A commercial cleaning bid is defensible when every number in it can be traced to something you measured: square footage and scope from a walkthrough, hours from production rates, cost from a loaded labor rate, and price from a margin you chose on purpose. Owners who lose money on contracts almost never got the wage wrong or the supply cost wrong — they guessed the hours, and hours are the one number in the stack that keeps moving after the contract is signed.
This guide walks the full path from site visit to monthly price: what to capture on the walkthrough, how production rates turn square feet into hours, what a loaded labor rate really is, a complete worked example with the math shown, and how to protect the margin after you win.
Why cleaning bids fail
Ask owners in cleaning-business communities what sinks a bid that looked profitable on paper and the answers converge on one pattern: the job was priced around best-case labor time. Rent does not drift. Insurance does not drift. The estimated 3.0 hours per visit quietly becomes 3.5 because the tenants are messier than the walkthrough suggested, the crew is new, or nobody priced the twenty minutes of loading and travel — and that half hour repeats five nights a week, every week, for the life of the contract.
The second failure is invisible costs: unpaid-looking travel time that is actually payable labor, supervision visits, supplies restocked from the truck without being tracked, and payroll taxes and workers' compensation that were never added to the wage. A bid built on the raw hourly wage is underpriced before it is even sent.
Start with the walkthrough, not the spreadsheet
The walkthrough is where the bid is actually won or lost, because it is the only chance to measure instead of assume. Capture: cleanable square footage by area type (open office, restrooms, kitchens, lobbies, hard-floor vs carpet), fixture counts in restrooms (each toilet, sink, and dispenser is recurring work), occupancy and traffic (a 12,000 sq ft office with 40 people cleans very differently from the same space with 150), service frequency by area, floor surfaces and what they need, trash and recycling volume, access logistics (loading dock, elevator waits, alarm procedures — these are minutes on every single visit), where supplies will live, and what the client actually complained about with the last vendor. That last answer defines what better must look like — and what it costs.
Write it all down in one structured place. A walkthrough that lives in a notebook produces a bid nobody can reconstruct in six months when the client asks why the price is what it is.
Production rates: turning square feet into hours
A production rate is how many square feet one worker can clean to a defined scope in one hour, and it is the engine of the whole estimate. Published references exist — ISSA's cleaning-times standards catalog hundreds of task-level times, and vendor guides publish office rates — but ranges are wide because density, fixtures, and scope dominate: an open-plan office with nightly trash-and-vacuum runs far faster than a medical suite with disinfection protocols.
The honest method is to treat published rates as a starting bracket and build your own: time your existing crews on jobs you already run, per area type, and keep the numbers. Three timed jobs beat any table on the internet, because they are your crews, your scope, and your standard of clean. Then apply them: measured square footage divided by your production rate, area by area, gives hours per visit — the number everything else stands on.
Load the labor rate — the wage is not the cost
If a cleaner earns 18 dollars an hour, an hour of their work does not cost 18 dollars. Employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation premiums, liability insurance tied to payroll, paid time off, and the supervisor's periodic site visits all ride on top — commonly adding somewhere in the range of 15 to 25 percent or more to the base wage depending on your state, claims history, and comp class. Your accountant can compute your exact burden from last year's numbers; until then, bidding at the raw wage means donating the burden out of your margin.
The loaded rate is also the honest input for comparing bids to reality later: when you review a contract's profitability, actual hours times the loaded rate against contract revenue is the comparison that tells the truth.
The full bid formula, worked end to end
Everything below is a hypothetical example with the arithmetic shown — swap in your own measured numbers. The site: a 12,000 sq ft office, cleaned five nights a week. The walkthrough and your timed production rates say the nightly scope takes 4.0 crew-hours per visit (two cleaners, two hours). Five visits a week is about 21.7 visits a month, so roughly 87 crew-hours a month.
Cost it: at an 18 dollar wage with 25 percent burden, the loaded rate is 22.50, so labor is about 1,950 dollars a month. Supplies for an office of this profile might run about 5 percent of labor — call it 100 dollars. Fifteen minutes of paid travel per cleaner per visit adds about 11 crew-hours a month, roughly 245 dollars. Allocating overhead (insurance base, admin, software, vehicle) at 10 percent of those direct costs adds about 230 dollars. Total monthly cost: roughly 2,525 dollars.
Price it: at a target 25 percent margin, price equals cost divided by 0.75 — about 3,365 dollars a month, which sanity-checks at about 28 cents per square foot per month. Now watch the failure mode: if the crew actually needs 4.5 hours per visit instead of 4.0, labor rises by about 245 dollars a month and the margin on the same price falls from 25 percent to under 18 — one half-hour of nightly drift erased seven points of margin. That is why the hours estimate deserves more scrutiny than every other line combined.
Per square foot, per hour, or per month?
Clients buy a monthly price; per-square-foot and per-hour numbers are how you build and sanity-check it, not how you should present it. Published per-square-foot ranges are wide enough to check a finished bid against — if your math lands far outside typical ranges for the facility type, find out why before the client does — but no published rate can produce a bid, because it knows nothing about your labor market, your scope, or that building's fixture count.
Quoting hourly to commercial clients has a subtler problem: it caps your upside for being efficient and invites line-item auditing of every visit. Bid the outcome (a clean building to a defined scope, monthly price), and keep the hours math as your internal skeleton.
After you win: the bid meets reality
A bid is a forecast, and forecasts drift. Scope creep arrives politely ('while you're here, could the crew also...'), new-crew hours run long, travel grows when routes change, and supplies walk. The contracts that stay profitable belong to owners who compare forecast to actual every month: bid hours versus real worked hours per site, bid supply cost versus what the site consumed, contract revenue versus loaded cost. When the drift is real, the data funds either a fix (rebalance the crew, tighten scope) or a repricing conversation backed by evidence instead of a feeling.
This is the part software genuinely changes. StockPoint's time clock verifies the hours with GPS and a selfie check at each building, its walkthrough estimator keeps the original site measurements and scope in the same system, and its per-contract monthly P&L puts verified labor, supplies from per-site inventory, and invoiced revenue on one page — so 'is this account still profitable?' is a report, not a project. The same verified punches also price the invoices, which means the number you bill and the number you cost are never two different numbers.
Pre-bid checklist
Before the price leaves your desk: square footage measured by area type, not taken from the listing; fixture counts written down; production rates from your own timed jobs where possible; hours per visit computed area by area, with a line for travel and load-in; wage loaded with your real burden percentage; supplies, overhead allocation, and supervision included; margin chosen deliberately and stress-tested against a half-hour of nightly drift; and the walkthrough notes stored where you can find them at renewal. If any of those are guesses, the price is a guess.
If you want the after-the-win half handled — verified hours per site, walkthrough records, and a monthly per-contract P&L that compares your bid to what the building actually costs you — that is the workflow StockPoint is built around. A free signup at getstockpoint.com takes a building from walkthrough to priced contract to verified actuals in one place.