What should a cleaning business charge per hour

Ask this question in any group of cleaning owners and you will get a range so wide it is useless: someone charging $35 an hour with one cleaner in a small town, someone charging $65 with a two-person crew in a coastal city. Both can be right. Rates are set by the wage you pay, the miles you drive, the overhead you carry and the margin you need, and those four things are local to you.

So replace the question. Instead of what should I charge per hour, ask what does each client currently earn me per crew hour. That question has one answer per client, it is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it points directly at the work worth fixing.

Earned rate: the only rate that describes your book

For any client, take what they pay per visit and divide it by the paid crew hours that visit actually consumes:

earned rate = price per visit ÷ ((hours on site + drive time) × crew size)

Drive time counts because you pay for it. Crew size counts because two cleaners for two hours is four hours of wages. Here is the same $150 visit under three different arrangements:

One price, three completely different businesses. This is why owners who track only revenue per job cannot tell which of their clients are the problem: the invoice looks identical.

Compare it to your floor, not to the market

Your cost floor is what an hour of crew time must earn to cover wages, burden, supplies, overhead and your target margin. Working it out takes about ten minutes and is set out step by step in how to work out your cost per crew hour. In that worked example the floor comes out at $36 an hour.

Against a $36 floor, the three rows above read: the first client is fine, the second is four dollars an hour short, and the third is losing you fifteen dollars for every crew hour you send. Nothing about the market rate in your city changes those facts.

What a shortfall actually costs per month

An hourly gap is easy to shrug off. Multiply it out and it stops being abstract. Take that third client, seven paid crew hours at fifteen dollars below floor, cleaned every two weeks:

$15 short × 7 crew hours = $105 per visit × 2.17 visits a month = $228 a month

One client. Two hundred and twenty-eight dollars a month, or roughly $2,700 a year, and it does not appear anywhere in your accounts as a loss. It appears as being fully booked and still short at the end of the month.

Setting the rate for new work

For quotes, the floor gives you a minimum and your judgement sets the rest. Three rules that hold up:

• Quote the job, price from the hour. Clients want a per-visit number. Work out the paid crew hours, multiply by your floor, then round up to something that sounds deliberate.
• Charge for access, not just square feet. Two houses of the same size take different times when one has three dogs, four children and a gated entry. Time is the thing you sell.
• Price the first clean separately. A deep first visit at recurring rates is the fastest way to start a relationship underwater.

The part almost nobody does

New quotes take care of themselves, because you do the arithmetic while the price is still in your mouth. The clients who quietly hurt you are the ones you priced two or three years ago, before the last two wage increases, who have been renewing on autopilot ever since. Their earned rate has been falling every year while the invoice stayed the same.

You cannot fix what you have not counted. Getting the earned rate for every client on your list is the whole job, and it is what RateRescue does from a spreadsheet or an export.