---
title: "How to price a house cleaning job (without guessing) · BlastoClean"
description: "A room-by-room method for estimating cleaning work that produces prices you can repeat, explain and defend."
url: "https://www.blastoclean.com/blog/how-to-price-a-house-cleaning-job"
---

# How to price a house cleaning job (without guessing)

June 10, 2026 · 2 min read · The BlastoClean Team

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.