How to Bid Commercial Cleaning Jobs (2026): Step-by-Step

8 min read

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Most cleaning bids are lost before the walkthrough ends. Not on price — on the fact that the bidder guessed at how long the building takes to clean, then worked backwards to a number that felt competitive.

This is the method for doing it the other way round: measure the work, cost the work, then decide what margin you are willing to accept. It takes longer than guessing. It is also the difference between a contract you keep for four years and one you quietly resent by month three.

A note on numbers: this guide deliberately does not hand you a rate per square foot. Production rates and labour costs vary enormously by region, building type, and how your crew actually works — any benchmark we printed would be wrong for most readers and dangerous for the rest. Every figure below comes from your walkthrough and your payroll.

Step 1: Do not bid without a walkthrough

If a prospect will not let you walk the building, you are not being invited to bid — you are being used to pressure their incumbent. Walk away, politely.

On the walkthrough, you are collecting five things:

Cleanable square footage, not gross. Mechanical rooms, stairwells you are not servicing, and leased-out suites come out.
Floor surface mix. Carpet, VCT, polished concrete, and tile all clean at different speeds and carry different periodic work.
Fixture counts. Toilets, urinals, sinks, dispensers. Restrooms drive labour far more than their square footage suggests.
Occupancy and access. Headcount, shift pattern, when you can be in the building, alarm and key procedures.
The specification. What gets done nightly, weekly, monthly, quarterly. Get this in writing before you price it.

Photograph everything. When a dispute arises in month eight about whether the loading dock was ever in scope, the photos settle it.

Step 2: Convert the building into hours

Labour is the overwhelming majority of a cleaning contract cost. Everything else is rounding. So the bid is really an estimate of hours.

Build it up area by area rather than applying one blanket rate to the whole building:

Open office / general areas — the fastest space per square foot, and usually the largest.
Restrooms — price per fixture and per restroom, not per square foot.
Kitchens and break rooms — slow, and the first place a complaint comes from.
Entrances and lobbies — high visibility, disproportionate time, weather-dependent.
Periodic work — stripping, waxing, carpet extraction, high dusting. Price these separately, then amortise across the contract term.

If you have run similar buildings, your own historical hours are the best data you will ever get. Pull the timesheets. If you are new, time yourself on a representative floor and extrapolate honestly — then add a contingency, because your first estimate will be optimistic.

Step 3: Cost the hours properly — the part that sinks people

The single most common bidding error in this trade is pricing labour at the wage rate. Your cost per cleaning hour is not what you pay the cleaner. It includes:

Employer payroll taxes
Workers compensation, which in cleaning is not cheap
Any benefits or paid time off you offer
Supervision and quality inspection time
Cover for absence — someone still cleans the building when your regular is sick
Training and turnover, which in this industry is a real and recurring cost

Work out your true loaded cost per hour once, properly, and reuse it on every bid. Our free True Hourly Rate Calculator will get you there in a few minutes.

Then add the non-labour costs the contract actually consumes: chemicals and paper, equipment and its replacement, travel, insurance, and a share of your office overhead. Consumables deserve particular attention — if you are supplying paper and liners for a busy building, that line is much larger than new bidders expect, and it scales with occupancy rather than square footage.

Step 4: Decide margin deliberately

Only now do you pick a number. Margin is a decision, not a residual — and the mistake is confusing markup with margin. Marking your cost up by 20% does not give you a 20% margin; it gives you about 16.7%. On thin cleaning contracts that gap is the whole profit.

If that distinction is fuzzy, run the numbers through our Markup vs. Margin Calculator before you send anything.

Set your margin against risk, not against what you think the competitor will bid. A one-year contract in a building with unpredictable occupancy and a fussy property manager needs more margin than a three-year contract in a quiet suburban office. Bidding low to “buy the account” only works if you have a credible plan to raise the price later. Usually there is not one.

Step 5: Write a proposal that is hard to compare on price alone

If your proposal is a number on a page, the buyer will put it next to two other numbers and pick the lowest. Make that harder.

Restate the scope in your own words, with frequencies. This demonstrates you understood the building and quietly exposes competitors who did not walk it.
Separate nightly service from periodic work so the buyer can see what they are getting rather than one lump sum.
State what is excluded. Counter-intuitively this builds trust, and it protects you later.
Name your quality process — inspection frequency, how complaints are handled, response time. Buyers have been burned before and this is often what actually decides it.
Put the price at the end, after the value is established.

Then follow up. A large share of cleaning contracts go to the bidder who followed up twice while everyone else sent the proposal and waited.

Do the arithmetic somewhere other than your head

Every step above is simple on its own. Stacked together across a dozen areas, three periodic services, and a loaded labour rate, it is exactly the kind of calculation where one transposed number costs you a year of profit.

Two things on this site will do it for you:

The free Commercial Cleaning Bid Calculator — enter areas, hours, and your loaded rate, and it returns the bid.
The Cleaning Bid Kit ($39) — our expanded bid calculator spreadsheet plus an editable proposal template built around the structure in Step 5. It is our own product, so we obviously have an interest in you buying it; the free calculator above will price a bid perfectly well without it.

Common ways cleaning bids go wrong

Bidding off a floor plan. Plans lie. Buildings have been reconfigured, and the plan never shows how filthy the break room is.
Forgetting periodic work. You win on the nightly number, then discover the spec obligates you to strip and wax quarterly.
Ignoring consumables. Especially in high-traffic buildings, and especially when the spec says you supply.
No escalation clause. Wages rise every year. A three-year contract at a fixed price is a three-year pay cut. Build in an annual adjustment.
Pricing to win rather than to deliver. An underpriced contract degrades: you cut hours, quality drops, you lose it anyway, and you subsidised them for a year.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a commercial cleaning bid take to prepare?

For a straightforward office, an hour on site and an hour on the numbers. If you are turning bids round in fifteen minutes, you are guessing.

Should I show my hourly rate in the proposal?

Generally no for nightly service — it invites the buyer to negotiate your labour cost rather than evaluate your service. Do quote hourly for extra or on-call work, so there is an agreed rate when they ask for something outside scope.

What if the buyer says I am much higher than another bid?

Ask to see the scope the other bidder priced. Nine times out of ten it is a different specification, fewer periodic services, or fewer hours on site. If it genuinely is the same scope and you are still higher, your cost base is the problem, not your bid.

Do I need software to bid cleaning contracts?

Not to bid. You will want it to run the work once you have a few contracts — see our buyer guide to cleaning business software.

If the markup-versus-margin distinction in Step 4 is where you get stuck, we walk through it properly with worked examples in contractor markup vs. margin.

How to Bid Commercial Cleaning Jobs (2026): A Step-by-Step Method