House cleaning price calculator
Most house-cleaning quotes are a guess dressed as a number. This one builds the price the way the work actually happens: task minutes for the rooms you are cleaning, adjusted for how often you visit and what state the home is in, multiplied by your own hourly rate. Change any input and the price, the time and the per-square-foot figure move together.
Before you quote
- Walk the home before you quote, or quote a range
- Count bathrooms, not bathroom fittings
- Ask how often, and whether pets live there
After the first visit
- Put the price basis in writing before the first visit
- Re-time the second visit — the first is never typical
- Raise the rate, not the hours, when the round fills
Price this visit
$176
- Task time
- 220 min
- On site with 2
- 110 min
- Works out at
- $0.098 / sq ft
What the model is doing
The minutes come from our own house cleaning checklist: a fixed block for arriving, whole-home dusting and packing down, then a rate per hundred square feet, per bathroom and per bedroom. Bathrooms carry the largest per-unit figure because they carry the wet work and the dwell times.
Two multipliers sit on top. Frequency, because a weekly home is genuinely faster than a monthly one and a first visit is genuinely slower than either. Condition, because a home that is behind takes about a third longer and pretending otherwise is how a fixed price loses money.
These minutes are WipeDeck's working model, not an industry standard. No trade body publishes a per-task table anybody can check. Time your own crew on five jobs and replace our numbers with yours — the model is the useful part.
Setting the hourly rate the price is built on
The rate in this calculator is what your business charges per cleaner-hour, not what you pay a cleaner. As a starting point, a solo operator's rate has to cover the cleaner's wage, the burden on top of it, supplies, driving, insurance and the hours nobody pays for — quoting, invoicing and the drive between jobs.
The BLS mean hourly wage for maids and housekeeping cleaners was $17.83 in 2025. If you are staffing at anything near that figure, an hourly charge rate below roughly two and a half times it leaves nothing for the business.
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, via the BLS public API, read 2026-09-04
Why two cleaners does not halve the price
The crew field splits the time on site, not the money. Two cleaners for ninety minutes is the same three cleaner-hours as one cleaner for three hours, and it costs you the same in wages.
What a second cleaner does buy is a shorter visit, which clients value and which lets you fit another job into the day. Price the day, not the visit.
Checking the answer against the market
Divide the price by the floor area and compare it with what the market near you charges per square foot. If your number is far below, your minutes or your rate are wrong; far above, and you may be quoting a deep clean.
The single most useful sanity check is the effective hourly rate on the finished job, measured after the second visit. If it is below your target rate, the fix is the scope, not more speed.