Price your first office like a big house and one of two things happens. You win it, and a year into the contract you find out it doesn't pay. Or you pad the number to feel safe, and you lose the work to someone who knew the maths.
Commercial is a different sum. You've priced homes for years and you're good at it, but the office, the salon and the shop don't scale up from a house. They get priced a different way, and they carry costs a home never does.
Here's the maths, with a real example worked all the way through.
Commercial is priced a different way
A home gets priced by the hour or a flat per-clean rate. Commercial work is usually priced per square metre per visit, or as a fixed monthly contract built from an agreed list of what gets cleaned and how often.
For a standard office, the going rate is roughly £0.15 to £0.40 per square metre per visit, and a small office on a regular clean tends to land somewhere around £400 to £800 a month. Those are sense-checks, not your price. Whatever the client wants, work your own number first, then see where it sits against theirs.
Work it from your hours, then convert it back
The safest way in is the one you already use on homes: walk the job, give it an honest time, and price the time. Then convert the result back into "what does this pay me per hour, after my costs?" before you sign anything.
Here's a real one worked through.
Say it's a 120 square metre open-plan office, a kitchenette and 2 loos, cleaned 3 evenings a week. You walk it and give each visit an honest 90 minutes.
- Your home rate is £20 an hour. It's an evening job, out of hours, so you add 30%, which takes it to £26 an hour.
- 90 minutes at £26 is £39 of labour a visit.
- You're providing the soap, towels and bin bags, so add about £5 a visit for those.
- That's £44 a visit. Cross-check it against the per-metre numbers: £44 across 120 square metres is £0.37 a metre, near the top of that £0.15 to £0.40 range, which is about right for a proper evening office clean.
- 3 visits a week is £132. Over a month, about £570, which sits comfortably inside what an office that size pays.
Now the bit that matters. If you'd quoted your flat home rate of £20 an hour with no evening uplift, the same job comes out around £390 a month, and you'd still be buying the consumables out of that. The careful sum is worth roughly £180 a month, every month, for as long as the contract runs.
If you send a cleaner rather than going yourself, the sum starts a step earlier: their wage plus the higher rate you pay them for unsocial hours, then your margin on top. Same method, one more line.
The costs a house never has
Three lines catch out nearly everyone pricing their first commercial job.
Consumables. In a home, the client buys their own loo roll, soap and bin bags. In commercial, that's yours to sort unless you say otherwise. Either the client supplies them or you supply and bill them, which adds roughly 10 to 15% on top. Agree it up front. Don't quietly absorb it.
Equipment. Your normal kit covers most of it. But hard floors that need a machine buff, high windows, or carpet cleaning need gear you might not own. Hire it or price it as a separate line. Never fold it into your hourly rate and hope.
Out-of-hours. Most commercial cleaning happens before the place opens, after it shuts, or at weekends. Antisocial hours are worth a premium, commonly 20 to 40% over your standard rate. And if you're holding a key and setting the alarm, that's real responsibility you're carrying. Price it in.
Two things that catch people at the last minute
Insurance. For homes, £1 to £2 million of public liability cover is normal and fine. A lot of commercial clients won't let you set foot in the building without £5 million. Cleaners lose jobs they were perfect for at the final hurdle over this. Check your cover and upgrade it before you pitch, not after.
Getting paid. A home pays you on the day. A business pays you on terms, usually one invoice at the end of the month and then 30 days to settle it. So you can do a full month's work and wait another month to see the money. That's a real gap in your cash flow the first time, and you have to plan for it. As the contracts add up, keep half an eye on the £90,000 VAT threshold too, because bigger invoices reach it quicker than houses do.
No tool prices this for you
One thing to be clear about before you pitch. No software prices a commercial job for you, and any that claims to is handing you a number you should be working out yourself. The automatic quotes you see online are built for homes, off bedrooms and bathrooms. An office is priced by the square metre and the hours, which only you can judge on the walk-round. Price it by hand.
Once you've won it, the work shifts from pricing to managing, and that's where commercial gets fiddly. Set the agreed monthly price and bill it the same every time. Send proper invoices with the VAT shown, the kind a business expects. And stay on top of the late payers, because on 30-day terms that's the bit a busy cleaner forgets. None of it is hard, but it's the part that keeps a good contract steady.
Price the job by hand, carefully, the first time. Get the sum right and a commercial contract is the steadiest money in cleaning: same work, same price, every month, for years. Get it wrong and you're tied to it. The difference is one careful afternoon with the numbers before you say yes.