Your Square Feet Per Hour Number Is Lying To You

Most cleaning businesses don’t lose money because they’re slow or bad at cleaning. They lose money in the margins, in the small pieces of time nobody thinks to price. Every visit has hidden minutes that never show up in your square footage math: unlocking doors, hauling supplies, filling buckets, setting up carts, walking long hallways, taking trash out to dumpsters, restocking paper, packing up equipment, locking up, sending texts, answering quick client questions. None of that is “cleaning,” but all of it is labor. On paper, you might think a job takes two hours because you only count production time, but in reality it takes two and a half. That extra 30 minutes doesn’t feel like much until you multiply it. Thirty minutes per visit, five nights a week, is 2.5 hours. Over a month that’s 10 hours. Over a year that’s more than 120 unpaid hours on one account. That’s three full workweeks of free labor you accidentally donated because you priced the job like a calculator instead of an operator. Most bids fail because we treat work like it starts the moment the mop hits the floor and ends when the last room is done, but real work starts when you arrive and ends when you leave. The fix is simple and boring, which is why it works: stop quoting only square footage and start pricing the full visit. Build setup time, walking time, and close-down time directly into your labor estimate. Break the job into chunks and account for the whole shift, not just the “productive” part. When you do, your numbers feel calmer, your schedule feels realistic, and your margins stop disappearing. Cleaning isn’t just what happens on the floor. It’s everything around it. And if you’re not billing for that hidden time, you’re working for free without realizing it. Let the systems do the talking.