There is no single market rate for commercial janitorial services, and this guide does not publish one. The price for your building is built from six inputs: labor hours, the wage behind them, labor burden, supervision, consumables and equipment, and overhead and margin. Price per square foot is only what those inputs add up to. In the illustrative example below, a 120,000 square foot office cleaned five nights a week needs about 900 labor hours a month, and wages plus burden make up roughly 73 percent of the price. Cut the cleaning to three nights a week and the hours fall by about 40 percent. Change the local wage and the whole price moves with it.
That is why a published price per square foot is hard to use on its own. It rarely tells you the building type, the cleaning frequency, the local wage, what the scope included, or whether the rate was per visit or per month. This guide walks through the method instead, so you can build a rough estimate for your own building and test each bid against it.
Further down: shift coverage and day porters, consumables, periodic floor care, price increases, how to use this before you bid, and frequently asked questions.
Every janitorial price is built from the same six inputs. Bidders weigh them differently, and knowing what each one covers makes bids easier to compare.
| # | Variable | What it is | What to ask about |
| 1 | Labor hours | Total cleaning hours per month for your scope | Total monthly labor hours for your scope |
| 2 | Wage rate | What those hours are paid, before burden | How the bidder will staff your site and keep the crew at your local wage |
| 3 | Labor burden | Employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, benefits, paid time off | Who employs the crew and carries their workers' comp |
| 4 | Supervision | On-site supervisory hours and account management | Who supervises your site, and how often they are there |
| 5 | Consumables and equipment | Paper, soap, liners, machines, repair | Whether supplies are included in the rate or billed separately |
| 6 | Overhead and margin | Administration, insurance, recruiting, profit | What the monthly rate includes, and what would be billed on top |
In a labor-intensive service, hours and wages make up most of the cost, so they are the first place to look when two bids differ. Local wages vary by metro, so use your own market's figure when you estimate.
Burden is the other large labor cost. Part of it is fixed by law: employers pay 6.2 percent Social Security tax and 1.45 percent Medicare tax on each employee's wages (IRS Topic 751). Unemployment taxes, workers' compensation, benefits, and paid time off add to that and vary by state, carrier, and employer.
For scale, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that benefits made up 30.0 percent of employer compensation costs for private industry workers in June 2026. BLS states that as a share of total compensation, while bids usually quote burden against wages, so the two figures are not directly comparable. What it shows is that benefits and legally required costs are a large part of employing someone, and every bid carries them somewhere.
Hours come from a production rate: the cleanable square feet one person covers in an hour for a given space type and task. The recognized industry reference is ISSA's cleaning times, published as the Official ISSA Cleaning Times, and ISSA explains the calculation in how to calculate cleaning times: divide the square footage by the production rate to get the time. Rates differ a great deal by space type, which is why a single building-wide rate tends to produce poor estimates.
The rates below are illustrative ranges for estimating, not ISSA figures and not a standard. Actual rates depend on the tasks in your scope, the equipment, furniture density, and the condition of the space.
| Space type | Illustrative sq ft per person per hour |
| Open office, carpeted | 3,500 to 4,500 |
| Private offices | 2,500 to 3,500 |
| Conference rooms | 3,000 to 5,000 |
| Corridors and lobbies | 5,000 to 7,000 |
| Classrooms | 2,000 to 3,000 |
| Restrooms | 300 to 600 |
| Break rooms and kitchens | 1,000 to 1,800 |
| Warehouse open floor | 15,000 to 25,000 |
| Exam rooms and clinical | 800 to 1,500 |
Ask each bidder whether they walked your building and built the hours space by space. A bid built that way has priced your building. One built from a single building-wide rate may have priced a building that resembles it.
This is an illustrative example. The building, production rates and percentages are assumptions chosen to show the method. They are not quotes, McLemore's pricing or market averages.
The building: a 120,000-square-foot office, cleaned five nights a week, with 400 occupants. The cleanable area, after removing shafts and mechanical space, is 110,000 square feet.
Step 1: split the area by space type. 70,000 sq ft open office, 15,000 private offices, 12,000 corridor and lobby, 6,000 restrooms, 4,000 break rooms, 3,000 conference rooms.
Step 2: convert to hours per cleaning using the midpoint of each illustrative range above.
| Space | Sq ft | Rate used | Hours per cleaning |
| Open office | 70,000 | 4,000 | 17.5 |
| Private offices | 15,000 | 3,000 | 5.0 |
| Corridors and lobbies | 12,000 | 6,000 | 2.0 |
| Restrooms | 6,000 | 450 | 13.3 |
| Break rooms | 4,000 | 1,400 | 2.9 |
| Conference rooms | 3,000 | 4,000 | 0.8 |
| Total | 110,000 | about 41.5 |
Note where the hours go. In this example, restrooms are about 5 percent of the cleanable area and about a third of the labor hours.
