Pricing is the bit most cleaners hate, and it's the bit that costs them the most. You quote a number, hold your breath, and hope they say yes. So you knock a few quid off to be safe, they say yes, and now you're stuck on that price for the next two years.
Nearly every cleaner I've spoken to has under-charged for years without realising it, and almost none of them are bad at the job. They just never had anyone show them how to land on a price. The usual advice is "charge your worth" or "don't undervalue yourself", which sounds nice and helps no one. It's a feeling, not a method.
Here's the method. It's a short sum, and it takes about ten minutes.
Start from what you want to take home, not the local rate
Most people price by asking "what's the going rate round here?" and matching it. That's how a whole area ends up under-charging, because the going rate is usually just everyone copying everyone else down to the bottom.
Work it the other way round. Start from the money you actually want to take home each week, then divide it by the hours you can really bill.
That second number is the one that trips people up. The hours you can bill aren't the hours you work. Between cleans you're driving, buying products, replying to enquiries, writing quotes and doing the books, and none of that pays. For a lot of solo cleaners, only 6 or 7 hours in every 10 you work are actually billable.
Then add the costs your clients never see. Roughly, for a solo cleaner, that's:
- Products: £10 to £20 a week.
- Public liability insurance: around £5 to £10 a month.
- Fuel: £20 to £40 a week, depending how spread out your round is.
- Phone: a few pounds a week.
- Tax: put aside roughly a fifth of what you bring in, because that bill always comes.
So the sum is: the take-home you want, plus your costs, divided by the hours you can really bill.
Here's it worked through. Say you want to take home £500 a week. Your costs come to about £60 a week. You work full days but can only bill around 28 hours of real cleaning. So that's £560 divided by 28, which is £20 an hour, and then you nudge it up a little so there's something left after tax. Call it £21 or £22.
For a lot of cleaners the answer lands somewhere around £15 to £20 an hour, more in London and the South East. Yours will be different, and that's fine. The number isn't the point. The method is.
Price the job by time, not "per house"
A 1-bed weekly tidy and a 4-bed fortnightly deep clean are not the same job, so they shouldn't be the same price.
Once you've got your hourly rate, price each clean by how long the home actually takes. Walk it, give it an honest time (a cluttered house with three dogs takes longer than a tidy one the same size, and you'll only know by seeing it), multiply by your rate, and set a minimum, because it's not worth getting the car out for 45 minutes.
A quick example. Say your rate works out at £18 an hour. A regular clean that takes two and a half hours is about £45. A first-time deep clean of the same house might take four hours, so that one's £72. Same cleaner, same rate, different jobs, different prices. Nobody feels short-changed, and neither do you.
Don't try to win on being cheapest
This is the one that costs people the most over a year.
The client who picks you because you're £2 cheaper than the next cleaner will leave you the day someone turns up £2 cheaper than you. You can't build a steady round on being the cheapest, because there's always someone willing to go lower, usually someone who won't last.
Price fairly, then win on the things that actually keep clients: turning up when you said you would, doing a lovely job, and being easy to deal with. That's what makes someone keep you for five years and recommend you to their sister. Cheap doesn't do that.
Then quote the same way every single time
Here's where the under-charging quietly creeps back in. You set a fair rate, and then you're stood in someone's kitchen at the end of a long day, they seem nice, you want the work, and you do the maths in your head and round it down. Again.
The fix is to quote the same way every time, so the price doesn't depend on how tired or keen you are that afternoon.
Make it a tiny system you run the same way every time. Write your hourly rate and your minimum down somewhere you'll see them. Build yourself a rough size-to-time guide, so a typical 2-bed is x hours, a 3-bed is y, and you can put a fair first number on an enquiry before you've even seen the place. Then when you walk it, you're adjusting a consistent starting price, not inventing one from scratch. The number stops depending on how tired or keen you are that afternoon, which is exactly when the under-charging used to creep back in.
If you run a small team, the same method holds, with one extra line: the rate you charge the client has to leave a margin over what you pay your cleaner, or you're working for nothing. That's a post of its own, and it's coming.
The method matters more than any tool, though. Even on the back of an envelope: start from your take-home, add your costs, divide by the hours you can really bill, price each job by time, and never compete on cheap. Do that, and in two years you'll be on a rate that actually pays you, instead of one you picked in a panic and never escaped.
Get your pricing right and the whole business gets easier. You take on fewer jobs for more money, you stop dreading the long ones, and the work finally pays what it's worth.