Bidding commercial work is a repeatable procedure and most contractors do it as an act of nerve instead. The procedure has five steps and takes an hour for a typical office. Doing it means you know before you send the bid whether you want the account at that price, which is a completely different position from finding out in month three. It also means a lost bid teaches you something, because you know exactly which assumption the winner beat.
How to bid a commercial cleaning job, steps one and two: walk it, then measure it
Walk the building with the person who will manage it, at the time of day the crew will work. Note the mix: open office, private offices, restrooms and fixture counts, kitchens, stairwells, entrances, floor types. Ask what the current contractor does and what they complain about, which is usually where the real scope is. Then get the cleanable area rather than the gross figure on the lease.
How to bid on cleaning jobs, steps three and four: hours, then loaded cost
Convert each area type to hours using your own production rate for that type. Add fixed time that does not scale: setup, travel between floors, locking up, restocking. Multiply hours by a loaded hourly cost, which is the wage plus employer payroll tax and insurance and any paid time you fund. Then add supplies, consumables if included, and equipment cost per visit. That total is what servicing the account costs you monthly.
How to bid on cleaning contracts, step five: price, then decide
Divide the monthly cost by one minus your target margin to get the monthly price, and check it per square foot to see whether it sits in the range that market accepts. Now decide. If the price you need is above what the building will pay, the honest outcome is to not bid rather than to win at a number that funds nothing. Businesses that bid every job at whatever wins are the ones that are busiest and least profitable.
Other questions people ask
How long should a commercial cleaning bid take to prepare?
About an hour of desk work after the walkthrough, once you have production rates you trust. Less than that and you are guessing at one of the five steps.
Should I ask what the current contract costs?
Ask. Many buyers will say, and knowing the incumbent number tells you whether the specification you are being shown is the one being delivered.
What if I am always the most expensive bid?
Check your production rates against a job you already run profitably. If they are right, you are competing against people who have not done this arithmetic, and some of those accounts are not worth winning.
How to bid on janitorial contracts: what changes when the work is a term contract?
The five steps do not change; three things around them do. The specification becomes the thing you are bid against rather than a description, so price what it says instead of what you would have done. Consumables have to be either excluded and invoiced at cost or included at a stated monthly allowance, because silence about them is a routine argument in month three. And a twelve month term needs an escalation clause tied to a date, or a wage rise in year two comes out of your margin.
How to bid commercial cleaning jobs when you have never bid one before?
Borrow your own numbers rather than somebody else's. Take a building you already clean at a profit, record the hours actually spent on each type of space across several visits, and divide to get production rates you can trust. Until you have those, every bid is a guess dressed as arithmetic, and the first sign of it is that you are always the most expensive or always the cheapest.
How do you bid a commercial cleaning job you have not been allowed to walk?
Price it with the assumptions printed on the document, or decline it. Without a walkthrough you cannot see the fixture counts, the floor types or what the current contractor is actually doing, and those are the three things that move the hours. If you have to bid blind, state the areas and frequencies you priced and say in writing that the price stands only for those. A re-price on sight is a much easier conversation before the contract than after it.