Step 3: monthly hours. Five nights a week averages about 21.7 cleaning nights a month (5 x 52 / 12). 41.5 hours x 21.7 nights = about 900 hours a month.
Step 4: see where the cost goes. Each percentage below is an assumption for this example, applied in order. Wages are the starting point at 100, and every other line builds on the ones above it.
| Cost line | Assumption | Share of the total price (illustrative) |
| Wages | The base: 900 hours at the local wage | 56.7% |
| Labor burden | 28% of wages | 15.9% |
| Supervision | 8% of wages plus burden | 5.8% |
| Consumables and equipment | 10% of the lines above | 7.8% |
| Overhead and margin | 16% of the lines above | 13.8% |
| Total | 100% |
In this example, wages plus burden are about 73 percent of the price. The example leaves out wage rates and dollar figures on purpose. Your local wage, your scope, and your frequency set the real number.
Now change one input. Drop to three nights a week (about 13 nights a month, or 540 hours) and the hours fall by about 40 percent. Every other line in this example is a percentage of the ones before it, so the whole price falls by about the same 40 percent. A local wage 10 percent higher than the one you assumed works the same way and raises the total by about 10 percent. The shares in the table stay the same, and the total moves.
That sensitivity is the point of the exercise. A price quoted without knowing your frequency and your local wage cannot reflect your building.
There is no single per-square-foot rate that holds from one building to the next. Your rate is the monthly price, built from the hours your scope needs, the local wage, burden, supervision, supplies, and overhead, divided by your cleanable square footage. Two buildings of the same size can come out far apart. When you do compare per-square-foot figures, two checks matter.
First, make sure every number you compare is in the same unit. Some rates are quoted per cleaning, others per month. To convert, multiply a per-cleaning rate by the number of cleanings in a month (about 21.7 at five nights a week) and compare the monthly figures for the same scope.
Second, compare like with like. Facility type changes the mix of space, the tasks and the rules on site, so a per-square-foot figure from one building type says little about another. This guide does not publish a rate per square foot for that reason: the number depends on the scope, the frequency, the local wage and the building, and a figure borrowed from another site would not describe yours.
| Facility type | What tends to move the price |
| Open-plan office | Restroom count, occupancy density, carpet ratio |
| Warehouse and distribution | Office buildout ratio, floor type, shift coverage |
| Manufacturing | Production-area restrictions, debris load, safety requirements |
| K-12 campus | Student density, event schedule, summer project work |
| Medical office and clinic | Exam room turnover, disinfection protocol, documentation |
| Corporate campus with amenities | Food service, fitness areas, conference load |
If a bid's price per square foot looks far from your own estimate, in either direction, ask the bidder to walk you through the hours and scope behind it. The explanation is more useful than the number.
Because at least one of the six inputs differs, or the bidders read the scope differently. Line the bids up against the six variables and the source of the gap is easier to see.
When one bid is well below the others, treat the gap as something to investigate rather than a conclusion. It may reflect genuine efficiency, better equipment, or a leaner overhead structure. It may also reflect fewer hours than the scope needs, a wage that makes it hard to keep staff, thin on-site supervision, or a narrower reading of the scope. Ask the bidder how they read the scope and how many hours they plan to put against it.
Keep the two issues separate while you do. Subcontracting is a legitimate structure; the question is whether you can see who employs, trains, and supervises the people in your building. Worker misclassification, where people who should be employees are paid as independent contractors, is a different and more serious problem, because employer taxes and workers' compensation may not be paid and wage and injury exposure can shift in ways you did not agree to. Asking who employs each worker on your site tells you who you are dealing with.
It can be, but in-house comparisons often count wages and stop. A fair comparison puts every cost line on both sides.
| Cost line | In-house | Outsourced |
| Wages | Yours | In the rate |
| Payroll tax and workers' comp | Yours | In the rate |
| Benefits and PTO | Yours | In the rate |
| Recruiting and turnover | Yours | In the rate |
| Training and certification | Yours | In the rate |
| Supervision and management time | Yours, often uncounted | In the rate |
| Equipment purchase and repair | Capital plus maintenance | Usually in the rate |
| Consumables | Yours to procure | Included or billed, by agreement |
| Coverage for callouts and vacation | Overtime, or a gap in service | The vendor's to manage, within the contracted scope |
| Unemployment claims for the crew | Yours | The vendor's, as the employer |
| Liability for incidents on site | Yours | Shared; depends on the contract's indemnity and insurance terms |
Two lines are easy to leave out of an in-house analysis. The first is management time. If a facilities manager spends several hours a week on custodial scheduling and callouts, that time is a real cost even though it rarely appears in the spreadsheet. The second is coverage: the cost of a building that does not get cleaned on a Friday night is not in the spreadsheet either.
