House Cleaning Price and Rates

When hiring a cleaning company there are many things to consider to ensure you make the right choice. You will need to review cleaning company reviews, make sure the maid service is bonded and insured, and go over the eco-friendly products that they will be using in your home, and understand how the set the house cleaning price

To make a fully informed decision, it’s ideal to also understand how rates are set, and how certain items will affect the all-around cost for your house clean. There are 3 main areas that you will need to focus on

Cleaning Company Rates: Cleaning companies set rates on a variety of factors.

• Local wage pressures: Each jurisdiction will have a different economy, in different parts of the economical cycle. They will have different minimum wage requirements. Minimum wage is the lowest set amount a company in that area can hire someone for, per hour. For example, cleaning companies hiring cleaners in Calgary, must adhere to Calgary’s minimum wage set at $15/hour. So if the minimum wage is set, it’s certainly a starting point for cleaning staff wages, it’s not the end of it. Certain local jurisdictions have pressures from surrounding industries that can increase the cleaning wages. To hire competent cleaning staff, a company will need to offer a competitive wage. If the economy is strong, then there will be pressure for wages to be higher. When evaluating if a cleaning cost per hour is fair you need to consider the above factors and realize they will be a portion of the set rate. So if the rate is set at $25 an hour, the wage alone will be $15, making it 60% of the cleaning rate. At this level, the cleaning piece per hour is fair. IF you do the same calculation at a cleaning cost per hour is set at $45, then wage is 33%. The rate is on the higher side based on wages alone. To get a good idea of what current cleaning staff wages in your local area are, check out some hiring boards, like Indeed, to get a baseline of the current market cleaning positions are going for.
• Cost of Supplies: Apart from labor, the cost of supplies is the other large expense that cleaning companies are faced with. Review the supplies, and see if they are Eco friendly ( which cost more), brand name, derived from bulk, etc. The higher the cost for supplies, the larger chunk they will make up of the cleaning price. For example, method brand  cleaning supplies cost $4-$6 per bottle, and that bottle may last 3 cleans. That adds the cost of $2 to the cost of each house clean for the cleaning company.
• Fuel and vehicle operating costs: Each client lives in a different area, and the maid company must drive to that location for each clean. The costs incurred will be fuel, insurance, maintenance costs, and the labor between houses. Cleaning companies will generally not charge for the labor to drive from house to house, but it inevitably is a cost to them and must be recouped somewhere. This cost for the company will be chalked up to overhead, and amortized over an employee’s full workday. If your home is far away from a local operating area, keep that in mind as the cleaning company  will not add it to the house cleaning price.

Number of cleaners in your home: Calculating cleaning hours

House cleaning companies in Calgary will generally price per hour for jobs. This sounds simple enough but becomes a point of dispute for many maid services. Here is an example to explain this in detail. If you hire a cleaning company, and they arrive at your home with 3 maids, and spend between 9 am to 11 am cleaning, what will your cleaning invoice be? One is bound to quickly jump to the fortuitous choice that it will be a 2-hour invoice, multiplied by the cleaning company rate. In this case, if you reference the example rate of $25 an hour above, your bill will be $50 plus tax. Isn’t that a lovely and cheap cleaning service that you just hired? Unfortunately, this isn’t the way it works. If you think above the points we touched on above, and divide the $25 by the 3 cleaners for the hour, you are left with $8.3 dollars per employee. That is far below the minimum wage requirements that we have to pay per employee. So this conclusion would not make sense as to what to expect for your invoice. To get a full understanding if this, simply think of cleaning quotes in “man-hours”. Cleaning companies can send any amount of maids to your home. from 1-4 is usually pretty standard. So don’t just count the hours that staff members are in your home. Instead, take the time they spend cleaning your home, and multiply by the quantity of cleaning personnel in your home. This will show you the total cleaning cost for your home. Here is an example of how a 6-hour house clean can look for you

The condition of your home and the type of clean you need will be the third main deciding factor when a company looks to decide the total cleaning cost for your project. Remember, cheap cleaning costs don’t always result in a good cleaning job, let alone a finished job. House cleaning prices are set from a variety of variables.

