How to Price Cleaning Services Per Hour

An hourly cleaning rate has to clear four things before a dollar of it is profit: your own labor, your supplies, your drive time, and the roughly 15% of net income that self-employment tax takes. Add those up per hour, and the number you get is a floor, not a price — you charge above it, not at it. A worked example below lands on a $28/hour floor for a one-person residential business; the arithmetic is what matters, not that specific number, because your rent, your drive times and your supply costs are not the ones in this example.

Most new cleaning businesses set a rate by asking around, landing near the middle, and finding out eight months later that jobs which looked profitable on paper left almost nothing behind. The fix is not a better guess. It is running the number forward from cost instead of backward from what feels competitive.

What actually eats an hour

An hour billed to a client is not an hour of income. Four things come out of it before anything is yours to keep:

Drive time itself is not billable to most clients, but it is real cost: a 20-minute drive between two 2-hour jobs means you spent 20% more time than you billed. Either fold an average drive-time cost into your rate, or bill a trip fee for jobs outside your normal radius — but pick one, because ignoring it is the same as giving that time away.

Building the floor, worked

A solo residential cleaner wants to know the lowest hourly rate that still leaves real money behind after covering everything above.

Step 1 — supplies and equipment, per hour. $40 a week in supplies across 20 billed hours = $2.00/hour.

Step 2 — drive time, amortized. Four jobs a day, three 15-minute drives between them (45 minutes), across 8 billed hours that day. That is 45 minutes of unpaid driving folded into 8 hours of billing — roughly 9% overhead, which on a $25 target rate is about $2.25/hour.

Step 3 — tax set-aside. On net profit, budget 15–20% for combined self-employment and income tax as a starting placeholder (refine it with a real year of numbers, and see the note on filing below). On a $25 rate this is roughly $3.50–$5.00/hour.

Step 4 — add it up.

Round to $28/hour as the floor. Anything charged below that is not a discount — it is unpaid work, supplies bought at a loss, or a tax bill you have not budgeted for yet. Margin comes from pricing above the floor: add efficiency (a faster, well-stocked routine), add scope (recurring contracts instead of one-offs, which cut the drive-time overhead by filling a schedule with less dead time between jobs), or raise the number once demand tells you the floor was set too low.

Recurring vs one-time jobs

A common structure is a lower recurring rate that assumes a full, planned route, and a higher one-time or deep-clean rate that covers the extra drive time and product cost of a job that will not repeat next week.

Common questions

Should I charge by the hour or by the job? Either works once you know your floor. A flat job price is really an hourly estimate in disguise — it only holds up if you have logged enough past jobs to know how long that size of house actually takes you, not how long you hope it takes.

Do I raise prices for existing clients or only new ones? Both, eventually — supply costs and your own cost of living do not freeze for existing clients. A common approach is a smaller, telegraphed increase (a month’s notice) for existing clients and the current rate for anyone new.

Is the tax set-aside percentage exact? No — it is a planning placeholder. The 15.3% self-employment tax figure is fixed by law; your income tax bracket, deductions and state taxes are not, so refine your own percentage once you have a real year of profit and loss to work from, and treat this as record-keeping, not tax advice.