Outsourcing also does not move all of your exposure to the vendor. How much risk shifts depends on the contract's indemnity language and the insurance behind it, so have your risk team review both.
There is an earlier piece on the outsourcing tradeoff in how outsourcing your cleaning needs can save you money.
Under an hourly structure, the invoice moves with the hours worked, and overage shows up after the fact. Under fixed monthly pricing, you pay a set monthly rate for a defined scope and contract period. The rate does not move with hours worked, but it is not a promise that the price never changes: agreed scope changes and the contract's escalation terms still apply.
The practical effect is that the work of estimating labor sits with the vendor, the party who knows how long the job takes. That makes the scope document more important, because the scope is what the fixed rate buys.
McLemore prices on a fixed monthly basis for a defined scope and contract period. We have served commercial and public facilities for more than 50 years, and our client retention is 96 percent year over year.
Frequency is not the only schedule variable. The coverage model changes price too.
A night crew cleaning an empty building is usually the most efficient model because the work isn't interrupted. A day porter costs more per productive hour because the work is interrupted, but many high-traffic buildings use them to keep restrooms and entryways up to standard during occupied hours. A 24-hour operation needs coverage across shifts, and later shifts may carry a pay differential.
Budget a day porter as a distinct line rather than folding the cost into the nightly rate. It keeps the tradeoff visible when someone asks why the number moved.
You can bundle paper, soap, and liners into the monthly rate, bill them separately, or leave them entirely with you. All three are legitimate structures. What matters is knowing which one you agreed to.
If consumables are bundled, ask what happens when usage rises after a headcount increase, because bundled pricing assumes a volume. If they are billed separately, agree up front on how they will be priced and invoiced.
Periodic work is a common source of budget surprises. Strip and wax, burnishing, carpet extraction and concrete sealing run on their own schedules and at their own prices.
Decide before signing whether periodic care sits inside the monthly rate or gets quoted per event. Inside the rate is easier to budget. Per-event can look cheaper on paper, but it leaves the timing and cost of each project to be settled later, which is where disagreements tend to start.
Many janitorial contracts carry an escalation clause. A defensible one names a mechanism, a cap, and a notice period.
Reasonable grounds for an increase include a statutory minimum wage change, a documented market wage shift in your metro, added square footage, added frequency, or a scope change you requested. A vague annual adjustment with no cap and 30 days of notice is much harder to plan around.
Settle the mechanism at signing rather than at renewal. For example, a 2 percent annual increase disclosed up front is a very different agreement from an uncapped wage pass-through that arrives in a letter.
Run your own estimate first, using the worked example above as a template and your own local wage, then follow the rest of how to buy commercial janitorial services from there. Then ask every bidder for three things: total monthly labor hours for your scope, who will supervise your site and how often they will be there, and how the price escalates in later years.
Those answers show whether a bid was built from your building or from a template. It is one of the quickest quality checks in the process, and it costs you one email.
All three show up in bids. Some vendors quote an hourly rate, some quote a per-square-foot rate per cleaning, and others quote a fixed monthly price for a defined scope. Convert every bid to a monthly figure for the same scope before you compare them.
In most bids, labor is by far the largest share. In the illustrative example in this guide, wages plus burden come to about 73 percent of the price. Your share will depend on your wage, your scope, and how supplies and supervision are priced.
Usually, and roughly in proportion to the hours removed. In the example above, moving from five nights to three cuts labor hours by about 40 percent. Restrooms, break rooms, and trash may still need daily attention in an occupied building, so check what a lower frequency leaves undone before you cut it.
Total monthly labor hours for your scope, who supervises your site and how often they are there, and how the price escalates in later years. With those and a clear scope, you can see whether the price fits your building.
More guides on buying, budgeting, staffing, and managing custodial services, organized by role and by facility type, are collected in the Facility Services Resource Center.
If you would rather have someone walk the building with you and give you a real number, we will do that whether or not you end up bidding it. Reach the sales team at sales@mbminc.com or (713) 528-7775.