12 Questions to Ask Before You Sign a Janitorial Contract

Before you sign a janitorial contract, get written answers on twelve points: how the scope is defined, what is excluded, how pricing and escalation work, who employs and supervises the crew, how quality is inspected and reported, and how you exit. This guide is part of our broader walkthrough on how to buy commercial janitorial services.

Three proposals can come back with similar pricing, similar cover pages, and the same promises of quality and reliability. The differences tend to sit in the contract language: floors you assumed were being burnished quarterly turn out to be an add-on, or the supervisor who walked your building during the sales process turns out to cover several other accounts.

Much of that can be learned before you sign. It means asking about the contract rather than the pitch.

Scope and pricing

1. Is the scope written by task and frequency, or in adjectives?

"Maintain restrooms in a clean and sanitary condition" reads fine until somebody has to enforce it. Months into the term, you and your vendor can interpret that sentence differently, and the interpretation that holds is usually the one attached to the signature.

A usable scope names the task, the area, and the frequency: sanitize fixtures daily, machine scrub floors weekly, descale monthly. Specificity is what makes performance measurable later.

2. What is explicitly excluded?

Ask for the exclusion list in writing. Items that commonly sit outside a base scope include periodic floor care, interior and exterior windows, high dusting, carpet extraction, post-construction cleanup, and day porter coverage.

Excluding any of those can be reasonable. The problem is discovering it later, when the annual strip and wax you didn't budget for arrives as a separate line item.

3. Who supplies consumables, and how are they priced?

Paper, soap, and liners can be bundled into the monthly price, billed at cost plus a markup, or left with you. All three are legitimate structures. The problem is not knowing which one you agreed to.

If consumables are bundled, ask what happens when usage climbs after a headcount increase. If they are billed separately, ask for the markup and whether you can audit it.

4. Is the monthly price fixed, and what does fixed cover?

An hourly structure can look flexible until an invoice arrives with an overage. A fixed monthly price puts the labor estimate on the vendor, who knows how long the job takes.

At McLemore, fixed monthly pricing means a defined scope and period, subject to agreed scope changes and escalation. Whatever a bidder calls fixed, ask what scope it covers, for what term, and what is allowed to change it.

5. What triggers a price increase, and how much notice do you get?

Most janitorial contracts include an escalation clause. Some tie to a fixed annual adjustment, others to CPI, others to statutory wage changes passed straight through.

Ask for the mechanism, whether there is a cap, and the notice period. An uncapped wage pass-through on short notice is a very different agreement from a capped adjustment disclosed at signing.

People and supervision

6. Who employs the people who will be in your building?

This question is worth asking early. If the answer involves a staffing agency or subcontractor, then background checks, training standards, and workers' compensation coverage sit with a company you don't have an agreement with. Subcontracting is a legitimate model, and for you it is a visibility question: who is accountable when something goes wrong?

At McLemore, every person we place in a facility is a McLemore W-2 employee, hired, trained, supervised, and covered by us. W-2 status alone does not prove quality, so ask every bidder who employs, screens, trains, supervises, and insures the crew. We covered the broader relationship questions in Vendor or Partner? 6 Questions Facility Leaders Should Ask.

When a bidder says they use W-2 labor, a useful follow-up is: what percentage of the staff assigned to my facility are direct employees of your company rather than agency placements?

7. Who supervises the work, and where is that in the price?

A supervisor on an org chart is not the same as a supervisor in your building. At McLemore, sites with 10 or more full-time staff have dedicated on-site supervision, and smaller sites are overseen by a route or area manager. Ask every bidder how supervision works at a site of your size.

Get the number of on-site supervisory hours per week, when those hours fall, and whether the person is dedicated to your account or shared across a region. Then ask where supervision appears in the pricing. If supervision isn't visible in the price, it's worth a follow-up question.

8. What happens to the incumbent custodial staff?

If you are replacing an in-house team or switching vendors, the people currently cleaning your building know things nobody wrote down: which doors stick, which lab cannot be entered after six, which tenant escalates straight to the property manager instead of filing a ticket.

Ask whether the incoming vendor plans to hire from the existing crew, and how that knowledge gets captured if they don't. Our transition process starts with documenting it building by building before the first shift.

Accountability and exit

9. Who inspects, how often, and does the score reach you?

Vendor self-inspection is normal and not disqualifying on its own. Self-inspection with no report delivered to the client is a different matter.

Ask about the inspection frequency, the form used, who performs it, and how often you receive the results. Ask what counts as a passing score and what happens after a failing one.

10. What is the response time when something fails at 2 a.m.?

Get the escalation path in writing, with names and response windows: who gets called, who calls you, and how long before someone is on site.

A vendor with an escalation process in place can usually describe it quickly. If the answer is a general statement about valuing communication, keep asking.

11. What reporting comes with the contract, and how often do we sit down?

Monthly service completion rates, open-issue aging, and inspection trends are reasonable to expect. So is a periodic review on an account of any real size.

Ask what the review covers and who attends from the vendor's side. When only the account manager shows up, you are getting a status update rather than a review, and that difference matters when you need a decision made.

12. How do you get out?

Read the termination clause before you read anything else about the relationship.

Look for the notice period, whether termination for convenience is allowed or only for cause, whether the vendor gets a cure period first, and what happens to equipment and supplies on the way out. For example, 90 days of notice plus a 30-day cure period puts a change four months out from the day you decide to make it.

What the twelve have in common

Each question asks whether a commitment is specific enough to hold someone to. A vendor with systems behind its answers can usually respond quickly and in detail. A slow or general answer may mean the answer doesn't exist yet, and it is better to learn that before signing than after. For reference, McLemore's customer retention rate is 96%.

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 have a contract coming up for renewal and want a second read on the scope before it goes out, we will walk your building and give you our assessment. Reach the sales team at sales@mbminc.com or (713) 528-7775.