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A $216 quote on a 1,800 sqft home nets $50.64 after $100 labor, $20 drive time, and overhead — and one weekly client is $11,232 a year.
Cleaning looks like the simplest business to price — until the drive time eats the margin. This calculator prices a job the way a profitable cleaning company does: square footage times your rate sets the quote, then the true cost comes out — crew wages for hours on site AND behind the windshield, supplies, and a real overhead line for insurance, bonding, software, and marketing. On a 1,800 sqft home at $0.12/sqft, the $216 quote leaves $50.64 of profit at a 23.4% margin. The numbers that actually decide this business — route density, frequency mix, and crew effective rate — are all here, annualized so retention math stops being a guess.
Cleaning owners use it before quoting: a $216 flat rate on 1,800 sqft nets $50.64 after labor, drive time, and overhead — and one weekly client is $11,232/yr of annuity.
Flat rate, and it is not close. Clients hear hourly pricing as “you will stretch the job,” and hourly punishes your efficiency — the faster your crew gets, the less you earn. Flat per-square-foot pricing flips both: the client gets certainty, you get paid for speed. But flat rates only work if your time-per-sqft data is honest, so time every job for your first 90 days and recalibrate the rate. The levers inside the flat price: first-clean surcharges (1.5–2× recurring is standard — the first visit resets the home to your baseline), deep-clean and move-out pricing at 40–80% above recurring, and frequency discounts that are worth every point — a weekly client at $216 is $11,232 a year, 4.3× a monthly client at the same rate, so discounting weekly to win it pays for itself.
Because it is one — a two-person crew spending 30 minutes between jobs burns $20 of wages with zero revenue attached, and two such gaps a day costs $5,200 a year in windshield payroll. Most failed cleaning companies were profitable on site and bankrupt in the car. The fix is route density: cluster bookings by neighborhood on the same days, quote out-of-cluster jobs higher to cover the drive, and treat any job more than 20 minutes away as a premium booking or a decline. The same logic sets your growth path: adding a second crew only pays when the route map is dense enough that the new crew is not driving the same total miles to serve the same total homes.
Three red flags: homes that take one person over three hours — fatigue destroys quality and your reviews; clients who negotiate hard on the first price — they negotiate every price and leave the bad review anyway; and any job you cannot reach in 20 minutes without premium pricing. Also watch the margin line on this calculator per job TYPE: recurring weekly homes are the annuity, one-time deep cleans are the cash spikes that fill schedule gaps, and move-outs are premium work but seasonal. A book of 25 weekly clients at these numbers is $280,000 a year of revenue — the entire game is winning weekly clients and never losing them, because replacing a lost $11,232 client costs months of marketing while keeping one costs a reminder text.