How to price recurring cleaning and maintenance jobs

Recurring work is the best revenue in service businesses and the easiest to underprice, because the mistake compounds silently. A job priced fifteen dollars low costs you almost four hundred dollars a year, every year, on one customer.

Start from your real hourly cost

Not the wage. The cost. Add up, per hour of billable field time:

• Wages plus payroll taxes
• Workers comp and liability insurance
• Vehicle: payment, fuel, maintenance, insurance
• Supplies and equipment replacement
• Unbillable time — drive time, estimates, admin, no-shows
• Your overhead: phone, software, accounting, the website

The unbillable line is where most owners go wrong. If a crew is paid for eight hours and bills five and a half, your true cost per billable hour is nearly half again the wage.

Then add the margin you actually need

Decide your target margin before you price anything, and treat it as a floor. If a job cannot clear it, the correct move is to decline the job, not to hope volume fixes it.

Estimate the hours honestly, then track them

Your estimate for a given house will be wrong for the first two visits and roughly right by the fourth. Log actual on-site time for every recurring job for one month. You will find two or three accounts that are quietly unprofitable, and fixing those is usually worth more than any new marketing.

Frequency discounts, done properly

A weekly home takes less time than a monthly one because less accumulates. The discount should reflect that reduced labor, not just be a bribe for commitment. A common structure:

1. 01One time or deep clean — full rate, often a premium for condition
2. 02Monthly — small discount, because the work is nearly as heavy
3. 03Every other week — moderate discount
4. 04Weekly — largest discount, because the visit is genuinely faster

Price the first visit separately

The first visit on a new recurring account is always heavier. Quote it as its own line — an initial or deep clean — and quote the recurring rate beside it. Doing this prevents the single most common recurring-pricing failure: setting the ongoing rate based on the hardest visit you will ever do.

Raising rates on existing customers

Rates should move annually, by a modest amount, on a schedule. Small and predictable is far easier to accept than a large correction after four years.

• Give at least 30 days notice, in writing.
• Say the amount and the effective date in the first sentence.
• Give one honest reason — costs — and do not over-explain.
• Thank them for the years. Mean it.
• Expect to lose a small number. The ones you lose are usually your least profitable.

If nobody ever leaves over a price increase, your prices are too low.