What actually
sets your price.

Most commercial cleaning in Australia is priced one of two ways. Ongoing servicing — the routine clean of an occupied office, retail space, warehouse or medical centre — is almost always quoted as a per-visit or monthly contract figure after a site walk-through, because the contractor needs to see the floor to estimate labour hours accurately.

One-off or ad-hoc work — a single deep clean, a post-event clean, or a job with no ongoing relationship — is more often quoted on an hourly basis, since there is no established routine to build a fixed visit time from. Neither approach is inherently cheaper; they suit different situations.

You will sometimes see cleaning discussed in dollars per square metre. It is a useful way to compare two quotes for the same building, but a meaningless number on its own, because it hides frequency, scope and site type. A low per-square-metre figure for a fortnightly light tidy tells you nothing about what a daily full-service clean of the same floor would cost.

If you want to use a per-square-metre comparison properly, hold frequency and scope constant across every quote you are comparing, and only then treat the figure as informative. Our dedicated page on cleaning cost per square metre goes into this in more depth.

The single biggest mistake in comparing commercial cleaning quotes is assuming the scope is identical because the price is similar. Check what is explicitly included and, just as importantly, what is explicitly excluded — window cleaning, carpet steam cleaning, and after-hours loading are common items that quietly vary between contractors.

Also check insurance and how staff are employed. A contractor without adequate public liability cover, or one relying on underpaid or informally arranged labour, is a liability risk to your business as well as an ethical one — and it usually shows up in the quote as an unrealistically low number.

A quote well below every other one you have received is not usually a bargain. In almost every case it means fewer hours allocated on site, understaffing, or consumables excluded and added back later. The work does not get lighter to match the lower price — it gets rushed.

The typical pattern is a clean that looks acceptable for the first few weeks and then visibly declines over two to three months as the contractor tries to make the low price workable. If a quote is dramatically cheaper than the rest, ask specifically how many labour hours per visit it assumes.

The fastest way to a reliable figure is to let the contractor see the site rather than describe it over the phone. Have your current cleaning schedule, floor plan or approximate area, and a list of any problem areas ready — this lets us quote the actual job rather than a generic estimate that gets revised later.

If you are comparing several quotes, ask each contractor to itemise frequency, scope, consumables and any periodic work as separate lines. It takes a few extra minutes and makes every subsequent comparison genuinely apples-to-apples.