How to price a house cleaning job (without guessing)

Ask five cleaning company owners how they price a job and you'll get five answers — square footage, number of bedrooms, "about what the last one cost", gut feel, or an hourly rate with a shrug. All five work until they don't: the day you quote a four-bedroom house that turns out to have two dogs, a home gym and a kitchen that hasn't seen a sponge since spring.

There's a better way, and it isn't complicated. It's the method professional estimators use in every trade: break the job into pieces small enough that each piece is easy to estimate, then let arithmetic do the rest.

Step 1: Think in rooms, not houses

A "house" is impossible to estimate. A kitchen is easy. So is a bathroom, a bedroom, a hallway. Walk the property (in person or over video) and list the rooms. That list is the skeleton of your quote.

Step 2: Give every task a time

For each room type, write down the tasks you actually perform and how many minutes each one takes a trained cleaner. Be honest, not optimistic:

• Wipe counters and cabinet fronts — 10 min
• Clean sink and faucets — 5 min
• Clean oven interior — 30 min
• Vacuum and mop floor — 15 min

Do this once, and you have a task library. From now on, estimating a kitchen means ticking boxes, not staring at the ceiling.

Step 3: Adjust for size and condition

A small powder room and a master bathroom are not the same job, and neither are a maintained home and a first clean. Instead of re-guessing every time, use multipliers:

• Size: small ×0.75, standard ×1.00, large ×1.25
• Condition: light ×0.90, standard ×1.00, heavy ×1.25

A large, heavily soiled kitchen at 60 base minutes becomes 60 × 1.25 × 1.25 ≈ 94 minutes. The multiplier does the negotiating with reality so you don't have to.

Step 4: Price the time, not the vibe

Add up the minutes across every room, round up to your billing increment (most companies use 15 or 30 minutes), and multiply by your hourly rate. Then add any fixed fees — travel, supplies, a first-visit surcharge — and tax.

That's the whole method. The price is now something you can repeat (the same house gets the same price next month), explain ("the kitchen is 94 minutes because of the oven and the condition") and defend (when a customer pushes back, you can talk about tasks, not feelings).

Where software earns its keep

You can absolutely run this method on paper or a spreadsheet — plenty of companies do, right up until the spreadsheet has seventeen tabs and nobody trusts the formulas anymore.

This method is exactly what BlastoClean runs under the hood: you build the room and task library once, tick boxes during the walkthrough, and the price updates live using your rates and your multipliers — worked out in cents, so the total on the screen is the total on the quote, every time. When the customer's ready, they accept online from a private link.

However you run it, stop guessing. Your prices — and your margins — will thank you.