How to Price Recurring Janitorial by the Square Foot

When a prospect asks what you charge per square foot, you need a real answer, not a guess. A lot of operators throw out a number they heard somewhere and wonder why they are losing money three months into the account. The per square foot rate is a shorthand. It has to come from actual math, or it will erode your margin one visit at a time. Here is the method.

Start with your production rate

Your production rate is how many square feet one cleaner can service in one hour under the specific scope you have been asked to provide. For standard office janitorial (vacuum carpet, empty trash, wipe surfaces, clean restrooms) a realistic starting rate is 3,000 to 4,000 square feet per hour. That number is not fixed. Hard floors lower it. A lot of glass lowers it. A dense restroom count lowers it. A light scope with mostly carpet and minimal restrooms can push it higher.

Do not use one production rate for every building. Adjust it to what the job actually requires before you run any numbers. Using the wrong rate is the most common way operators underprice a job before the first visit.

Convert square footage into crew hours

Divide the building's square footage by your production rate. That gives you hours per visit.

Example: 20,000 square feet at a rate of 4,000 square feet per hour equals 5 hours per visit.

If the client wants five nights a week, that is 25 labor hours per week for one person, or split across a crew however it makes sense for that account.

Mark up your labor

Take the hourly wage you pay your cleaner and multiply it by 200 to 210 percent. If you pay 16 dollars per hour, your charge rate is 32 dollars per hour. The 16 you pay covers the wage. The other 16 covers overhead, payroll taxes, supplies, management time, and profit. Never tell the client an hourly rate. Price the job. But always know your hourly rate in your head so you know your margin before you quote anything.

If your market will support it, push the markup toward 210 percent. On accounts where competition is heavy, you may run closer to 200. Going below 200 starts to compromise the margin in ways that hurt when you factor in turnover, retraining, and the occasional complaint callback.

Build the monthly on 4.33 weeks

Multiply your hours per visit by the visits per week to get weekly hours. Multiply weekly hours by your charge rate to get the weekly price. Then multiply the weekly price by 4.33, which is the true average number of weeks in a month. As I covered in the guide to bidding a commercial cleaning contract, using 4 instead of 4.33 means you undercharge every single month and give away real money over a year.

Continuing the 20,000 square foot example at five nights a week:

• 5 hours per visit times 5 nights = 25 hours per week
• 25 hours times 32 dollars = 800 per week
• 800 times 4.33 = 3,464 per month

That is your monthly price before you back out the per square foot rate.

Back out the per square foot rate

Divide the monthly price by the building's square footage.

3,464 divided by 20,000 = about 17 cents per square foot per month.

That is your real rate for that job at that scope. When the prospect asks what you charge per square foot, 17 cents is the honest answer for this account, and you can stand behind it because you know exactly where it came from. The Janity.ai Bid Calculator runs this math automatically once you enter the square footage, scope, and frequency, so you are not doing it by hand on every walkthrough.

Why the rate compresses as buildings get bigger

Setup time is fixed. On a 5,000 square foot suite, a crew might spend 15 to 20 minutes getting in, setting up, gathering supplies, and doing an initial sweep before the real service begins. On a 50,000 square foot building, that same setup time is absorbed into a much longer run. The effective production rate goes up because there is more service per dollar of fixed overhead.

Large facilities also tend to have simpler scopes: long uninterrupted runs of carpet, larger restrooms that clean faster per square foot, fewer area transitions. All of that raises efficiency and lowers the cost per square foot.

As a rough market benchmark:

• Under 10,000 square feet: 18 to 28 cents per square foot per month is common
• 20,000 to 50,000 square feet: 10 to 18 cents depending on scope and frequency
• Over 100,000 square feet: can come in below 8 cents on a simple scope

These benchmarks are a sanity check, not a starting point. Run the math from your production rate and labor cost first, then compare to what closes in your market.

What raises the rate per square foot

Hard floors. Carpet gets vacuumed. Hard floors get swept and mopped, and sometimes machine scrubbed or burnished. A building that is 80 percent hard floors can take 30 to 40 percent more labor hours than the same square footage in carpet. That time translates directly into a higher rate. Note that one time floor services like strip and wax are priced differently from recurring janitorial. If you need those numbers, they are in the guide on pricing deep cleans, strip and wax, and post construction work.

Glass. Lobbies with tall windows, conference rooms with interior glass walls, storefronts: every pane is time. Smudge control on heavy glass is real maintenance and it shows up in your hours.

Restrooms. Restrooms are the most labor intensive area per square foot in any building. Four restrooms in 15,000 square feet is a very different job from four restrooms in 50,000 square feet. Count the restrooms on every walkthrough and factor them into your production rate.

Frequency. A five night a week account keeps the building cleaner between visits, so each service takes less time. A once a week account has more accumulation on every visit and often takes longer per visit than you expect. If the prospect asks for multiple frequency options, run the math separately for each one. Do not just divide the monthly price and assume the rate holds.

A worked example from start to finish

Building: 15,000 square feet. Mix of carpet and tile in the common areas and restrooms. Standard office with four restrooms. Three nights a week.

The tile and four restrooms pull the production rate down from the standard office baseline. Adjusted production rate: 3,000 square feet per hour.

1. Hours per visit: 15,000 divided by 3,000 = 5 hours
2. Weekly hours: 5 hours times 3 nights = 15 hours per week
3. Pay rate 16 dollars per hour. Charge rate 32 dollars per hour.
4. Weekly price: 15 times 32 = 480
5. Monthly price: 480 times 4.33 = 2,078
6. Rate per square foot: 2,078 divided by 15,000 = 13.9 cents per month

That number is defensible because you can show exactly where it came from. When a prospect tells you another company quoted 9 cents, you can walk them through the math and ask what that company is doing differently on the floor care. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they go with the cheap quote and call you in six months.