• What kind of clean do you need: Not every type of clean is going to take the same amount of time, no matter how much we all wished it would. More detailed cleans like move out cleans, and deep cleans, will take longer than other cleans like AirBnB cleaning, and biweekly house cleaning. The more tasks that are added, the longer they will take. To help explain this factor more, think of all the extra items that need to be done with a move-out clean. For example, cleaning inside the cabinets and cleaning inside appliances. This task is generally not part of a regular biweekly clean. Another example is cleaning the window tracks deeply in the event of a fall clean, and not doing them for a regular house clean ( unless requested). To set the price for the clean, a cleaning company will need to fully understand what kind of clean you need,  to give you a house cleaning price that will be accurate, and then they will tally up the total cleaning services needed to complete it, and multiply them by the cleaning hours, a set cleaning rate. Each new item that needs to be completed, will add time to the invoice. If you want inside the appliances cleaned, that will generally add an hour of cleaning time to the maid service cost.
• Size of your home: This factor is simpler than the others we mentioned above. The larger the home, the more square feet will need to be cleaned. Likewise, the more bathrooms it will generally have, and bathrooms are some of the most time-consuming parts of the home to clean, versus simpler spaces like the bedrooms. To ballpark times, for a deep clean, a 600 square foot condo will take approximately 5 hours to clean, and a 2000 square foot home, will take 8-10 hours to deep clean. The general rule of thumb is each kitchen will take 2-3 hours to clean, each bedroom will take 1 hour to clean, and common areas will vary.
• The actual state of your home: The messier the home, the longer it will take to clean. Regular cleaning in your home will make the trained maids’ job faster and easier. There is less calcium buildup to tackle, less built on grease to wipe off, and in the kitchen, less burnt on food to clean up. The more neglect your house sees, the more hours a cleaning company will need. Have a good look at your space, and pay special attention to calcium, dust levels, food burnt on, and grease throughout the space. The best thing to do in this case is, to be honest with yourself. Rate each room on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being extremely dirty, to 10 being sparking clean already. Relay this information to the cleaning company, and supply them with some pictures for their review. Alternatively, you can request an in-house consultation, so they can review the space themselves, and give you a set, and accurate cleaning quote. If you misrepresent the condition of your home, you will not get an accurate quote, and the actual job might exceed your cleaning budget.

In Summary, the main factors that your cleaning cost is derived from are the rate per hour, the cleaning hours it will take for the specific clean you need, and the size/ condition of your home before the clean starts. Simply take the rate per hour, multiply it by the hours needed to clean the size of the home, and add or subtract the premium or cost savings for having a really dirty hour, or a really clean house. To reduce your cleaning costs, it’s important to either hire professional cleaning companies regularly or pitch in and clean the home from time to time yourself.

Once you understand how a cleaning company sets your cleaning rate, and you review the total cost, to find it a little too high, here are some tips on how to drive your costs down.

1. Pre clean a bit yourself, or at a minimum, uncluttered and pick up your mess. For every 15 minutes the maid service spends picking your clutter up or moving it out of the way, that will take away 15 minutes from your cleaning time budget for actual house cleaning. Keep the job efficiently, but making it easier for the hired cleaning company.
2. Review the cleaning companies cleaning chemicals and agents: We always use eco-friendly cleaning supplies in our company, and we use the correct chemicals for the correct tasks. Review the chemicals and their uses with the trained maid staff on site. Degreasers are used for the kitchen, window cleaners for windows, and special calcium fighters in bathrooms. Using the wrong cleaning chemicals in the wrong spaces will do nothing but drive up your cleaning hours, which are multiplied by the cleaning rate, resulting in a higher cleaning bill for you and your home. The same goes for cleaning tools the company will use. These days, they make and sell all sorts of cleaning equipment that is task-specific, and will make the cleaning more efficient. There are special sponges, brushes, and even window blind cleaning tools. For example, the blind tool will reduce the time spent cleaning per blind by 75%, which means more money leftover in your pocket.
3. Use a house cleaning checklist: this will take the guesswork out of the clean, and make it a simple, yet efficient process. Eliminating wasted time reduces the time spent in your home, and when you multiply the time by the cleaning rate, you will get a reduced cleaning invoice and house cleaning price.
4. Do not be shy to shop around, and get a few cleaning quotes. This will ensure that you get a good understanding the market, and if quotes are in line with it. Keep in mind that different cleaning companies offer different value, so the price will not always be exact, but with this, you can leverage yourself to negotiate a better rate with your preferred provider.