Commercial cleaning bid calculator
A janitorial bid is arithmetic, not instinct: cleanable area divided by a production rate gives hours, hours times a loaded wage gives labour, and everything else is a percentage on top. This calculator does that chain and shows you the monthly price, the price per square foot and the margin you are actually bidding.
Before you bid
- Measure or obtain the gross area — never accept 'about'
- Walk the site and mark what you will not clean
- Ask for the current spec and the current price if there is one
- Count the nights, the restrooms and the entrances
Before you send the bid
- Check the price per square foot against your own past wins
- Confirm the margin survives one absence a month
- Put the production rate in the bid so the client can see the logic
Monthly bid
$2,246
- Hours a visit
- 3.00
- Hours a month
- 64.9
- Loaded wage
- $23.49 / hr
- Per sq ft a month
- $0.1872
- Gross margin
- 29.4%
- Production rate
- 3,400 sq ft / hr
Production rate is the whole game
A production rate is the square feet one cleaner covers in an hour at the specified standard. Get it wrong by ten per cent and your margin moves by more than your profit line. The rates in the dropdown are our working figures for a light nightly specification — general office around 3,400 sq ft an hour, warehouse much faster, medical much slower because of the standard rather than the dirt.
Measure your own. Time one cleaner over a known area for three nights and divide. That single number, kept honest, is the most valuable thing a commercial cleaning business owns.
Cleanable area, not gross area
Gross floor area includes plant rooms, risers, stairwells you never enter, and voids. Bidding on gross area at an office production rate is the classic way to win a contract and lose money on it every month.
Walk the building with the floor plan and cross out what is excluded. Then write the excluded areas into the bid. A client who later asks why the plant room is dirty should be able to read the answer in the document they signed.
Loaded wage, not wage
Labour burden is payroll taxes, workers' compensation, paid time off, and the training and supervision hours that never appear on a timesheet. Twenty-six per cent is a common working figure; yours depends on your state and your claims history.
The default base wage in this calculator is $18.64, the BLS mean hourly wage for janitors and cleaners in 2025. Replace it with what you actually pay — this is the input that most often makes a bid look better than it is.
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, via the BLS public API, read 2026-09-04
Reading the margin honestly
The margin shown is gross: price minus labour and supplies, before overhead. Overhead and profit are then added as percentages, which is how the trade quotes and how a client's procurement team expects to see it.
A bid that only works at full attendance is not a bid, it is a hope. Re-run it with an extra hour a week of cover and see whether the number still stands.