Free tool
Does tonight's cleaning route fit the shift
Add up the real minutes of a night route, including drive time and the alarm and cart minutes nobody schedules, and see where the shift runs out.
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What one cleaning account really earns per paid hour
Enter the monthly price, the crew hours, the paid drive time and your loaded wage, and see what the account leaves behind before overhead.
Cleaning owners usually judge an account by its monthly price. That number tells you almost nothing on its own, because the office at sixteen hundred a month that sits eleven minutes from your shop is a different business from the one at eighteen hundred that costs your crew half an hour of paid driving each way. The only fair comparison across accounts is dollars left per paid labor hour.
The field to be honest about is paid drive time. If your cleaners clock in at the first stop and out at the last, every minute between buildings is on your payroll whether or not you priced it. Put the real number in, not the number you wish were true, and the calculator will show you which accounts on your book are carrying the others.
Your result
Paid hours per month
49.0
Every paid hour this account consumes in a month, drive time included.
Monthly labor and supply cost
$1,260
Labor at your loaded rate plus the consumables the crew uses.
Monthly gross profit
$390
What is left before overhead like vans, insurance, phones and your own pay.
Gross profit per paid hour
$7.96
The one number that compares fairly across every account on your book.
Run this for your three largest accounts and your three smallest, then look at the last row before you renew anything.
Why drive time changes the ranking
Take two office accounts at the same price. One is a strip center suite eight minutes from your last stop. The other is across a river and twenty eight minutes away at nine at night. Over twenty one visits that gap is about seven paid hours a month, which at a loaded rate near twenty four dollars is most of a small account's profit.
This is why route clustering is not a nicety. Every account you add inside an existing cluster starts life with a much better number in the last row than an identical account forty minutes out. When you are deciding which bids to chase, run this calculator with the drive time the new stop would actually add to an existing night.
Using the result when a wage increase lands
When a scheduled state minimum wage increase or a new paid leave accrual rule pushes your loaded rate up, raise the loaded wage field and rerun each account. The accounts that fall under a healthy gross profit per paid hour are the ones needing a price conversation, and you now have the arithmetic to hold in that conversation.
It also tells you which accounts to fix with production instead of price. If a stop takes two and a half hours because the crew is walking trash to a dumpster on the far side of the lot, buying a bigger barrel is cheaper than losing the account over a price increase your client will not accept.
Questions about this calculator
Should overhead go into the loaded wage?
No. Keep the loaded wage limited to what an hour of labor costs you directly, which is wage plus payroll taxes, workers comp and paid leave accrual. The result here is gross profit, and your vans, insurance and office costs come out of the total across all accounts. Mixing overhead into the hourly rate makes accounts look worse than they are and hides which one is the problem.
What is a healthy gross profit per paid hour?
It varies by market and by whether you are still cleaning yourself. Many small US cleaning companies aim for gross profit per paid hour in the same neighborhood as their loaded wage, which leaves room for overhead and an owner wage. The point of the calculator is comparison across your own accounts more than hitting a national benchmark.
How do I handle periodic work like strip and refinish?
Leave it out of this calculation and price it separately. Periodic floor work has its own labor hours, machine costs and downtime, and folding it into the monthly average hides how the recurring service performs. Run the recurring account here, then quote the strip and refinish as its own job.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
New cleaning account startup checklist
The steps that decide whether a new janitorial or residential account is profitable and stable by day thirty, in the order an owner should work them.
When the result comes out worse than you expected
A bad number on this calculator is usually a routing or scope problem rather than a pricing mistake. On a demo we take the account you just ran, write its property checklist, and slot the stop where it truly falls in the night so you can watch the paid minutes move. You keep the figures either way.