Commercial cleaning cost per square foot

A general office cleaned five nights a week costs about 19 cents per square foot per month. The same office cleaned once a week costs about 4 cents. A restaurant cleaned five nights a week is closer to 30 cents.

Those are all the same industry, the same year and the same method. The reason published ranges are so wide is that they blend every building type and every frequency into one number and then quote the spread. It is accurate in the way that saying a car costs between four thousand and four hundred thousand dollars is accurate.

So before any figure is useful, two questions: per square foot per what — visit, month or year? And how often is it being cleaned? Get those two wrong and you can be out by a factor of twenty while comparing what look like similar numbers.

The unit confusion that costs people contracts

There are three units in common use and they are routinely mixed up in the same conversation.

• Per square foot per visit — what one clean costs. Barely moves with frequency, because the work in a single visit is the same whether you come weekly or nightly.
• Per square foot per month — the most common contract unit, and the one that scales almost directly with frequency. Five nights a week costs roughly five times once a week.
• Per square foot per year — mostly used in facilities management and tender documents. Twelve times the monthly figure.

If a competitor quotes "twelve cents a square foot" and you are at nineteen, you may not be more expensive at all. They may be quoting a three-night schedule against your five, or a per-visit figure against your monthly one. Ask which, before you drop your price.

The rate chart

Dollars per square foot per month, by building type and cleaning frequency. The last column is the per-visit figure, expressed per 1,000 sq ft because per-square-foot-per-visit numbers are too small to read.

These are not survey figures or numbers copied from other sites. They are calculated from the standard bid formula at a defined set of assumptions: 85% cleanable area, a $17.00 hourly wage plus 25% labour burden, supplies at 5% and overhead at 18% of labour, and a 20% net margin. Change any of those and the whole chart moves — which is exactly the point of the next section.

Why the chart looks the way it does

The ranking of building types is not about how dirty they are. It is about production rate — how much floor area one cleaner covers in an hour.

A warehouse is cheap per square foot because a cleaner covers enormous ground per hour; it is mostly open floor with almost no fixtures. A restaurant is expensive because the same cleaner covers perhaps a quarter of that, with detail work, grease, and no long open runs. Medical sits near the top for the same reason plus higher standards and more restrooms.

You are not really selling square feet. You are selling hours, and the square footage is just the thing that determines how many hours it takes. That is why two buildings of identical size can differ by four times in price without either party being unreasonable.

What moves your number away from the chart

• Wage rates. The single biggest factor. Everything here assumes $17.00 an hour. At $22.00 every figure rises by roughly 29%.
• Clutter and layout. Open plan cleans far faster than the same area chopped into small offices. Desks with cables and personal items slow everything down.
• Restroom density. Restrooms are the slowest square footage in most buildings. A site with unusually many for its size prices well above its category.
• After-hours access and security. Alarm protocols, sign-in, escorts and lift access all consume paid time that produces no cleaning.
• Consumables. If you supply paper and soap, that is a separate line that scales with headcount, not floor area, and it can add meaningfully to a busy site.
• Contract length. A one-year term with no escalation clause is worth less than a three-year term with one. Price accordingly.

Working in square metres

Multiply any figure in the chart by 10.764. A general office cleaned five nights a week works out at about $2.02 per square metre per month; the same site at once a week is around $0.40.

If your market quotes in metres, run the whole calculation in metric rather than converting at the end — converting a production rate and then converting back compounds the rounding.

How to actually use this

Not as a price. As a check.

Work out your price properly from cleanable area, production rate, labour cost, overhead and margin — the method is in how much to charge for commercial cleaning, or you can let the bid calculator do it. Then compare the result against the chart.

If you land close to the row for that building type and frequency, good. If you land far outside it, something upstream is wrong — usually an over-optimistic production rate, occasionally an overhead percentage nobody has revisited in three years. Find the wrong input. Do not move the price to match the chart.