How to Estimate House Cleaning Jobs: Walkthrough to Bid

Short answer: To estimate house cleaning jobs, count fixtures rather than rooms — every toilet, shower, tub, vanity, and sink — then measure floor area by surface type and note stairs, pets, and clutter. Convert those counts to crew minutes using times you have measured yourself, multiply by your loaded crew-hour cost, add supplies and drive time, and divide by one minus your margin. Price the visit, not the hour.

A cleaning walkthrough takes about fifteen minutes and decides two years of revenue. The mistake is not quoting too low once; it is quoting from a number the client said on the phone instead of the fixtures you counted in the hall. What follows is the field process — what to count, what to photograph, what to ask, and the arithmetic that turns all of it into a per-visit price you can hold when the house turns out to be dirtier in month three.

What do I look at before I get out of the car?

Four things, and they change the number before you have seen a single bathroom.

Parking and the walk from it. A driveway is free; a downtown street with a two-hour meter and a fifty-yard carry adds ten minutes of load-in and load-out to every visit forever. Stairs to the front door, and whether there is an elevator in a building. Whether it is a house, a condo, or a unit inside a complex with a gate code and a signed visitor log. And the exterior read: an unswept porch and a mat that has not moved in a year usually means the interior baseboards match.

Look at the driveway too. Two child seats and a dog crate in the back of the car tells you more about the floors than anything the client will say at the door.

What do I count on the walkthrough?

Fixtures, floors, and access — in that order. Room count is what the client will quote at you; fixture count is what determines the clock.

What to count	How to record it	Why it moves the price
Toilets	Count, and note wall-mount or pedestal	Dense, slow, inspected first
Showers and tubs	Count, and note glass door versus curtain	Glass with hard water can double a bathroom
Vanities and sinks	Count, with mirror size	Two-sink vanities are two jobs, not one
Kitchen counters	Linear feet, and the material	Stone with a busy family is a wipe; a full clear-and-clean is not
Appliance exteriors	Count, and note stainless	Stainless takes a second pass and a different cloth
Hard floor	ft², by type: tile, LVP, sealed wood, unsealed wood, stone	Sets mop time and rules out some products
Carpet and rugs	ft², plus stairs by the flight	Vacuum time, and stairs are hand work
Stairs	Flights, plus whether they are carpet or wood with spindles	Spindled railings are detail dusting
Ceiling height and fans	Note anything over 9 feet, count fans and vents	Ladder work, and a two-person job in some rooms
Interior windows	Pane count if requested	Priced separately, never assumed
Pets	Species, count, indoor or outdoor, shedding	Extra vacuum passes and floor time
Occupants	Adults, kids, ages, home office, smokers	Soil load, and how often surfaces are touched
Clutter	A 1-to-5 note per room	Decides whether you are cleaning or tidying

Write the numbers into your phone as you walk. A quote reconstructed from memory in the truck is a quote missing a bathroom.

What do I photograph in a house I am quoting?

The things that will otherwise become your problem in month two, plus the things that justify the deep-clean line.

Photograph the shower glass and grout in every bathroom, the oven interior with the door open, the top of the refrigerator, the range hood filter, the baseboards in the highest-traffic hallway, the ceiling fan blades, and the area around any litter box. Those seven pictures are the deep clean argument, and they are far more persuasive than a paragraph.

Then photograph existing damage before you have touched anything: chipped tile, scratched or cupped hardwood, a cracked mirror, worn finish on a stone counter, torn window screens, broken blind slats, stained grout, and any wall damage behind furniture. Date-stamped photos from the estimate visit are the entire answer when someone points at a mark in November.

Last, photograph the laundry area and the supply closet. You are deciding whether there is a place to fill a bucket, whether the washer is available if you launder anything on site, and whether the client’s cabinet of half-empty spray bottles is about to become your product plan.

What do I have to ask while I am standing there?

Nine questions, and one of them is worth more than the other eight.

• Who cleaned it last, and when? A house that has not been cleaned in eight months does not price like a house someone left last month.
• What bothers you most when you walk in? This is the question. The answer tells you what “clean” means in this house, and hitting that one thing is most of your retention.
• How often do you want us, and is that flexible? Frequency changes the soil load and therefore the time.
• Who is home during the visit, and are there work-from-home hours we need to work around?
• Pets: how many, are they friendly, are they contained during service, and who handles the litter box?
• Any allergies, scent sensitivities, or products you do not want in the house?
• What is off-limits? Home office, a child’s room, unsealed stone, antiques, a specific rug.
• How do we get in, and who else has access? Key, lockbox, code, alarm, garage, building fob.
• Is this a rental, a sale, or a move-out with an agent’s standard to meet? That changes the scope and the person who signs off.

