How Much Does a Cleaning Business Make, From Revenue to Owner Pay
How much a cleaning business makes comes down to the price of a clean, how many cleans fill a week, and what is left once costs are paid. In the worked example below, a full-time solo cleaner charging $150 a clean brings in $75,000 a year and keeps about $62,500 before tax.
A small team brings in far more revenue but keeps a smaller share of it. Whether that counts as profitable, and what moves the margin, is the subject of is a cleaning business profitable.
How much a particular cleaning business makes comes down to three numbers, which are the price per job, how many paid jobs fit in a week, and what labour costs once other people do the cleaning. Each is worked through below from stated assumptions, so you can swap in your own.
Revenue, profit and owner pay are three different numbers
Most confusion about cleaning income comes from mixing up three figures. A business can have impressive revenue and still pay its owner very little, so it helps to name each one before doing any sums.
- Revenue
- Everything clients pay, before any costs. Price per clean multiplied by the number of cleans.
- Profit margin
- The share of revenue left after supplies, driving, insurance, wages and other running costs.
- Owner pay
- What the owner actually takes home, which for a sole proprietor is profit less income and self-employment tax.
The earnings figures people quote online are usually revenue, which is why they can look generous. The question worth asking of any figure is which of these three it is. The rest of this post works from revenue down to owner pay.
What a solo cleaning business makes in a year
Start with one owner cleaning homes alone. The assumptions are a price of $150 for a standard clean taking about three hours, 10 cleans a week, and 50 working weeks. That is 30 hours of cleaning, with driving and admin filling the rest of a 40-hour week.
On those assumptions revenue is $150 times 10 times 50, or $75,000. The cleaning business earnings calculator runs the same sum if you want to try other prices and schedules. The costs that come off it are smaller than many people expect.
The solo cleaner keeps about 83 cents of every dollar before tax, because the biggest cost, labour, is their own time.
That profit is not yet take-home pay. A sole proprietor owes income tax and self-employment tax on it, and the IRS self-employment tax page sets that second tax at 15.3% of net earnings, within the limits it explains. An accountant can tell you what to set aside for your own state and income.
How that compares with a cleaning wage
Spread across 2,000 working hours, $62,480 comes to about $31 an hour before tax. For comparison, O*NET's profile of maids and housekeeping cleaners gives a median wage of $17.07 an hour for people employed to do the same work.
The comparison is not exact, since an employee does not pay for supplies, insurance or the employer's share of payroll tax. It does show where the owner's extra comes from, which is the price.
Across the students we work with at the Cleaning Business Institute, the hourly rate built into a standard clean has run at roughly three times the median wage of an employed house cleaner over the past two years.
Why first-year numbers are lower
The solo example assumes a full diary for 50 weeks, and a new business does not start with one. Clients arrive over months, through referrals, listings and repeat bookings, so the first year is usually a ramp rather than a plateau.
Here is a simple illustration of the ramp. If a new cleaner grows steadily from two cleans a week to ten over the year, the average is about six. At $150 a clean over 50 weeks, that is $45,000 of revenue rather than $75,000, with costs that are a little lower but not proportionally so, because insurance and software do not shrink.
How quickly the diary fills depends mostly on two things an owner controls. One is how actively they look for clients in the first months, and the other is how many one-off clients they turn into regulars. Our guide to getting clients for a cleaning business covers the first.
How profit changes when you hire a team
One person can only clean so many homes, so a solo business has a ceiling set by the hours in a week. Hiring lifts that ceiling, but it changes the shape of the profit. The comparison below keeps the same price and adds two employed cleaners.
The team assumptions are three people doing 10 cleans each a week, cleaners paid $18 an hour for 35 hours including driving, and payroll taxes plus workers' compensation at 15% of wages. Liability, bond and van cover come to $2,784 a year, using the averages in our guide to cleaning business insurance cost, and other overheads rise to $6,000.
| Line | Solo | Owner plus two |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $75,000 | $225,000 |
| Wages, payroll tax, comp | $0 | $72,450 |
| Supplies and driving | $8,560 | $25,680 |
| Insurance and overheads | $3,960 | $8,784 |
| Profit before tax | $62,480 | $118,086 |
| Profit margin | 83 cents a dollar | 52 cents a dollar |
The team earns the owner nearly twice as much, at a much lower margin. It also changes the owner's job. Hiring, training, checking quality and covering sick days become the work, and the owner's own hours often rise rather than fall in the first year of employing people.
There is a second catch. The team only earns that profit if all 30 cleans a week are booked and paid. A cleaner on wages costs money whether the diary is full or not, which is why owners usually hire when they are already turning work away. Our guide to scaling a cleaning business covers that step.
The levers that decide what you make
The two worked examples point to the same few levers. Each one moves profit more than any cost saving, because cleaning costs are already small next to revenue:
- Price. In the solo example, raising the price from $150 to $165 adds $7,500 a year with no extra hours. Our guide to how to charge for cleaning services shows how to set a rate from your costs.
- Booked hours. Recurring clients fill a diary predictably. A weekly or fortnightly client is worth many one-off cleans.
- Driving. At the IRS standard mileage rate of 76 cents a mile, every mile cut from a route is money kept. Grouping clients by area matters more as the business grows.
- Labour cost. Once you hire, wages are the largest cost, and how well cleaners are trained decides how many cleans each one completes.
Of the four, price is the one new owners tend to leave alone longest. A price set in the first month, when the owner was nervous about winning any work, tends to stay in place for years unless someone decides to review it. A yearly review, with notice to existing clients, keeps the rate in step with rising costs.
For a wider view of the numbers, including how earnings vary by service type, see how much a cleaning business can make.
How the course covers the profit side
The Fundamentals Course covers the levers a solo owner controls. Unit 3, Pricing Your Services for Profit, teaches the true cost of running a cleaning business and when to charge hourly, flat-rate or by square footage. Unit 5, Client Experience and Retention, covers turning one-off jobs into the repeat clients that fill a diary.
The team side of the comparison belongs to the Fast Track Course. Unit 8, Systems for Efficiency, covers scheduling and invoicing. Unit 9, Hiring and Growing Your Team, and Unit 10, Scaling and Long-Term Growth, cover the move from solo operator to owner.
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