Cleaning Job Costing Calculator

How this calculator works

This calculator computes the true net profit of a single cleaning job by stacking every cost that hits the business when a cleaner walks out the door: burdened labor (including compensable drive time), supplies consumed, a per-job equipment depreciation charge, a fixed overhead allocation, and any commission owed. The result is net profit per job — the number that determines whether the business is actually viable, not just busy.

Most cleaning businesses that fail do so because they track revenue but not true job cost. A job that bills $250 and pays a cleaner $75 looks profitable from the revenue side. But once drive time adds $18.75, supplies add $15, equipment depreciation adds $2, and overhead adds $40, the total cost is $150.75 — and the job earned $99.25 (39.7% margin), not $175. That margin gap, multiplied across hundreds of jobs per year, is the difference between a business that grows and one that stays permanently at breakeven.

What "burdened" labor rate means

The labor-rate input must be the fully-burdened rate — the total employer cost per hour for a W-2 cleaner, not just the take-home wage. For a cleaner earning $17.85/hour (the BLS OES national mean for SOC 37-2011 / 37-2012), the fully-burdened rate adds:

• Employer FICA: 7.65% ($1.37/hour)
• FUTA: 0.6% ($0.11/hour)
• SUTA: 1-5% depending on state ($0.18-$0.89/hour)
• Workers'-comp premium: $4-$15 per $100 of payroll depending on state and class code (9014 or 9015) — adds $0.71-$2.68/hour

The result is a fully-burdened rate of $22-$28 for a cleaner at the national mean wage. Operators who use the base wage (not the burdened rate) systematically underprice labor by 30-50% and run operations that appear profitable on paper but lose money in practice.

Drive time — the overlooked cost

Drive time paid to W-2 cleaners is compensable work time under the Portal-to-Portal Act (29 USC § 254). Travel between job sites during the workday is compensable even if the first and last trips of the day are not. On a densely packed urban route with back-to-back jobs, drive time may represent only 10-15 minutes per job and is a minor cost factor. On a suburban or rural operation with 20-40 minute drives between jobs, drive time can add 15-25% to the effective labor cost per job.

The drive time input should reflect the time paid per job — not total daily drive time divided by jobs, which undercounts on jobs farther from base.

Equipment depreciation — why it matters

Equipment depreciation is the most consistently omitted cost in cleaning job costing. Most operators think of a vacuum cleaner or steam cleaner as a sunk cost after purchase — but it is not. The equipment has a finite useful life measured in jobs, and each job consumes a fraction of that life. A $400 commercial-grade upright vacuum rated for 700 jobs costs $0.57 per job in depreciation. If the operator does not recover that $0.57 per job, the business will not have the cash to replace the vacuum when it fails.

The formula is simple: (purchase price − salvage value) ÷ estimated job count = depreciation per job. For a basic residential kit the default of $2.00 per job is a reasonable aggregate estimate.

ISSA cost benchmarks

The ISSA (International Sanitary Supply Association) publishes cost-ratio benchmarks for cleaning operations. These are the targets for a well-managed cleaning business:

| Cost category | ISSA benchmark (% of revenue) | |---|---| | Labor (including payroll taxes) | 50–65% | | Supplies | 5–8% | | Overhead (insurance, admin, marketing, software) | 15–25% | | Equipment depreciation | 1–3% | | Net profit | 5–15% |

Operators outside these ranges should identify which cost is out of proportion and investigate. A supply-cost ratio above 10% on recurring jobs usually means over-diluting chemicals is not happening, reusable items are being replaced too frequently, or per-job quantities are not being controlled.