The number that decides the bid
Every janitorial bid starts with a loaded labor rate: what one hour of a cleaner on the site actually costs you. Once that number is wrong, every line built on top of it is wrong, and there is no way to find the error later by staring at the final price per square foot. The bid looks competitive. It is actually losing money on every visit.
The loaded rate is a stack, not a wage. Base pay is the bottom of it. Above that sit payroll taxes, workers' compensation, general liability, supplies allocation, vehicle cost, equipment amortization, supervision spread across sites, and office overhead. BSCAI's bidding guidance is blunt about the stakes: labor is typically 50% to 80% of the total contract price, and misjudging that single largest expense, even by a little, "can drastically cut into your profit margins" (BSCAI).
Here is how to build the rate so you can defend it, then use it in a bid you can walk away from.
Component 1: the base wage is a local market number, not a national one
Start with what you actually pay to fill the post this week, then check it against the floor.
The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, but almost nowhere in commercial cleaning is that the binding constraint. The Department of Labor's state minimum wage table shows the real spread as of fall 2026: District of Columbia $18.40, California $16.90, Connecticut $16.94, New Jersey $15.92, New York $17.00 in New York City, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester and $16.00 elsewhere in the state, Washington $17.13, Colorado $15.16, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri and Nebraska $15.00, down to $7.25 in Texas, Pennsylvania and the states that follow the federal floor. Michigan is at $13.73, scheduled to reach $15.00 on January 1, 2027.
That is a spread of more than 2.4 times between the highest and lowest jurisdictions, on the same job title, in the same industry. Any rate card built once and rolled out nationally is wrong in both directions: underpriced in the Northeast and overpriced in the South.
Watch the state overtime rules too, because they change your cost per hour in specific places. California requires time and one-half over eight hours in a day, double time over 12 hours in a day or over eight on the seventh consecutive day, per the DOL table. Colorado pays premium after 12 hours daily and 40 weekly. Minnesota after 48 weekly. Night and weekend scopes in those states carry a different cost per visit than a five-night-a-week schedule in a state that only counts the week.
Component 2: workers' comp on class code 9014 is a state-by-state lottery
Janitorial by contract is NCCI class code 9014. The filed rate is quoted per $100 of payroll, and the spread across states is larger than most operators expect: a median of about $1.50 per $100 across 20 states, ranging from $0.810 in Tennessee to $4.42 in New Jersey, according to wcclasscode.com's 9014 rate table. New York files at $3.27, Illinois at $2.44, Hawaii at $3.00, Virginia at $0.917, Kentucky at $0.860.
Translate that into the loaded rate. On a $20,000-per-year payroll for one full-time cleaner:
- Tennessee: $16,200 annual premium at $0.810 per $100, or about $0.81 per hour on a 2,000-hour year.
- New Jersey: $88,400 annual premium at $4.42 per $100, or about $4.42 per hour.
- National median: about $1.50 per hour.
A $3.60-per-hour difference in workers' comp alone between the cheapest and most expensive filed states, on identical work. That difference is bigger than most contractors' entire target profit margin per hour.
Three things follow. First, the base rate is not your rate: effective premium is base rate times your experience modifier, adjusted for schedule credits or debits and deductible loading, which is why two carriers quoting the same base can differ by more than 30% on the effective number. Second, the experience modifier is a margin lever. Moving from a 1.25 EMR to a 0.85 EMR is a 47% difference in premium on the same code, and it is built mostly by claim frequency, not severity, which means the small strains and trips you let slide are the expensive ones. Third, NCCI's governing classification rules mean that if 51% or more of payroll sits in 9014 you generally classify all employees there except separated clerical (8810) and outside sales (8742) payroll, so keep those records segregated or you will pay janitorial rates on office staff.
Component 3: the costs nobody budgets until the job starts
BSCAI's bid-budget list includes the items that quietly break a marginal job: recruiting for the new site, background checks where the client requires screening, uniforms, vehicle lease, insurance, fuel and maintenance, software for scheduling and timekeeping, performance bonds on public work, and subcontractor fees for window cleaning or floor refinishing you pass through. Add these as line items with a number attached before the bid goes out, not as an afterthought in month three.
