How much to charge for house cleaning

In this article

Every pricing article you will read gives you a range and leaves you there. The range is the easy part. The hard part is that two cleaners in the same town, both charging $150 for the same house, can be $40 apart on what they keep — because one of them counted the drive and the other did not.

So this is in two halves. What the market is actually paying right now, with the sources at the bottom so you can check them. Then how to build your own number from underneath, and how to tell whether it is working.

What people are actually charging

These are 2026 US national figures. Metro areas run 20–50% above them; lower‑cost regions run 10–20% below.

Job	Range	Notes
Hourly, per cleaner	$30–$75	Midpoint around $50 for a standard clean. Solo and newly started sits at the bottom; an established, insured company sits at the top.
Standard clean, 2,000 sq ft	$120–$280	National average near $180.
Deep clean	$240–$500	Angi puts the average at $260. Roughly 1.5–2× a standard clean of the same house.
Move‑out clean	$250–$600	Averages around $280. Inside cupboards, inside the oven, inside the fridge — it is a different job, not a longer one.
Per square foot	$0.06–$0.14	Standard. Deep $0.12–$0.25, move‑out $0.15–$0.35.
1‑bed / 3‑bed standard	$75–$110 / $130–$200	Flat rates are what customers understand. Quote flat, cost it hourly.
Recurring discount	10–15%	Off the one‑off rate for weekly or fortnightly. More than 15% and you are buying the customer, not earning them.

Use that to sanity‑check yourself, not to set your price. If your number comes out well under the bottom of a range, you have missed a cost. If it comes out well over the top, you are either in an expensive metro or you are slow.

Three ways to price, and when each one breaks

Method	Good for	Where it fails
Hourly	First jobs, unknown houses, hoarder and post‑renovation work.	It punishes you for getting faster. Two years in you are quicker, better, and earning less per house than the day you started.
Flat rate per visit	Almost everything. It is what customers want and it rewards efficiency.	Quote it without seeing the house and one bad guess costs you every visit for a year.
Per square foot	Quoting fast, and for commercial where floor area really is the job.	A 1,200 sq ft house with three bathrooms and a dog is not a 1,200 sq ft house. Bathrooms and occupants drive the time, not floor area.

Most people who make money at this quote flat, cost hourly, and use square footage only to get in the right neighbourhood before they walk the house.

Build your number from underneath

Six lines. Do it once, properly, and you can quote from the sheet for a year.

• Pay. What the person doing the work earns per hour. If that is you, pay yourself a real wage — the median for this work is around $15 an hour, so if you are paying yourself less than that you are running a charity with a vacuum.
• Add the burden. Payroll taxes, workers’ comp, holiday. Roughly 15–25% on top of the wage. This is invisible and it is the most commonly forgotten cost in the trade.
• Add supplies. $2–$10 a job, depending on the house. It should be 3–6% of what you charge.
• Add the drive. Unpaid time is still time. A 25‑minute drive on a 2‑hour job is a fifth of your day that nobody is paying for.
• Add the overheads, per job. Insurance, phone, vehicle, software, advertising, the hour on Sunday doing invoices. Total them for the month and divide by the number of jobs you actually did that month — not the number you hoped to do.
• Add the margin. Everything above is cost. The margin is the business. 20–40% on top is the working range.

That is exactly what the cleaning price calculator does, including the part almost nobody does by hand: spreading what it costs you to win a customer across the visits they actually stay for. A customer who costs $80 to acquire and stays 18 visits costs you $4.44 a visit. One who leaves after three costs you $26.67.

What the money should look like afterwards

Your price is right when the shape of your accounts looks like this. If it does not, the price is the cause — not the effort.

Line	Share of revenue	What it means if you are outside it
Labour	45–55%	Over 55% is the single clearest signal in this trade: you have a pricing problem or a productivity problem. It is almost never a “work harder” problem.
Supplies	3–6%	If this is high you are buying retail. Concentrates, not spray bottles.
Vehicle	3–6%	High means your round is too spread out. Density, not effort.
Insurance	2–4%	If it is 0%, stop reading and go and buy cover.
Overhead and admin	8–15%	This is where software, phone and advertising live. It is also the first thing people forget to price in at all.
Net profit	15–25%	Under 10% and one bad month wipes out the year. Over 30% solo is normal — you are also the labour.

Gross margin — what is left after labour and supplies, before overheads — should sit somewhere between 50 and 70%.

Deep cleans and move‑outs are not longer cleans

They are different jobs with different risk, and pricing them as “a standard clean but slower” is how people end up doing an eight‑hour move‑out for $180.

• First clean of any recurring customer is a deep clean. Charge 1.5–2×. Say it at the quote, in writing, so it is never a surprise on the day.
• Move‑outs are inspected. Somebody with a deposit at stake is going to open the oven. Price for that, and photograph everything before you leave.
• Never quote either one blind. Ten minutes in the house is the cheapest insurance in this trade.
• Post‑construction is hourly. Always. Nobody has ever accurately guessed how much drywall dust is in a house.

Where to sit in the range

The bottom of the range is not a starting point you graduate from. It is where you stay unless something makes you different, because price is the only thing a customer can compare when everything else looks the same.

What actually moves you up the range: being insured and bonded and saying so; turning up in the window you promised; the same cleaner every visit; answering the phone; a written checklist of what is included. None of those cost much. All of them are worth more than $10 an hour to the kind of customer you want to keep.

And the one that costs nothing at all: quote in writing, the same day. Half the jobs in this trade are won by whoever replied first.

Raising the price on customers you already have

Everybody underprices their first ten customers. It is not a mistake you can grow out of — growing only multiplies it.

• Once a year, on a fixed date. Not when you feel brave.
• In writing, 30 days ahead, with the new price and the date it starts.
• No apology and no justification. “Costs have risen” is the whole message.
• 5–10% is normal and almost nobody leaves. If you have not raised in three years, do it in two steps rather than one.
• Expect to lose one or two. They will be the ones you dread. That is the increase working, not failing.

Sources

Every figure above comes from one of these, checked in August 2026. We have published them because nobody else does — most pricing guides in this trade quote numbers with no source at all, which makes them impossible to argue with and impossible to trust.

• Angi, deep cleaning cost and move‑out cleaning cost — national averages, built from what homeowners reported paying.
• HomeGuide, house cleaning prices — regional variation and per‑size rates.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics — median wage for maids and housekeeping cleaners.

Ranges move. If you are reading this a long way from 2026, re‑check the two Angi pages — they are updated yearly and they are built from what homeowners actually paid rather than from what anybody is selling.