Commercial cleaning bids are won on the walkthrough and lost on the math. How to measure a building, calculate your production rate, price per square foot without guessing, and present a bid that beats bigger companies.
Residential cleaning pays the bills; commercial contracts build the company. One office building at $2,800 a month is thirty-three recurring residential cleans that never reschedule, never haggle per visit, and renew annually. Which is why every cleaning company eventually asks the same question: how do you actually bid these?
Here's the process, end to end.
Nobody prices commercial work from a phone description. The walkthrough is where the contract is won — partly because of what you measure, mostly because of what you notice.
Measure and count the obvious: cleanable square footage (not gross — hallways, offices, restrooms; not server rooms you'll never enter), restroom count and fixture count, flooring types and their square footage split (carpet vacuums fast; VCT that needs burnishing doesn't), and trash points.
Then ask the questions that separate pros from price-guessers: What's the building's traffic — 20 employees or 200? What did the last company miss? (This answer is the entire sales pitch, gift-wrapped.) Who supplies consumables — paper, liners, soap? What's the security/alarm procedure? Day cleaning or after-hours?
Write it all down on a walkthrough form, every time. The habit alone reads as professional to a facility manager who's watched three competitors eyeball the lobby and quote a round number.
Commercial pricing rests on one concept: the production rate — square feet cleaned per labor-hour. Industry ballparks for general office cleaning run 2,500–4,000 sq ft/hour depending on density and spec; restrooms are the great time-sink (figure 2–4 minutes per fixture), and hard-floor work runs on its own rates.
The formula from there is honest arithmetic:
For a 12,000 sq ft office, 5 nights a week, at 3,000 sq ft/hour with a $22 loaded wage: 20 hrs/week → ~$1,905/mo labor → landing somewhere around $2,600–2,900/mo at healthy margins. Sanity-check against the market: most US office cleaning bids land between $0.10 and $0.25 per square foot per month at 5-day frequency, with medical, high-security, and small-but-fussy spaces above that band.
If your math says $0.08/sq ft, you didn't find efficiency — you forgot something. Usually the restrooms.
Facility managers compare bids by scope, so give yours a real scope: task frequencies in a table (nightly: trash, restrooms, touchpoints; weekly: dust horizontal surfaces; monthly: vents, edges; quarterly: burnish). A written spec does three things — it prevents scope creep, it gives you the "that's a quarterly task, here's the add-on price" conversation, and it makes the vague bids around yours look vague.
Present it cleanly, send it the same week as the walkthrough, and make it signable electronically — a facility manager who can approve from their phone is a facility manager who doesn't put you in the "circle back" pile. (This is precisely what estimates with e-signing are for, and yes, follow up — commercial decisions stall for weeks and the bidder who checks in politely usually takes it.)
Target buildings where the giants don't bother: 5,000–25,000 sq ft offices, medical/dental suites, gyms, daycares, property-managed strip centers. The decision-maker is reachable, the specs are manageable, and the incumbents get complacent — "what did the last company miss?" almost always has an answer.
Bid ten of these with real math and a written spec, and you'll sign one or two. Then the recurring revenue starts doing what recurring revenue does.
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