For move-out work add one more: who is inspecting, and against what checklist. For post-construction, ask when the trades finish and whether power and water are on, because dust settles for days and a single pass is never enough.

How do the counts turn into minutes, and the minutes into a price?

Four steps. Do them in order and the price stops being a guess.

Step one: convert counts to crew minutes. Time your own crew on three houses and replace every figure below. These are starting shapes, not standards.

Task unit	Minutes each
Toilet, full detail including base and behind	6
Shower or tub, routine soil	14
Shower with glass door and hard water	22
Vanity, sink, mirror, fixtures	6
Kitchen counters and backsplash, per 10 linear feet	10
Stovetop and hood exterior	9
Appliance exteriors, per unit	6
Sink, faucet, and disposal detail	6
Bedroom dusting, surfaces and sills	7
Bed made with fresh linens	4
Stairs, per flight, vacuum and edges	8
Hard floor, sweep and mop	900 ft² per hour
Carpet, vacuum	1,500 ft² per hour
Trash, mats, entry, final walkthrough	8

Step two: apply a soil factor. A four-week interval, three shedding animals, or a house nobody has cleaned since the last owner all extend every one of those numbers. A multiplier of 1.1 to 1.4 on the task total, decided at the walkthrough, is more honest than pretending the base times hold everywhere.

Step three: cost the crew hour. Not the wage. The wage plus payroll taxes, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, paid time off, and training — a burden that commonly lands somewhere between 1.25 and 1.4 times the base rate — plus your vehicle, insurance, software, phone, and advertising divided by the hours you actually bill.

Step four: add supplies and drive, then divide by one minus your margin. Not multiply by markup. The difference is where the year goes.

Worked example: 4 bedrooms, 3 full baths, 2,850 ft² with 1,700 ft² hard floor and 1,150 ft² carpet, one flight of stairs, one dog and one cat, biweekly.

Task	Count	Minutes
Toilets	3	18
Showers and tubs, one with glass	3	50
Vanities and sinks	4	24
Kitchen counters, 22 linear feet	—	22
Stovetop, hood, appliance exteriors	4	27
Kitchen sink detail	1	6
Bedroom dusting	4	28
Stairs	1 flight	8
Hard floor, 1,700 ft²	—	113
Carpet, 1,150 ft²	—	46
Trash, mats, entry, walkthrough	—	8
Task subtotal		350
Pet factor, dog and cat	×1.15	403
Load in, load out	—	12
Drive from the previous house, 11 min × 2 people	—	22
Total crew minutes		437 = 7.28 crew-hours

Step	Calculation	Amount
Labor cost	7.28 × $34.00 loaded crew hour	$247.52
Supplies and consumables	Per visit	$11.00
Cost		$258.52
Price at 28% margin	$258.52 ÷ 0.72	$359.06
Per-visit price	Rounded	$359.00

Read that as arithmetic, not a going rate. The $34.00 crew hour and the 28 percent margin are placeholders for numbers built from your own payroll and overhead, and per-visit prices differ by more than double between metros and between dense routes and scattered ones. Published averages are useful only to catch an order-of-magnitude error.

Two crew members on site does not halve the cost. Sum everything as crew minutes, because you pay for both people whether or not both are working.

Price the job, not the hour. An hourly rate charges the client less when your crew gets better, which is a strange thing to build a business on.

What does the bid miss almost every time?

The costs that happen off the clock and out of sight.

Missed item	What it actually costs
Drive between houses	Crew minutes, paid, on every route — and the mileage deduction only exists if it was logged
The estimate visit itself	An unbillable round trip, which is the argument for batching quotes by neighborhood
Disinfectant contact time	Surfaces have to stay visibly wet for the full label time, and reapplying is real minutes — EPA’s disinfectant guidance explains why the label time is not optional
Microfiber laundering	Machine time, detergent, and someone’s unpaid evening unless it is priced
Vacuum bags, belts, filters, mop pads	Small and constant; a year of them is a real number
Employee burden	Payroll taxes, workers comp, unemployment, PTO — commonly 25 to 40 percent on top of wage
Callbacks and redos	A return trip that earns nothing; budget for a small percentage of visits
Key and lockbox management	Trips to collect, replace, and return access
Cancellations and skips	A gap you cannot resell, and a dirtier house next visit
First-visit slowness	Even a strong crew is slower in an unfamiliar house
Sales tax on services	Some states tax residential cleaning; check before you quote a total
Card processing fees	A percentage of every visit for the life of the account

Any one of these is small. Together they are the gap between a schedule that is full and a business that pays.

