Ten thousand square feet of standard office space takes about four labor hours a night to clean at a full-service scope (trash, restrooms, break room, dusting, vacuuming), so you need one cleaner for four hours or two cleaners for two. A medical suite of the same size takes four to five and a half hours; a school wing, three and a half to five; a mostly open warehouse floor, under two. The number of people is a scheduling choice; the number of labor hours is the fixed quantity, and it comes from a production rate.

The rates below are commonly quoted planning ranges from industry time tables, not measurements from any specific building. Use them to bid, then replace them with your own crew's check-in to check-out times after the first month.

Production rates by building type

A production rate is square feet cleaned per labor hour for a defined scope. Labor hours for 10,000 square feet are simply 10,000 divided by the rate:

Two things about this table. First, the office number is blended: it assumes the restrooms and break room are part of the 10,000 square feet and are cleaned every night. A building with six restrooms and a commercial kitchen is not a 3,500 building even if the floor plan says office. Second, round labor hours up. A 3.4-hour estimate is a 3.5-hour shift, because nobody leaves at 3.4.

One cleaner for four hours, or two for two

Same labor hours, same wage cost. The differences are in everything around the wage:

When one cleaner is better

• Travel is paid once. Two cleaners means two trips and, if you pay from the previous stop, twice the travel minutes.
• Accountability is simple. One name on the visit, one check-in, one person who knows the building. Quality is more consistent when the same person does the same restroom every night.
• It fits a route. A four-hour building is one stop for a cleaner who then goes home, or half a night for one who does two.

When two cleaners are better

• The access window is short. If the client wants you out by 8 p.m. and the office empties at 6, four hours does not fit. Two hours does.
• Lone-worker rules. Some clients, and some of your own policies, will not allow one person alone in a building at night. Medical sites in particular.
• Coverage. When one of two calls in sick, the other does a longer night and the building still gets cleaned. When your one cleaner calls in sick, you are cleaning it.
• Team cleaning. One person on restrooms and floors, one on trash, dusting and vacuuming; specialists are faster than generalists and the equipment is never idle.

There is no correct answer; there is the one that fits this client and this route. What matters for pricing is that both options cost the same four hours of labor, and the difference is the 15 minutes of extra travel and whatever the sick-day risk is worth to you.

What changes the number

The same 10,000 square feet can be a three-hour building or a six-hour building. Things that move the rate:

• Restroom and fixture count. The single biggest variable. Count fixtures (toilets, urinals, sinks) and budget three to four minutes each, then add the rest of the floor at the office rate.
• Occupancy. A hundred people generate more trash, more restroom use and more desk clutter than thirty in the same square footage. Ask for headcount, not just floor area.
• Floor type. Carpet vacuums quickly with a backpack vacuum; hard floor that needs dust-mopping and damp-mopping every night is slower per square foot. Machine work (auto-scrubbers) is faster than either, once the floor is open enough to use one.
• Frequency. A five-night building is maintained; a two-night building is recovered. Cut the visits and the hours per visit go up, not down proportionally.
• Scope. Dishes in the break room, wiping desks (vs. only clear surfaces), interior glass, and "just the conference room too" add up. Write the scope down and put a rate to each extra.
• Layout. Twenty private offices with doors are slower than one open floor of the same size; every door is a stop.
• Building condition. A first clean after a bad vendor can run at twice the hours for two weeks. Price the recovery separately or you eat it.
• Equipment. A backpack vacuum vs. an upright, a flat mop system vs. a bucket, a caddy with everything vs. trips to the closet. Equipment is the cheapest production-rate improvement you will ever buy.

A worked example

Example figures, not a real account. A 10,000-square-foot insurance office, 45 staff, carpet throughout, two restrooms with seven fixtures total, one break room, five nights.

• Restrooms: 7 fixtures × 3.5 minutes = 25 minutes
• Break room: 20 minutes
• Offices, corridors and reception: about 8,800 sq ft at 3,500 sq ft per hour = 2 hours 30 minutes
• Trash pull across the floor and a final walk: 20 minutes
• Total: about 3 hours 35 minutes, budgeted as 3.75 hours

One cleaner, 6:00 to 9:45 p.m., or two cleaners from 6:00 to 7:55. At five nights that is 21.67 visits × 3.75 = 81 labor hours a month, which at a $16 wage with 12% burden is about $1,455 in labor before travel, supplies and overhead. The five-night pricing walk-through takes a building like this from hours to a monthly price; the contract profitability calculator does the same arithmetic live.

How many buildings can one cleaner do in a night?

Turn the question around and it becomes a routing problem. A cleaner working a six-hour evening shift has about five and a half hours of cleaning after travel. At 10,000 square feet of standard office per four hours, that is one such building plus a small 3,000-square-foot suite nearby, or three 5,000-square-foot buildings if they are within ten minutes of each other. Every stop costs a travel leg (paid, if you pay from the previous job) and an alarm code, a key and a check-in, so two 10,000-square-foot buildings on one route beat four 5,000-square- foot ones for the same labor. When you take on a new account, the question is not just "how many hours" but "whose route does it fit, and what does the travel add?"

Then measure it

Every number above is an estimate, and estimates drift in one direction. The building that was bid at 3.75 hours is being cleaned in 4.1, and you will find out at renewal unless you are measuring. A GPS check-in and check-out per visit gives you the actual hours per building per night without anyone filling in a timesheet; after a month you know the real production rate for each account, and the next 10,000-square-foot bid is priced on it. That is the whole point of scheduling software for a cleaning company: not just who goes where tonight, but how long each building actually takes, so the schedule and the price agree.