where you cannot predict how bad the space will be. The risk: you are penalized for getting faster, and clients dislike open-ended bills.
Flat rate per job. You quote one price for the whole visit. Best for recurring maintenance cleans where you know the property and the scope does not change. This is the model most recurring plans should move toward once you have cleaned a place two or three times.
Per square foot. You price by measured area, common in commercial and post-construction work. Best when spaces are large, mostly empty, and comparable to each other. Industry production rates, such as the cleaning times published by ISSA, estimate how long a task should take per 1,000 square feet, which you can convert into a price.
For recurring residential and small commercial work, the usual path is: quote the first clean hourly or as a higher flat rate, learn the property, then lock a flat per-visit rate for the ongoing plan.
Before you set your own numbers, it helps to see where real invoices land. The table below shows the median invoice by cleaning service type, plus the typical low and high (the 25th and 75th percentiles) so you can see the spread, not just the middle.
Two things to read from this. First, the spread inside each service type is wide: a general clean has a median near $483 but a 75th percentile close to $964, which means the top quarter of those jobs bill roughly double the middle one. Scope, home size, and condition drive that gap far more than your base rate does. Second, the service type sets the floor. Window and commercial work carry higher medians than move-out or residential, so the same two hours of labor is not worth the same invoice everywhere.
These are invoice totals. Later in this guide we look at single line items, which sit on a different basis, so do not compare the two tables directly.
Build estimates from a saved price book, so every quote lands where the benchmarks say it should.
Here is the number that changes how you should price. Cleaning accounts that run recurring work do not bill less per invoice than one-time accounts. They bill slightly more in the middle and clearly more at the top.
The common assumption is that recurring work means a discount, so recurring invoices should be smaller. In this data they are not. The median recurring invoice ($475) sits above the one-time median ($436), and the 75th percentile is much higher ($947 against $748). The likely reason is not that recurring clients pay a premium per visit. It is that recurring relationships grow: clients add rooms, add services, and move from a maintenance clean to a deep clean or an extra bathroom over time, and larger households and offices are the ones that sign up for a plan in the first place.
The practical takeaway is that a recurring plan is not a race to the lowest per-visit price. A modest per-visit discount against a one-off rate is fine and expected, because you are trading a small amount of margin for predictable revenue and near-zero acquisition cost on every visit after the first. But you do not need to slash the rate to win the plan, and the data says you should not.
A clean way to structure it:
Write the frequency, scope, and rate into a simple service agreement so both sides know what each visit includes, then put the plan on a card on file so each visit bills automatically after it is completed. That removes the slow part of recurring work, which is chasing payment every two or four weeks.
When you quote a job, you are really adding up line items: rooms, add-ons, and materials. Tofu's data shows what those individual line items tend to bill at, which is useful when you build an estimate piece by piece rather than pricing the whole visit as one number.
These are per line item, not per invoice, so they run lower than the invoice medians in the earlier table. A single invoice usually bundles several line items plus materials. The value here is in setting your defaults: if you keep a standard price for each service in a price book, these medians are a sane starting point to check yours against. Once a service and its price are saved in your cleaning software, every estimate you build pulls the same number, so a three-person crew quotes the same way you do.
Clients think in bedrooms and bathrooms, so it helps to translate your rate into their terms. A common structure for residential recurring work:
Bathrooms and kitchens drive time more than bedrooms do, so price by both room count and room type, not square footage alone, for homes. Save these as tiers in your price book so a "3 bed, 2 bath, biweekly" plan produces the same cleaning estimate every time.
The base rate is a starting point. These factors move it:
Unlike lawn or pool work, cleaning invoice values in Tofu's data stay within a narrow band across the calendar year, so there is no strong seasonal swing you need to price around. What grows is volume, not the price per job, which is another argument for locking recurring plans rather than depending on one-time demand.
For local wage benchmarks to plug into step 2, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes wage data for Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners by state and metro area, which is a neutral source for what labor costs in your market.
Save your services and rates once in Tofu, and your whole crew quotes the same way you do.
Pricing cleaning work well comes down to two moves: build each job from your real costs plus the margin you need, then check that number against what the service actually bills. Recurring plans are where a cleaning business compounds, and the data is clear that they do not have to be the cheap option. Price the first clean on its own, set a flat per-visit rate for the ongoing plan, keep it at or above your one-off rate for the same scope, and put it on a card on file so the revenue arrives without chasing. Do that across enough clients, and predictable monthly income rather than one-off jobs becomes the core of the business.
Figures given in the article come from Tofu's own invoice data: 214,077 cleaning invoices from 3,042 businesses, shown in U.S. dollars. Each is a percentile of real invoices: the median is the midpoint, and the 25th and 75th percentiles are the typical low and high. Invoice totals and single line items use different bases. Treat these as benchmarks, not fixed rates.
