House cleaning pricing goes wrong in the same way in almost every business we have looked at: the owner picks a price that sounds right for the area, works out roughly how long the house takes, and never checks the two against each other again. Two or three years later the wage has moved, the house has gained a dog, and the visit is breaking even. Pricing from the cost up takes twenty minutes and it does not need an accountant; it needs the paid hours, the real cost of an hour, and a decision about the margin you want to keep.
Start with paid hours, not with the visit
Write down how many cleaners go and how long each is inside. Two people for three hours is six paid hours. Add the travel you pay for, because that is a cost of this house even though the customer never sees it. That total is the only quantity that matters, and it is the one most owners get wrong because they think in visit length rather than in labour.
Load the wage before you multiply
The wage on the payslip is not the cost of an hour. The employer's share of Social Security is 6.2% and Medicare is 1.45%, so 7.65% is owed on every wage dollar before any state unemployment insurance or workers' compensation. Add whatever those cost you and any paid time off you fund, and you have a loaded hourly cost. For most cleaning businesses this lands somewhere between ten and twenty per cent above the wage, and applying it turns a nineteen dollar wage into something over twenty-one.
Add what the visit consumes
Supplies, chemicals and machine wear used on the house. The vehicle, for which the IRS business mileage rate is a defensible per-mile figure rather than a guess. And overhead per paid hour: the office, the phone, the software, the marketing and your own unbilled time, divided by the hours you actually bill in a month. Only when all of those are on the number do you have a cost.
Then choose a margin, and divide
Decide the share of the price you intend to keep, then divide the cost by one minus that share. A $186 cost at a 35% margin is $286 before card fees, not $251. Adding the percentage instead of dividing is the single most common pricing error in the trade and it costs about nine per cent of the price every time. The pricing guide on this site does the division and shows the result per visit and over a year of the schedule you put the house on.
Questions people ask about house cleaning pricing
What are typical house cleaning rates?
There is no useful national answer, because the wage you pay and the market you sell in vary more than any average could carry. Price from your own cost and then sanity-check against what local competitors publish.
Should I charge by the hour or a flat rate?
Flat, for recurring work. Hourly pricing punishes you for getting faster, which is exactly what happens on a house you clean every fortnight.
How often should I raise prices?
Once a year, on a schedule, in writing, with notice. Businesses that raise prices reactively raise them late and lose customers over a bigger jump.