“How do I price a house cleaning?” There are three common answers: by the hour, at a flat rate by bedrooms and bathrooms, or by the square foot. The customer sees one of them. Underneath all three sits the same number, and it is the one that decides whether you make money: how many minutes the house takes, times what a minute of your cleaner costs.
This article compares the three methods, then builds that number from a time study, and uses it to price the first deep clean, the recurring visit, the frequency discount and the add-ons.
Three ways to quote, and who carries the risk
HomeAdvisor’s house cleaning cost guide, updated June 2026, reports what homeowners pay under each method. Its ranges are national and are the guide’s, not a rule:
| Method | The guide’s range | Who carries a slow job |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly | $12 to $25 an hour for independent cleaners; $25 to $80 for cleaning companies | The customer |
| Flat rate per visit | $118 to $238, average $176; bedroom rates of $30 to $80 | You |
| Per square foot | $0.10 to $0.20 for standard cleaning; up to $0.25 deep; up to $0.35 move-out | You |
Hourly is the safest for you and the hardest to sell: the homeowner cannot tell what the visit will cost, and a fast cleaner earns the business less. Flat rate is the easiest for a customer to say yes to, because they know the number before you arrive, but every extra minute is yours to absorb. Square foot pricing is quick to quote from a listing, but it hides what actually takes time: a 2,000-square-foot house with three bathrooms takes longer than one with one bathroom.
Notice the bottom of the hourly range. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage of maids and housekeeping cleaners at $17.07 an hour in May 2025. A price of $12 an hour would not cover the middle of the market’s wage, before a cent of payroll tax, supplies or drive time. A guide’s low end is a data point, not a price to match.
The number under all three: minutes by room
For your next ten cleans, log the minutes each room type takes: kitchen, full bathroom, half bathroom, bedroom, living and dining areas. Keep first visits in a separate column from recurring ones, because they are different jobs. Ten cleans is enough to see the pattern; keep logging and the averages sharpen.
Say the log for one cleaner on recurring visits settles at these numbers. They are illustrative; yours will differ with your checklist and your homes.
| Room | Minutes, recurring visit |
|---|---|
| Kitchen | 35 |
| Full bathroom | 25 |
| Half bathroom | 10 |
| Bedroom | 15 |
| Living and dining areas | 30 |
A three-bedroom, two-bath house then takes 35 + 50 + 45 + 30 = 160 minutes, about 2.7 hours. As a check, HomeAdvisor’s guide says a routine cleaning of an average-size home generally takes one to three hours.
What a cleaner’s minute costs
Wages are the start, not the cost. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for June 2026 puts the average for service occupations in private industry at $23.73 an hour in total compensation: $18.26 in wages and salaries and $5.47 in benefits, of which $2.08 was legally required benefits such as Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. Worked from those figures, benefits ran about 30 cents on every wage dollar.
Then come the hours nobody pays for: driving between houses, loading supplies, the visit that cancels at the door. Your real hourly cost walks through that in full. Here is the short version, with illustrative figures:
| Wage | $18.00 |
| Plus 30% for payroll costs and benefits | $23.40 |
| Divided by 0.80, if 80% of paid hours are spent inside customers’ homes | $29.25 |
| Plus supplies, insurance and overhead per billable hour | $35.00 |
| Price per billable hour at a 30% margin (cost ÷ 0.70) | $50.00 |
That is about 83 cents a minute. The last line divides rather than adds, for the reason markup vs. margin explains: adding 30 percent to $35 gives $45.50, which is a margin of only about 23 percent.
From minutes to a flat rate
Now the flat rate writes itself: minutes for the house times the price per minute. With the illustrative room times and $50 an hour:
| Home | Minutes | Recurring price |
|---|---|---|
| 2 bedrooms, 1 bath | 120 | $100 |
| 3 bedrooms, 2 baths | 160 | $133 |
| 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1 half bath | 185 | $154 |
If you would rather quote by the square foot, divide each price by a typical size for that home in your area, and keep a bathroom adder so the three-bath house is not priced like the one-bath house next door. Either way the customer sees a simple number, and you know what is under it.
The first visit is a different job
HomeAdvisor’s guide says deep cleans, with grout scrubbing, baseboard wiping and furniture moving, stretch to three to six hours, and reports deep cleaning at $200 to $400 per visit. Move-in and move-out cleaning, it says, costs up to $500 depending on the size of the home.
Price the first visit from its own column in your time log, not as a percentage you guessed. If your first visits run, say, 1.8 times as long as the recurring ones, the 160-minute house becomes a 288-minute first clean, and $240 at the same rate. Put both numbers in the quote, “first visit $240, then $133 a visit,” so the second invoice is not a surprise to either of you.
Frequency discounts that pay for themselves
HomeAdvisor reports weekly cleaning at an average of $75 to $200 per week and biweekly at $100 to $250 per visit, and says weekly costs less because there is simply less to clean; some companies discount for that reason, especially on longer contracts.
So let the minutes set the discount. If your log shows the same house taking 120 minutes weekly, 160 biweekly and 200 monthly, price it at $100, $133 and $167 a visit. The weekly customer pays 25 percent less per visit than the biweekly one and you earn the same per hour, because the discount is time you did not spend. A discount that is not backed by fewer minutes is just a lower price.
Add-ons, priced by the minute too
HomeAdvisor notes that add-on services such as window or tile and grout cleaning raise the total. Inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows, inside cabinets, a load of laundry, changing the beds: time each one the first five times you do it and price it at your per-minute rate. Ask about pets as well; hair on every surface is time, and it is better priced into the quote than discovered on the couch.
Every input here is something a homeowner can answer before you visit: bedrooms, bathrooms, rough size, how often, first clean or recurring, add-ons and pets. If you want that answered on your own website, NapkinPrice™ shows the homeowner a price range built from your own rates. The cleaning page shows how it is set up for house cleaning.