How do I present the number so it gets accepted?

Same day, in writing, and without apologizing for it.

Give the per-visit price first, then the scope in verbs — “counters, sink, stovetop, appliance exteriors, microwave interior, cabinet fronts spot-cleaned, floor vacuumed and mopped” — so the client can see what they are buying and can see what is not in there. Offer two frequency options rather than one number, since a client comparing weekly against biweekly is choosing between your prices instead of between you and a competitor.

Put the first deep clean on its own line and say why it is higher. State exclusions plainly. Add an expiration date, a cancellation window, and the access arrangement. Then stop talking. The number that gets negotiated is the one the estimator starts explaining.

Payment terms belong here too, not in month four. A recurring house is 26 invoices a year, and deciding up front how the money arrives is most of getting clients to pay without chasing anyone.

What do I track after the first three visits?

Actual crew minutes against your estimate, per house. That single comparison is what turns your minute table from a borrowed guess into your own production data, and it is the only way to find the house that has been quietly costing you forty minutes every other Tuesday since March.

Keel is an iOS app that keeps that record on the phone: no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, and an App Store privacy label reading Data Not Collected. It does not build the estimate — that stays wherever you write it today. What it does is everything after the yes. The invoice goes out from the driveway before you have loaded the vacuum, carrying your own numbering, your logo, your brand color, and a payment link the client scans as a QR code. The janitorial supply run, the case of microfiber, and the replacement vacuum get photographed at the counter and read on device by Apple Intelligence. Every leg of the route is a logged trip, which for a six-stop day is one of the larger deductions in the trade and the one most often lost — what the log has to contain is set out in independent contractor mileage log. The ledger is append-only and hash-chained, and the whole year exports as a single file, which matters when the question is whether the price you set in July still worked in February. Free covers unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase rather than a subscription. You can get it on the App Store.

Frequently asked questions

How do you estimate a house cleaning job?

Walk the house and count fixtures rather than rooms: toilets, showers, tubs, vanities, and sinks, plus floor area by surface type, stairs, pets, and clutter. Convert those counts to crew minutes using times you have measured with your own crew, apply a soil factor for frequency and condition, then multiply by your loaded crew-hour cost, add supplies and drive time, and apply your margin.

How long does it take to clean a house?

Long enough that guessing is expensive. Build it from task minutes instead: roughly 6 minutes per toilet, 14 for a routine shower, over 20 for a glass door with hard water, 6 per vanity, and floor time from measured square footage. A four-bedroom, three-bath house of about 2,850 square feet commonly lands near seven crew-hours on a recurring visit.

Should I charge by the hour or by the job for cleaning?

By the job, in almost every case. Hourly billing pays you less as your crew gets faster and puts the client’s attention on the clock rather than the result. Track hours internally so you know your true cost per house, then sell a per-visit number. Keep hourly for unbounded work: clutter handling, post-construction, and hoarding-adjacent cleanups.

What should I ask a customer before quoting a cleaning job?

When it was last cleaned, what bothers them most when they walk in, the frequency they want, who is home during service, pets and how they are contained, product sensitivities, what is off-limits, how you get in, and whether it is a move-out with an agent’s standard. The second question matters most, because it defines what clean means in that house.

Do I need to see the house before giving a price?

For a firm price, yes. Phone descriptions consistently understate bathroom count, hard water, pet load, clutter, and floor type, and those are exactly the variables that set the clock. Give a range over the phone, say clearly that it is a range, and batch your estimate visits by neighborhood so the unbillable driving covers three houses instead of one.

How do I price a first cleaning versus recurring visits?

Separately, and higher. The first visit carries everything the previous months left behind: grout, hard water, baseboards, door frames, vent covers, and behind furniture. Most operators land between 1.5 and 2.5 times the recurring price based on what they saw in the walkthrough. Put it on its own line with its own scope so recurring visits read as maintenance rather than repetition.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.