The average cost of house cleaning in the United States is around $160, with an average of around $90 for a home less than 1,000 square feet and $250 or more for a house 3,000 square feet according to Home Advisor. While the national average is generally between $115 and $227, keep in mind prices vary according to the location and the size of the home and any tips you pay your house cleaner.
Customizable Price List
There are two parts to the customizable price list attached. Part One is simply an outline of the services offered, while Part Two delves into how prices are determined. If you need help downloading the printable, check out these helpful tips.
Part One: What the Service Includes
It is critical that the customer and cleaning service know what to expect from each other. This document provides an example of the services included in many standard house cleaning service packages, as well as add-on services, available for an additional fee. Services will vary from one cleaner to another, but this should give you a general idea of what services to expect.
- Customer Perspective: You should receive a comparable list of tasks, either in brochure or contract form, from your cleaning service. It helps you to set expectations and evaluate whether tasks are being performed satisfactorily.
- Cleaning Service Perspective: You can easily add or delete services that you are prepared to provide for your customers. Feel free adapt Part One of this document to include in your marketing brochure. You can also use it as a checklist for training employees. How well and how quickly they perform each of these tasks becomes your yardstick for measuring performance. Review the add-on services and add or delete services as you see fit.
Part Two: How Pricing Is Determined
This pricing method is based on the standard amount of time it takes to complete various tasks, multiplied by the prevailing wage for maids and house cleaners in a specific area. This section contains a spreadsheet designed to help owners of house cleaning services establish fair competitive pricing, but it also provides insights that many customers will find useful.
Simply follow the step-by-step spreadsheet to arrive at your quote:
- Click to Access: Click the image above to access the price list.
- Minutes Allotted Column: Determine how many minutes it takes to perform each task. It's a good idea to actually perform each task two or three times to be sure your expectations are realistic. You need to work consistently and with attention to detail. The pace must be one that can be reasonably sustained by your employees. Estimated numbers are included, but feel free to change them as appropriate
- Quantity Column: This is the column you will use most frequently to actually generate price quotes. Simply fill in the quantity of each task to be performed - for example, one kitchen, three bedrooms, two additional rooms. An additional room may be a laundry room, exercise room, office, or playroom. If the room requires little attention, you may choose to count it as a half room. If it requires extra attention, like cleaning several pieces of gym equipment or mirrored walls in a home gym, you may choose to count it as a room and a half.
- Total Minutes: This column multiplies the minutes per task by the number of tasks and auto-calculates total minutes for you.
- Hours: This column automatically translates the number of minutes into hours. The total of the column also tells you how many staff hours you will need to plan for.
- Prevailing Rate: This column is particularly important because it tailors pricing to your specific area. It also supports your pricing structure with hard data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS). To determine the correct prevailing rate:
- Visit the BLS website.
- Click the link for your specific area. (There are 374 from which to choose. In the example, "Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI" was used.)
- Scroll down to the chart and look for the code "37-2012." This is the occupation code for "Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners."
- Look to the right side of the row for the "Mean Hourly Wage." (It's the third column from the right.)
- Replace the rate of "$11.07" in the spreadsheet with the correct mean hourly wage for your area.
- Amount per Room: This column auto-calculates for you. It multiplies the prevailing wage, by the estimated hours, by two. The amount at the bottom of the column, rounded up to the nearest five dollars, is the amount you can reasonably expect to charge your customer. Out of the fee, you will need to extract a fair profit and pay the following expenses:
- Prevailing employee wages/benefits
- Payroll taxes
- Cost of equipment (commercial vacuum cleaners and other cleaning supplies)
- Transportation costs
- Marketing costs
- Administrative costs, like accounting, insurance, and customer service
Common Prices
Though pricing depends on a number of factors, there are some ranges to consider for common tasks:
- Basic house cleaning services: $25 to $45 per hour
- Windows: Interior at four to seven dollars per window and exterior at five to eight dollars
- Cleaning refrigerator or oven interior: $25 - $35
- Dusting mini blinds: About $20
- Polishing wooden surfaces: $30 and up
- Baseboard cleaning: $35 and up
- Cleaning inside cabinets: $20 -$45, depending on size and number
- Changing bed sheets: Around $10 per bed
- One load of laundry (wash and dry): About $20
- One-time deep cleaning: From $100 for smaller spaces (such as a studio apartment) to $300 or more for a home with several bedrooms
Some services offer package deal at different cleaning levels and different price points as well.
Busy Families
With American families busier than ever these days, this may be the perfect time to hire a service to keep your home clean or to start a house cleaning business. There's nothing quite like the feeling of walking into a freshly cleaned, sweet smelling home, knowing all household tasks have already been checked off your list. Providing that service can be a pretty good feeling too.
