How to bid a commercial cleaning contract

How commercial bids differ from residential quotes

A house clean is priced per visit. A commercial contract is priced per month for a scope that repeats night after night, often for a year or more. Small errors compound: underestimate by half an hour a night on a five-night contract and you lose more than 120 labor hours over a year. The client also compares bids side by side, frequently through a purchasing manager who will look for gaps in scope.

The work is labor-heavy and the labor market is tight. US janitors and building cleaners earned a median of $17.71 an hour in May 2025, many work evening hours, and about 321,800 openings are projected each year^[2]. Janitorial services employment was 1,084,200 in September 2026, up 1.4% on a year earlier^[3]. A bid that cannot pay enough to keep a reliable cleaner on the site will cost you the contract later even if it wins today.

The walkthrough

Bids are won or lost on the walkthrough. Bring a checklist and a measuring tool, and photograph everything you may need to refer to.

1. 01

   Measure by space type

   Record square footage separately for offices, open areas, conference rooms, restrooms, break rooms, lobbies, corridors, stairs and storage. Production rates differ by space type.

2. 02

   Count fixtures and points

   Toilets, urinals, sinks, showers, trash and recycling points, desks, kitchen appliances, glass doors and entrance mats.

3. 03

   Note floor types

   Carpet, vinyl, sealed concrete, tile, wood. Floor care is often the biggest variable after restrooms.

4. 04

   Ask about frequency

   Which areas are cleaned nightly, which weekly and which less often. Ask what the client expects that the current provider misses.

5. 05

   Check access and security

   Hours of access, alarm procedures, key or fob control, restricted rooms and who to call after hours.

6. 06

   Ask about special requirements

   Medical or dental exam rooms, food areas, labs, high-traffic entrances in winter, green cleaning requests.

7. 07

   Confirm supplies

   Who supplies paper products, soap and liners, and whether the client wants them in your price or billed separately.

8. 08

   Ask about the current contract

   Why they are looking, when the current agreement ends and how they will decide.

From square feet to labor hours

Convert the walkthrough into labor hours with production rates: how many square feet of each space type one cleaner can finish per hour to your standard, or how many minutes each fixture takes. Industry tables exist, but your own timed data is better, because your cleaners, equipment and standards are what will do the job.

Example: a nightly scope of 9,000 square feet of offices at 3,000 per hour is 3.0 hours; 1,500 square feet of corridors at 4,000 per hour is about 0.4 hours; 12 restroom fixtures at 4 minutes is 0.8 hours; and 40 trash points at 1 minute is about 0.7 hours. With a break room and setup and wrap-up, the nightly total is about 5.5 labor hours.

Add weekly and monthly tasks separately, such as vacuuming edges, dusting high surfaces, scrubbing restroom floors, and periodic floor care. Convert each to hours per month and add them to the nightly total multiplied by cleaning nights.

Pricing the labor

Price labor at what it really costs, not at the wage. On top of the hourly wage come employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, any health or paid leave benefits and the cost of hiring and training replacements. Across US private industry, total compensation averaged $46.89 an hour worked in June 2026, with benefits making up 30.0% of it^[1]. Your burden will differ, so get the real figure from your payroll provider.

Then add:

• Supervision: inspection time, the supervisor's share of the site and on-call coverage.
• Supplies and chemicals: per labor hour or per square foot from your purchasing history.
• Equipment: vacuums, auto-scrubbers and carts, spread over their working life.
• Consumables, if included: paper, soap and liners, priced from the client's usage or billed at cost plus a handling margin.
• Overhead and profit: your share of office, insurance, vehicles and marketing, plus the margin you need.

The industry is crowded with small firms. There were 67,799 US janitorial and maid service establishments with paid employees in 2023, employing 1,088,193 people, and the average payroll per employee was $30,089^[4]. Competing on price alone against firms with no benefits or insurance is a losing game; compete on reliability, quality control and response time.

Write the scope as a frequency table

Clients compare scopes. A frequency table makes yours easy to check and hard to undercut by leaving things out. List each area, each task and its frequency: nightly, weekly, monthly, quarterly or on request. Example tasks for an office:

• Nightly: empty trash and recycling, clean and restock restrooms, wipe break room counters and sinks, vacuum traffic areas, spot-clean entry glass.
• Weekly: vacuum all carpet edge to edge, damp-mop hard floors, dust reachable surfaces, clean interior glass partitions.
• Monthly: high dusting, vent covers, baseboards, deep clean restroom floors.
• Quarterly or on request: carpet extraction, strip and refinish hard floors, exterior window coordination.

The proposal format

Keep the proposal short and in this order:

1. A one-paragraph summary: what you will clean, how often, who will do it and the monthly price.
2. The frequency table by area.
3. The staffing plan: nightly hours, number of cleaners, a named supervisor and how call-outs are covered.
4. Quality control: inspection schedule, scored checklists and how issues are reported and fixed.
5. Security and access procedures, including key control.
6. Insurance and bonding certificates available on request, and any certifications.
7. Price: monthly price for the core scope, consumables either included or billed separately, and a price list for extras such as floor care.
8. Terms: start date, term, notice period for either side, annual price adjustment wording and what happens if the client changes the scope.

A clear staffing and call-out plan is often what separates the winning bid from the cheapest one; the commercial shift scheduling guide covers how to build it.

Example: a five-night office bid

Example: a fictional company bids a 12,000-square-foot office cleaned five nights a week. The walkthrough and production rates give 5.5 nightly labor hours plus 18 hours a month of weekly and monthly tasks, about 137 labor hours a month. Labor is priced at the company's loaded cost per hour, supervision adds a set share, supplies and equipment are priced per labor hour from purchasing records and consumables are billed separately at cost plus handling. The proposal names a nightly cleaner and a trained backup, includes a monthly inspection report and offers floor care as a separate price list. The company does not win on price, but the client chooses it because its staffing plan explains exactly how a missed night is covered.

After you submit

Follow up within a few business days with a short note: confirm the client received the proposal, offer to walk the site again with the decision-maker and ask whether any part of the scope needs adjusting. If you lose, ask why. Price is often the stated reason, but the follow-up conversation sometimes reveals that a competitor offered a more frequent restroom clean or a day porter, which is a scope difference you can learn from.

If you win, schedule a start-up walkthrough with the client contact before the first night. Confirm the frequency table, keys and alarm procedures, supply locations and the inspection schedule, and introduce the cleaner and the supervisor. The first two weeks of a new contract set the client's impression for the rest of the term, so plan a supervisor inspection on several of those nights.

Common bid mistakes

• Pricing from total square footage alone, without separating restrooms and break rooms.
• Forgetting setup, travel between floors and wrap-up time each night.
• Including consumables in a fixed price without a usage cap.
• No annual price adjustment clause on a multi-year contract.
• No re-measure clause when the client adds space or changes hours.

For homes and one-time jobs, the methods in house cleaning pricing and move-out clean pricing apply instead.