How to price a cleaning job in the UK (2026)
Most cleaning businesses price by looking at what the company down the road charges and going slightly under. That is not pricing, it is guessing — and it is why so many owners are busy every day of the week and still cannot say whether the month made money.
The number you need is built from the bottom up: what an hour of cleaning actually costs you, plus the margin you intend to make. Everything else — the quote, the discount, the decision to walk away from a job — follows from that one figure.
Start with the true cost of an hour
The mistake is starting from the wage. If you pay a cleaner £12.50 an hour, an hour of cleaning does not cost you £12.50. It costs considerably more, and the gap is where margins quietly disappear.
1. The wage
Whatever you actually pay, per hour, for the person doing the work. If that is you, put your own number in anyway — a business that only works because the owner is unpaid is not a business, it is a job with extra admin.
2. Employer on-costs
On top of the wage you carry employer National Insurance, pension auto-enrolment, and holiday pay. Holiday is the one people forget: 28 days statutory is roughly 12.07% on top of hours worked.
As a working figure, on-costs add 20–25% to the wage. On £12.50 that is around £2.80.
3. Materials and equipment
Cloths, chemicals, bags, machine consumables, and the amortised cost of vacuums and machines that wear out. Take a year of spending, divide by a year of chargeable hours.
For most domestic operations this lands at £0.80–£1.50 an hour.
4. Travel
The half hour between two jobs is unpaid by the customer and very much paid by you. Count the fuel, the insurance, the servicing, and — importantly — the time.
A round with 20 minutes of travel per job adds roughly a third to the labour time of a 60-minute job. This is the single biggest thing that separates a profitable round from a busy one.
5. Overhead
Insurance, phone, software, accountant, advertising, DBS checks, uniforms. Total it for the year and divide by chargeable hours.
A small operation doing 2,000 chargeable hours a year with £6,000 of overhead carries £3.00 an hour before anyone has cleaned anything.
The worked example
A one-van domestic cleaning business, one employed cleaner, roughly 1,800 chargeable hours a year.
| Component | Per chargeable hour |
|---|---|
| Wage | £12.50 |
| Employer on-costs (22%) | £2.75 |
| Materials and equipment | £1.10 |
| Travel (time and vehicle) | £2.60 |
| Overhead | £3.00 |
| Total cost | £21.95 |
That is the floor. Not the price — the point at which you break exactly even and have paid yourself nothing for running the thing.
Now add margin. A net margin of 20–30% is a healthy target for a small service business:
- At 20%: £21.95 ÷ 0.80 = £27.44 an hour
- At 25%: £21.95 ÷ 0.75 = £29.27 an hour
- At 30%: £21.95 ÷ 0.70 = £31.36 an hour
Note the division. Adding 25% to your cost gives you a 20% margin, not 25% — a mistake that quietly costs a small business thousands a year.
Turning the rate into a quote
Now price the job, not the hour.
A three-bedroom house, standard weekly clean, takes your cleaner about 2.5 hours. At £29 an hour that is £72.50, and you quote £72 or £75 — a round number, fixed, per visit.
Three things to hold onto:
Quote the job, keep the rate private. A fixed price is easier to accept, and when your cleaner gets faster at that house the gain is yours. Publish an hourly rate and you have capped your own productivity.
Price the first clean separately. An initial deep clean on a house that has not been done properly takes two to three times as long. Quote it as its own job. Absorbing it into the first regular visit is how a good contract starts at a loss.
Charge more for less frequency. A fortnightly clean is harder work per visit than a weekly one, and a one-off is harder still. A common ladder is weekly at the base rate, fortnightly at +10–15%, and one-off at +25–40%.
What the market will bear
Your costs tell you the floor. The market tells you the ceiling. In 2026 the broad UK bands for domestic cleaning are:
| Area | Typical range per hour |
|---|---|
| London and the South East | £22–£32 |
| Large cities (Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Glasgow) | £19–£27 |
| Smaller towns and rural | £17–£23 |
Commercial and end-of-tenancy work generally sits above these, and carries more specification, more insurance requirement, and slower payment.
If your calculated rate comes out above what your area pays, the answer is not to drop the price. It is to cut travel time by tightening the round geographically, or to move up the market to end-of-tenancy, commercial or short-term-rental turnovers where the rate supports the cost.
Do not forget VAT
Once your turnover passes the VAT registration threshold across any rolling 12 months, registration is compulsory. Below it, it is optional — and for a business cleaning private homes, usually unattractive, because households cannot reclaim VAT. Registering means either absorbing the VAT out of your margin or raising every price by a fifth.
Watch the threshold as you grow, and keep your invoices and expenses in a state where you could evidence the figure. If you are already registered, quote inclusive of VAT to households and exclusive to businesses, and say which on the quote.
Raise your prices once a year
Set a date. Apply it to everyone. Give 30 days’ written notice.
Costs rise every year — wages, fuel, insurance, everything in the table above. A business that holds prices flat for three years is not being generous to its customers, it is quietly reducing its own margin to nothing. Small annual rises are expected and rarely lose anyone. The 20% rise you are eventually forced into is what loses people.
The bit that actually decides it
None of this works if you cannot see what a job made after it is done.
Two houses that both pay £75 are not the same job if one takes 2.5 hours and the other takes 3.5 and is 20 minutes further out. Owners who cannot see that at the job level end up with rounds full of work that keeps them busy and makes nothing — and they usually find out from the accountant, months later.
Put your costs against each job as you go, and let the numbers tell you which customers to keep.
Price and invoice in one place. OlasBoard turns a quote into a booked job, the job into an invoice, and tracks the costs against it — so you can see what each customer actually made you. Try it free for 14 days, no card required.