Office cleaning is quoted in square feet and built in hours. That gap is where most bid arguments start, and it is also why two contractors walk the same 20,000-square-foot floor and come back with prices 40% apart without either of them being dishonest.
The rate per square foot is not a market price. It is the output of four inputs: what an hour of labour costs, how much floor an hour actually covers, how often you go, and what share of the invoice has to be labour for the job to survive a bad month. Change any one and the rate moves. So instead of quoting a national average, here is the arithmetic with 2026 numbers in it, so you can put your own wage and your own production rate through it.
The 2026 rate, state by state
The wage is real: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for janitors and cleaners (37-2011), May 2025 release, hourly mean wage. Everything after it is arithmetic, run at a 22% payroll burden, 3,000 square feet per labour hour, and labour at 68% of the contract price.
| Market | Mean wage | Loaded hourly | Per sq ft, per visit | Per month, 5×/week | Per month, 3×/week |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Washington | $22.79 | $27.80 | $0.009 | $0.295 | $0.177 |
| Massachusetts | $21.75 | $26.54 | $0.009 | $0.282 | $0.169 |
| New York | $21.55 | $26.29 | $0.009 | $0.279 | $0.168 |
| California | $21.25 | $25.93 | $0.009 | $0.275 | $0.165 |
| Illinois | $19.59 | $23.90 | $0.008 | $0.254 | $0.152 |
| New Jersey | $19.57 | $23.88 | $0.008 | $0.254 | $0.152 |
| United States | $18.64 | $22.74 | $0.008 | $0.242 | $0.145 |
| Arizona | $18.17 | $22.17 | $0.007 | $0.235 | $0.141 |
| Pennsylvania | $18.16 | $22.16 | $0.007 | $0.235 | $0.141 |
| Ohio | $18.06 | $22.03 | $0.007 | $0.234 | $0.140 |
| Florida | $16.86 | $20.57 | $0.007 | $0.218 | $0.131 |
| Georgia | $16.54 | $20.18 | $0.007 | $0.214 | $0.129 |
| North Carolina | $16.39 | $20.00 | $0.007 | $0.212 | $0.127 |
| Texas | $16.29 | $19.87 | $0.007 | $0.211 | $0.127 |
Read the last two columns as the sustainable floor, not the ceiling. A 30,000-square-foot office cleaned five nights a week in Ohio is $7,020 a month at $0.234. In Washington it is $8,850 for the same nights and the same floor. Same building, 26% more money, and the only input that changed is the wage.
Input one: the burden on a wage
The wage is the smallest number in the stack. On top of it sits FICA at 7.65%, federal unemployment at 0.6% on the first $7,000 of each employee's pay, state unemployment tax, and workers' compensation. Workers' compensation is the one that surprises people outside the trade: cleaning is a high-frequency injury class, and the rate is charged per $100 of payroll, so it scales with every wage increase you give.
Twenty-two percent is a working figure, not a law. Pull your own four-line quote out of last year's return before you use it to price anything. A contractor whose state unemployment rate is 5% and whose workers' comp class runs high is carrying closer to 26%, and at that point every square foot they clean costs 4% more than the table says.
Input two: production rate
3,000 square feet an hour is a benchmark for routine office cleaning — vacuumed carpet, spot-mopped hard floor, trash pulled, break room wiped, restrooms serviced. It is not a measurement of your building.
The table below holds everything else constant at the national wage and moves only the production rate, because this is the input contractors overestimate most consistently.
| Square feet per hour | Cost per sq ft, per visit | Per month, 5×/week |
|---|---|---|
| 2,000 | $0.011 | $0.362 |
| 2,500 | $0.009 | $0.290 |
| 3,000 | $0.008 | $0.242 |
| 4,000 | $0.006 | $0.181 |
The difference between 2,500 and 3,500 square feet an hour is half the price of the contract, and it is decided by things the square footage never shows: how dense the desks are, how much hard floor needs mopping instead of vacuuming, how many restrooms and fixtures there are per thousand square feet, whether the customer wants liners changed nightly, and how far the dumpster is from the service elevator.
A lobby with 4,000 square feet of open marble is an hour and a half. Four thousand square feet of cubicles with sixty trash cans under desks is closer to two and a half. Both are 4,000 square feet on the bid form.
Input three: frequency, which is not linear
Five nights a week is 21.7 visits a month; three nights is 13. That is a 40% cut in visits and it does not produce a 40% cut in price, because the fixed load — supplies, equipment, supervision, the trip — does not shrink with the schedule. It produces a building that gets dirtier between visits, which is why three-night contracts get extended scopes and complaints that five-night buildings never see.
What a real building bills
A 20,000-square-foot office at the national wage, 3,000 square feet an hour, five nights a week: 6.7 hours a night, 145 hours a month, $3,285 of loaded labour, and a price near $4,830.
The same arithmetic at 50,000 square feet gives 16.7 hours a night, 362 hours a month, $8,213 of labour and about $12,100 a month. Nothing about going from 20,000 to 50,000 square feet reduces the hours per square foot. Scale buys you supervision density and equipment amortisation, not a cheaper hour.
The number per square foot is the start, not the price
A rate card tells you what the work costs to deliver. It does not tell you whether the contract is worth signing, because the price is only the first of three numbers that decide that. The loaded labour rate tells you what an hour costs you; the walk-away number tells you the floor below which winning is a loss; and the escalator clause decides whether the margin in year one survives to year three. A fourth number — what the contract book is worth — is what a buyer of your business will actually pay for.
Build the rate per square foot from your own payroll, your own workers' comp quote, and a production rate you measured by walking the floor with a stopwatch. Then check it against the table above. If your number is 30% under the table for your state, you have not found an efficiency. You have found the reason the last contract you won has no margin in it.
