Most house cleaning calculators answer the customer's question: roughly what will this cost me. That is a useful thing and it is not what an owner needs. The owner's calculator answers the opposite question: what does this house cost my business to clean, and therefore what is the lowest number I can charge without working for nothing. Those are two different calculations with different inputs, and running the customer's one and treating its output as your price is how a business ends up busy and broke.
The inputs a cost calculator cannot do without
Cleaners on the job and hours each, which multiply into paid hours. The wage, and the percentage on top of it for the employer's payroll tax and insurance. The travel you pay for. The supplies consumed. The vehicle cost for the trip. And overhead per paid hour. Miss any one of those and the answer is wrong in a direction that always favours the customer, because every omitted cost is a cost you are absorbing.
Why square footage on its own is a poor input
Two 1,800 square foot houses can differ by an hour depending on clutter, pets, surfaces and how long since the last clean. Square feet is a reasonable way to describe a price to a customer and a poor way to derive one. Use hours to compute and square feet to sanity-check, which is the order the sheet on this site works in.
The vehicle, with a number you can defend
The trip costs fuel, wear, and a share of insurance and payments. Rather than guessing, the IRS business standard mileage rate gives a published figure: 76 cents a mile for the second half of 2026, 72.5 cents for the first half. Multiply by the round trip and you have a vehicle cost per visit that you can put in front of an accountant without embarrassment.
From cost to price, in one more step
Once you have the cost, the price is the cost divided by one minus your margin, with the card fee taken off the same side so the margin survives it. That is the second sheet on this site, and it is deliberately separate: mixing the two calculations is how a margin percentage quietly becomes a markup percentage.
Questions people ask about house cleaning calculator
Is there a free house cleaning calculator?
Yes, on this site, and it needs no account. It is built for the owner rather than the customer, so it asks about your wages rather than about your bathrooms.
What should I use for overhead per hour?
Your monthly fixed costs divided by the hours you actually billed last month. If you bill 400 hours and carry $2,400 of overhead, that is $6.
Does the calculator store anything?
Not unless you save it to an account. It computes in the browser and forgets.