Supplies are usually modeled as a percentage of labor or a fixed cost per man-hour so the budget scales with scope; restroom consumables belong in the bid when they are in your scope, and historical usage data beats guessing from headcount if the building will give it to you.
One compliance item belongs in this stack and almost never does: personal protective equipment. Under 29 CFR 1910.132(h), the employer pays for PPE required to comply with the standard, at no cost to employees, and must pay for replacement unless the employee lost or intentionally damaged it. Gloves, eye protection and the rest are a real per-head annual cost, and if a chemical is corrosive enough to require a quick-drench facility under 1910.151(c), the site setup is part of mobilizing that account.
A worked bid: 20,000 sq ft general office, five nights a week
This is the arithmetic, not a market price. Substitute your own numbers at each step.
1. Base wage. Local market for the post: $15.50/hr.
2. Payroll taxes. Employer FICA 7.65% plus federal and state unemployment, call it 9.5%: $1.47.
3. Workers' comp. Class 9014 at a mid-range state rate with an EMR of 1.00: $1.50/hr.
4. General liability and bonding allocation. $0.40/hr.
5. Paid time off and holiday coverage. Two weeks vacation plus six holidays is roughly 4.6% of scheduled hours, plus the coverage hours you pay someone else to cover: $0.85/hr.
6. Supplies and consumables allocation. $0.45/hr of labor.
7. Supervision and site management spread. One supervisor per six to eight accounts, loaded similarly: $0.90/hr.
8. Office overhead. Scheduling, payroll admin, phones, software, bad debt: $1.00/hr.
Loaded rate: $22.07 per hour.
Now the labor hours. General office production runs about 2,000 to 3,000 sq ft per hour in published 2026 estimating benchmarks, with high-density or high-touch space at 1,500 to 2,200 and medical space at 800 to 1,500; the same sources put a general office at $0.08 to $0.15 per sq ft per visit and a loaded labor rate for planning at $25 to $45 per hour (LeadDuo, Commercial Cleaning Pricing Per Sq Ft 2026). Use a conservative production rate for a building you have not serviced before, because new accounts always run slow until the crew learns the route.
At 2,300 sq ft/hr: 20,000 ÷ 2,300 = 8.70 labor hours per visit.
Labor cost per visit: 8.70 × $22.07 = $191.99.
Five visits a week, 4.33 weeks a month: 21.65 visits. Monthly cost floor: $4,157.
At a 40% gross margin (the middle of the 35% to 50% band these estimates use), the price is $4,157 ÷ 0.60 = $6,928 per month, or $0.346 per sq ft per month, or about $0.16 per sq ft per visit, which sits at the top of the general office range for a five-night schedule.
The margin check, which is the whole point. If you had used a naive loaded rate of $18.00/hr, the same bid would come out at about $3,390 a month in cost and a price near $5,650. You would have left $1,278 a month on the table, about $15,300 a year, on one 20,000 sq ft account, and the paperwork would have looked perfectly normal.
What to do with the number
Build the rate once, in a spreadsheet, with a line for every component above, and re-run it when a state changes its minimum wage, when your workers' comp renewal lands with a new modifier, and when your health premium renews. Store the result per state and per post, because the state spread in code 9014 makes a single national rate meaningless.
Then check every bid against the loaded rate before it leaves the office. Industry guidance puts typical commercial cleaning margins anywhere from 8% to 30%, depending on contract size, complexity and how many vendors are chasing the job (BSCAI). Large, high-profile jobs attract the most competition and the thinnest margins. If a bid only clears your target margin because of an optimistic production rate or a loaded rate you rounded down, it is not a bid you won. It is a job you agreed to subsidize.
Sources: BSCAI job costing and bidding guidance; DOL state minimum wage table (2026); NCCI class code 9014 filed rates; 29 CFR 1910.132(h) and 1910.151(c); 2026 commercial cleaning pricing and productivity benchmarks. Worked example uses illustrative inputs, not a quoted market price.
