For commercial cleaning firms
What it shows
Every job from the last twelve months, sorted into the types below — whatever your records happen to call them — then costed against the hours each type consumed. The output is a profit figure per type, an hourly return per type, and a defensible price range for each.
Daily and weekly contracts
The bulk of most books. Priced once, often years ago, and rarely re-costed against a wage floor that has moved every April since.
Periodic and deep cleans
Scheduled alongside the daily work and frequently absorbed into its price rather than charged as the separate job it is.
Floor care and specialist work
Machinery, chemicals and skilled hours. Usually priced as an add-on when it deserves its own rate.
Builders' cleans and sparkle cleans
Unpredictable scope, heavy overrun risk. The type most likely to look profitable on the invoice and not on the hours.
One-off and reactive jobs
Quoted job by job, so the spread inside the type is wide. Worth seeing what your own quoting has actually been returning.
Consumables and materials
Passed through at cost or marked up, and either way worth separating from the labour so neither is hiding the other.
The list is not fixed. If your records carry a type that isn't here, it gets its own row — the classification follows your work, not a template.
What drives your costs
Commercial cleaning is the trade where the wage floor is least yours to set. The National Living Wage rises on a schedule somebody else decides, and it lands on the largest share of your cost base at once. A contract priced against last year's rate does not stop covering itself gradually — it stops on a date in April.
On top of the wage sit employer's National Insurance, the auto-enrolment pension and statutory holiday. Holiday matters more here than in most trades because cover is real work: when a cleaner takes their twenty-eight days, somebody is paid to cover the site, and that cost belongs to the contract rather than to a general overhead. Some public-sector and framework contracts add their own wage floor on top, which is not yours to negotiate either.
The report costs each contract type against the wage you actually pay it, not a firm-wide average — so a site sitting on a higher rate shows as a higher cost per hour rather than being smoothed away. If your rates differ by site, say so and they are carried separately.
The arithmetic
The report's central number is your floor rate: the lowest hourly rate at which an average hour covers its own cost. Here it is at figures typical of a firm with 9 field staff and 3 vans. Yours will differ — the method won't.
£13.50 × (1 + 30.1%) = £17.56
employer's National Insurance 15.0%, auto-enrolment pension 3.0%, statutory holiday 12.1%. Rates change — use your own current figures.
£17.56 ÷ 82.5% = £21.28
You pay for 40 hours and invoice 33. The other 7 — travelling, quoting, the merchants, the customer who wasn't in — still get paid for, so every invoiced hour carries them. Skipping this step is the most common way a rate ends up too low.
£70 × 3 × 52 = £10,920/yr ÷ 15,444 hrs = £0.71
£3,000 × 12 = £36,000/yr ÷ 15,444 hrs = £2.33
Illustrative figures, not a benchmark. Cleaning runs a higher share of invoiced hours than trades that travel between short jobs, which is why the floor lands where it does — but a firm on a framework wage floor, or one paying different rates across sites, will not recognise these and should not try to. Figures are before VAT. The method is written out in full on the floor rate page.
And what it does when you get busier
| Invoiced hours a week, each | Utilisation | Floor becomes |
|---|---|---|
| 27 | 67.5% | £29.73/hr |
| 30 | 75.0% | £26.75/hr |
| 33 — this example | 82.5% | £24.32/hr |
| 36 | 90.0% | £22.30/hr |
| 39 | 97.5% | £20.58/hr |
What we need
A spreadsheet export is fine. So is a messy one — reconciling records that disagree with each other is most of the work, and it is work you are paying us to do rather than work you have to do first.
Before you buy
If you run fewer than about three operatives, there are not enough comparable jobs for the analysis to be sound. If a franchisor sets your prices, you cannot act on the half of the report that matters. If you need it tomorrow, five working days is five working days. The full list, with the reasoning, is on who it's not for — and the comparison page sets out when a spreadsheet or your existing software answers this better.
Your commercial cleaning year, costed and checked.
£500 · 12 months of your jobs · 5 working days · refunded in full if nothing material is found
£500 · refunded in full if it finds nothing material.