How the calculators work

One pricing engine

Every calculator and location page uses the same pricing rules. The engine exists twice, once in JavaScript for the live calculators and once in PHP for the server-rendered pages, and both versions must pass the same golden test cases to the cent.

Wages

Labour is priced from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025. House and location pages use maids and housekeeping cleaners (SOC 37-2012); commercial, move-out, window, furniture and restaurant calculators use janitors and cleaners (SOC 37-2011). Until you pick a location, the calculators use the national median for janitors and cleaners, $17.71 an hour, so a result is always shown.

Cost stack

1. Labour hours come from the job: square feet divided by a production rate (commercial, restaurant), rooms and minutes (house, move-out), panes and minutes per pane (window), or minutes per item (furniture).
2. Crew size divides labour hours into time on site. It never multiplies the cost.
3. Loaded wage = wage × (1 + employer FICA 7.65% + effective federal unemployment tax + state unemployment tax + workers' compensation + benefits).
4. Cost = loaded wage × (labour hours + travel hours) + mileage + supplies + equipment and overhead per labour hour.
5. Price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). A 20% margin turns an $800 cost into $1,000. If you prefer markup, cost × (1 + markup): a 50% markup is ×1.5. A 25% markup equals a 20% margin.
6. Add-ons are quantity × unit price. Each percentage surcharge applies exactly the percent on its label. Then the frequency discount, the minimum charge, rounding, and sales tax only where the service is taxable.

Customer ranges

The customer view shows a range. The low end re-prices labour at the local 25th-percentile wage with a lower overhead and margin band; the high end uses the 75th-percentile wage with a higher band; the midpoint uses the median. Without a location the wage term drops out and only the margin band remains.

Location pages use these starting-point assumptions for a small cleaning business: supplies $12.00 per visit, overhead $6.00 per labor hour ($4.00 low, $8.00 high), and a 20% margin (15% low, 30% high). They are not official statistics; every calculator lets you change them.

Values that are starting points, not official data

No government agency publishes cleaning times or room prices. For the items below we use typical industry starting points and published price guides. Change any of them in the calculator to match your business.

• Residential minutes per room and the deep-clean multiplier.
• Window minutes per pane and height premiums.
• Carpet production by method, rates per square foot and per room, and truck-mount cost per hour.
• Upholstery minutes per item.
• Restaurant front-of-house, kitchen and restroom production rates.
• Commercial production rates by facility type (these are not an official ISSA table).

Market price bands

Some calculators show a typical market price range from published consumer price guides (HomeGuide, Angi), with the publisher and date. These are a reference only and are never mixed into our wage-based calculation or shown as data on location pages.

Sources

• BLS OEWS May 2025
• DOL minimum wage and SUTA
• IRS mileage and self-employment tax
• State revenue departments
• HUD Fair Market Rents
• Census ACS
• BEA Regional Price Parities
• ISSA cleaning times
• HomeGuide and Angi, accessed October 2026

Location pages

A state or metro page is published only when it has at least 8 official figures, including the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile wage. A metro page must also differ from its state on at least 30% of its figures (more than 5% away from the median of the state's metro areas); otherwise it is marked noindex and left out of the sitemap. The first release indexes the 150 metro areas with the most cleaning jobs.