How to quote cleaning services – Cleaning pricing guide

How you price your professional cleaning services from job to job can make or break your cleaning business. No two cleaning jobs are exactly the same, which means having a standard or generalised price for every job doesn’t make much business sense. In fact, in doing so you could be underselling your services, undermining your business, and missing out on additional, much-deserved income for all your hard work.

Every house cleaning job you quote for and present to clients needs to be as accurate as possible; doing so will help ensure that you will get paid what the job is actually worth. After all, you’re in business to turn a profit, and understanding how to quote a cleaning job precisely will help ensure that you are paid the correct amount for the cleaning services you provide to every client you work with.

Of course, the other side of the coin is over-quoting and missing out on cleaning jobs due to your cleaning services being deemed too expensive. When considering how to quote a cleaning job, it’s all about finding the happy middle ground and determining a price that works for both you and your clients.

So, here is what you need to consider in order to accurately estimate house cleaning jobs when calculating cleaning services quotes.

Use your experience to accurately ‘size up’ each cleaning job

While the cleaning industry is competitive and very price-driven, it’s critical that you don’t make a habit of underquoting just for the sake of winning new business. In most cases, you’ll only regret it.

You’re a qualified and experienced cleaning professional, so you’ll likely have a keen understanding of how long a job will take and if any non-standard, more expensive cleaning products or equipment will be needed to get the job done right. Certain jobs may even require you to hire an offsider for the day, so factor these things into your quotes to ensure you are protecting your margin on each job.

When quoting for a cleaning job, try and learn as much as you can about the client and the premises to be cleaned beforehand. Doing so will only help make your cleaning job quote more accurate.

How to calculate cleaning services costs?

Before putting any quote on the table, it’s important that you have a thorough understanding of the scope of the house cleaning job at hand. Assessing the scope of a cleaning job can be broken down into the following six key factors. If you can confidently answer these six questions, you will be well positioned to provide an accurate estimated quote for every house cleaning job you accept.

1. How big or small is the house?

It goes without saying that a larger house will take longer to clean than a smaller house. So, your cleaning quote for, say, a five-bedroom home, should be more expensive than your quote for a three-bedroom home. However, size is only one factor, which leads into our next point.

2. The scope of the cleaning job

Essentially there are two levels of house cleaning – ‘basic’, and ‘deep’ – and each offers a different scope of work. The former would include general cleaning tasks such as sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping and a moderate amount of elbow grease. Meanwhile, deep cleaning is a much more thorough undertaking, requiring more labour-intensive cleaning and often requiring industrial grade cleaning products.

3. Location, location, location

Location and travel time matters, and this is something that should be factored into your quote when providing estimates for house cleaning jobs. It’s not just the cost of fuel, but also the time it takes you to get to and from the job site, and wear and tear on your work vehicle.

4. Condition of the home

Whether the cleaning job you’re quoting for requires a basic clean or a deep clean, within each category there can be notable differences. If you can’t get to the client’s home in person to scope the job, request recent photos of the house from the owner to help you quote accurately.

5. Recurring clients

This point won’t always be able to be determined with brand new customers, but if a homeowner likes the cleaning service that you provide, they may become a recurring customer. In this case, rewarding their loyalty with a reduced price per clean simply makes good business sense, and could very well lead to new referrals.

6. How to get cleaning jobs using different pricing strategies

Occasionally some cleaning clients will ask what your hourly rate is. Other clients may ask about your flat rate for cleaning their entire home. And yet other clients may prefer to be charged per room. So, it’s important that you can accurately estimate what an appropriate price would be in each instance. Being able to offer different pricing models may be the difference between gaining a new client or being passed over.

Have you locked in your cleaning insurance?

While you’re busy building your cleaning business, let us help by handling your business insurance*. We’ll sweep up all the available insurance quotes for your business and present the best options for you. Go online for your cleaning insurance or give us a call 1300 920 864 to see how we can help protect your business.