Work out what a contract really costs per square foot — then check it against what production rates and labor cost actually support. Because cost per square foot is not a price you look up. It is a number that falls out of the labor, and any benchmark that ignores frequency is telling you nothing.
| Per sq ft, per month | — |
| Per sq ft, per year | — |
| Per visit | — |
| Visits per month | — |
| What the labor math implies | — |
The benchmark assumes your production rate and labor rate, at 6% supplies and a 30% margin. Change those inputs and it moves with you.
Live, from your labor rate and your frequency — not a number scraped off someone else's blog. Monthly price per square foot at .
| Facility type | Production rate | $ / sq ft / month | $ / sq ft / year |
|---|
These are what the bid math produces, not survey data. They move with labor rates, frequency and how fast a building can genuinely be cleaned — which is exactly why a fixed published benchmark is worth so little.
It is the most-searched number in commercial cleaning and the least useful one, because it is an output, not an input. Nobody prices a building by looking up a rate per square foot. They work out how many labor hours the space takes, multiply by what labor costs, add supplies and margin — and cost per square foot is simply that answer divided by the floor area.
Which means every published benchmark is quietly assuming three things it usually does not tell you:
Frequency. Five nights a week costs about five times what one night a week costs, per square foot. A benchmark that does not state visits per week is not a benchmark.
Production rate. An open warehouse might clean at 8,000 sq ft an hour. A restaurant with a kitchen and two restrooms might manage 1,800. That is a 4× spread in labor before anything else is considered.
Labor market. The same scope in a market where loaded labor is $27 an hour costs 35% more than where it is $20. No national average survives that.
So use cost per square foot the way it is actually useful: as a sanity check on a number you built from labor. If your price per square foot is far below what your own production and labor rates support, you have not found an efficiency — you have made an arithmetic error, and the account will underperform for as long as you hold it.
Usually, yes — but check the inputs first. If your crews genuinely clean faster than the production rate you selected, the benchmark is wrong for you and your price may be fine. If they do not, the account is running on a thinner margin than you think, or on none at all. The contract profitability check settles it with real hours.
Not automatically. Higher-frequency scopes, day porter coverage, consumables supply and demanding specifications all legitimately raise the number. What matters is being able to explain the difference — a customer who understands what they are buying rarely leaves over price alone.
Generally no. It invites a comparison against a number they found online that assumes a different frequency and a different scope. Quote a monthly price against a written scope, and keep cost per square foot as your own internal check.
No, and it should not. Floor refinishing, carpet extraction and window cleaning are priced as separate line items. Folding them into a recurring per-square-foot rate makes the account look expensive and the periodic work look free.
All free, all in your browser, none of them ask for an email.
These tools are single screens of DayPorter, a CRM built for one trade: commercial cleaning. Bids save with the inputs that produced them, against the building they belong to, and the contracts you win roll up into monthly recurring revenue. It all stays on your phone.
See what DayPorter does →