The short answer
Square footage sets the baseline, and then five other factors adjust it: which cleaning phase is required, the finish level of the building, how accessible the site is, whether the building is occupied, and whether work has to run outside standard hours.
Two buildings of identical size can differ by a wide margin on the same phase. A 60,000-square-foot warehouse final clean and a 60,000-square-foot medical office final clean are not comparable jobs, because the second has an inspection standard the first does not.
The six variables
Anyone quoting from square footage alone is either padding the number to cover the unknowns or is about to discover them on site.
- Cleaning phase
- Rough, final, fluff and last touch have different labour intensities. A final clean is typically the largest line by hours on any project.
- Finish level
- Polished concrete and painted drywall clean quickly. Stone, specialised LVT, custom millwork and clinical casework do not, and they carry a risk of damage that changes the method.
- Site access
- Infill sites with no lay-down area require continuous debris removal rather than a single haul, which changes both the labour and the disposal cost.
- Occupancy
- Cleaning around a live tenant means containment, restricted hours and a space that has to be usable the next morning. Empty buildings have none of those constraints.
- Schedule
- Night shifts, weekends and compressed fast-track mobilization all price differently from standard weekday work.
- Building type
- Healthcare, laboratory and food-service handovers carry inspection standards that add verification steps a commercial office does not have.
Where projects go over budget
The most common overrun is not a mispriced clean. It is a rough clean that was skipped, which loads work onto the final clean that was never quoted.
The second most common is a final clean scheduled against the occupancy date rather than the inspection date, which turns a planned phase into an emergency mobilization at short notice.
The third is scope that was agreed verbally on site rather than in writing, particularly on tenant improvements where the boundary between construction cleaning and janitorial work is genuinely ambiguous.
What to send for an accurate quote
Send five things and a quote can usually be returned within one business day: total square footage, the project address, the cleaning phase, the building type, and your target inspection date.
Adding the finish schedule or a set of drawings improves accuracy further, particularly on buildings with specialised flooring. Photographs of current site conditions are more useful than a written description of them.
A note on the cheapest quote
On a commercial project the cleaning contractor is on your site, under your general contractor’s insurance requirements, working to your inspection date. A quote that comes in well under the others usually differs on one of three things: whether workers’ compensation is actually carried on every employee, whether the crew is licensed for the scope, or whether the quoted phase matches the phase you need.
Ask for the certificate of insurance and the licence number before comparing prices. If a contractor cannot produce both quickly, the price difference is explained.