What should a cleaning company charge, and where does the margin actually go?

Cleaning companies charge roughly £20 to £30 an hour in the UK and $45 to $75 in the US, against independent cleaners at £15 to £22 and $30 to $45. The gap is not profit. It is employer taxes, holiday pay, insurance, supplies, cover when someone is ill, and the hours you pay for but cannot bill.

Most cleaning businesses set their price against what they pay the cleaner. That number is somewhere between 25% and 45% below what the hour actually costs them, which is why a company billing £20 and paying £13 can work hard all year and end up with very little.

Figures below come from UK and US pricing guides and wage data read in October 2026. They describe advertised rates, which are the visible end of a market where plenty is quoted privately.

What do cleaning companies actually charge?

The spread between a company and an independent is the whole business model. A customer paying the higher number is buying insurance, vetted and replaceable staff, cover when their regular cleaner is ill, and somebody to complain to. If you cannot name those things when asked why you cost more, you will be negotiated down to the independent's rate while carrying a company's costs.

One floor is not negotiable. In the UK the April 2026 National Living Wage for over-21s is £12.71 an hour, so a company paying £13 is paying a shade above the legal minimum and has almost no room beneath it. Check the current figure on GOV.UK rather than in any blog post, this one included.

What does an hour of cleaning actually cost you?

Take a UK cleaner paid £13.00 an hour. That is not what the hour costs.

An hour you sell for £22 costs about £19.27, which is a gross margin of 12%, before a penny of office time, advertising, software, accountancy or your own wage. At £20 an hour the same clean returns about 4%, which will not survive those overheads, and selling more of it makes the hole deeper rather than shallower.

At £26 the same hour returns about 26%, which is a business.

Employer National Insurance rates and thresholds change, so treat that line as a worked method rather than a current figure and check it for your year. The shape is what matters, and the shape does not change: loaded cost is typically 25% to 45% above the wage, and most of that is not optional.

The US version of the same sum, for a cleaner paid $20.00:

An hour billed at $50 returns about 46%. At $40 it returns 32%. At $35 it returns 22%, which is below what most cleaning businesses need once office costs and an owner's wage come out of it.

There is a formula buried in that, and it is worth writing on a wall:

Minimum price = fully loaded cost ÷ (1 − target margin)

At a $22 loaded cost and a 45% target, that is $22 ÷ 0.55 = $40 an hour as the floor, not the goal.

Why is travel the number that decides your margin?

Because it is the only large cost that does not appear anywhere in an hourly rate, and because it is the one you control.

A cleaner doing five jobs across a day might be paid for eight hours and bill for six. Two hours of paid travel and setup spread across six billed hours adds 33% to the cost of every hour you sell. That single ratio moves your margin more than anything else on the list above.

Which means the question is not "what do I charge" but "how many billed hours can I get out of a paid day". Three levers:

Cluster by area, not by preference. Two jobs eight miles apart cost you more than the difference in their prices. Agencies that let the rota grow organically end up with routes that criss-cross a city.

Price travel into distant work rather than absorbing it. A customer at the edge of your area is not the same product as one in the middle, and charging the same for both means the close ones subsidise the far ones.

Know your actual ratio. Billed hours divided by paid hours, per cleaner, per week. If you cannot produce that number, you do not know your margin, you know your price.

The jurisdictions differ on whether travel between jobs must be paid, and in several it must. That is a question for an employment adviser where you operate, and the answer changes your arithmetic rather than your strategy.

Should you price by the hour or by the job?

By the job, once you can estimate reliably. Not before.

Hourly is honest while you are learning and it protects you from a house that turns out to be far worse than described. It also punishes you for getting good: a cleaner who finishes in two and a half hours instead of three earns you less, which is exactly backwards.

Per job aligns the incentive. The customer knows the price in advance, which closes more sales, and improvements in speed become yours. The risk is estimating badly, and the fix is simple: price the first clean hourly, measure it, quote the recurring one per job.

Per room or per square foot is common in the US and is really per-job pricing with a formula. It quotes faster and estimates worse, because two identical floor areas can be an hour apart in work.

Whichever you pick, publish a minimum. A one-hour job costs nearly as much to schedule, travel to and invoice as a three-hour job.

What about deep cleans and end-of-tenancy?

Different work, different price, and the mistake is pricing them off your regular rate.

A deep clean or an end-of-tenancy is typically 1.5 to 2.5 times the hourly equivalent of a regular clean, and it earns it: more equipment, more specialist product, harder physical work, and a result that gets inspected by somebody with a financial interest in finding fault.

End-of-tenancy carries a specific risk worth pricing. Many are sold with a re-clean guarantee if the landlord or agent objects. That is a second visit at no revenue, and it is claimed often enough to matter. Either price it in or do not offer it, and if you do offer it, record how often it is claimed so you find out what it costs.

When should you raise your prices?

Three signals, in the order they appear.

Your wage floor moved and your price did not. This is the one that quietly kills cleaning companies. Minimum wage rises are announced months ahead and arrive on a known date. If your prices move afterwards, or not at all, every uprating takes a slice of your margin permanently. Raise prices in the same month, every time, and say why.

You are turning work away, or your cleaners are fully booked. Capacity is the cheapest reason to raise prices because the demand is already proven.

You are winning almost every quote. A win rate near 100% means you are the cheapest option, not the best one.

What does not work is raising prices quietly and hoping. Cleaning customers are long-term and they talk. An increase you can explain in a sentence, usually a wage rise you are passing on, is accepted far more often than people expect. An increase you cannot explain costs you the customer and the goodwill.

What this means for how you run it

Two numbers decide whether a cleaning company works, and neither is your hourly rate.

Billed hours divided by paid hours. Your real capacity. It is set by routing, cancellations and travel, and it is the number to improve before you touch pricing.

Fully loaded cost per hour. Not the wage. The wage plus everything the first table lists, recalculated whenever a tax or a wage floor moves.

Both are arithmetic over things you already know: who worked, where, for how long, and what was invoiced. The difficulty is never the sum, it is that the hours live in a rota, the pay in a spreadsheet and the invoices somewhere else, so nobody ever puts them side by side.

That is the job software for a cleaning business is actually for, and we wrote a separate buyer's guide that names the alternatives and says plainly when a spreadsheet is still the right answer.

Rates, wage floors and employment taxes vary by country and change. Check current figures with your own authority and an accountant where you operate before setting prices. If your numbers differ from these, we would like to hear it: hello@rostavo.com.