Tips Reference

Three Ways To Set House Cleaning Rates

Posted on 15. Sep, 2009 by Mark Coleman in Cleaning

When starting a house cleaning service, you must choose a house cleaning rate. This rate will be your fee for services provided. Like many other services, such as moving companies or painters, house cleaning has various ways of charging for service. Three of the most common ways to set house cleaning rates are hourly, by the room, or a flat fee. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Below is a brief description and use of each rate.

Hourly

This rate for house cleaning is mostly useful for the following situations:

The amount of time needed to clean is uncertain
Inexperience with estimating
Multiple jobs covered by the same client
Jobs which will take long periods or chunks of time.
Some disadvantages would be:
Customers may feel that you would watch the clock and try to tack on extra time.
A job may require extra time one week and you would have to charge over your initial amount.
You can not cover the cost of employees as readily as other methods.

By The Room

This is the rate for house cleaning is the most useful when you know how long it takes to clean a room in general. This rate would be useful for the following situations:

General package deals such as vacuuming, dusting and window cleaning only.
Each room needs a different level of cleaning
There are a lot of rooms
Discount rates are easier to calculate for this type of rate.
Some disadvantages are:
You would need to charge an additional 50% for initial cleaning since it would take longer.
You would need to add on for certain services such as stove and refridgerator cleaning.
In general you could use this method to set a basic rate which would include any employees working in other areas of the house at the same time.

Flat Fee

This rate for house cleaning is used most commonly by companies offering the following:

Whole house specials
A certain number of rooms and a set schedule to clean them.
Discount rates for customers who give many referrals.
Disadvantages to flat fees would include:
Unknown situations and problems which could take away income.
Different houses each take different amounts of cleaning
Customers may haggle the price.

As you can see each house cleaning rate has a reason. Depending on your level of confidence and experience, you can choose which fee is right for you. Do not forget to base your fees high enough for when you add on help or other expenses so that you still have a profit. What also helps is to have a house cleaning list which you can show to customers to explain what you do and why.