Cleaning Quote Template: Price the Job From the House, Not From Your Gut

The phone call goes like this. A new client describes a house you have never seen, asks what it costs, and waits. Most cleaning businesses answer with a number built from memory: what a similar house cost, what the last quote was, what feels like it will win the job. That number is a guess wearing a price tag, and it is wrong in both directions. Too high and the job goes to the next company on the list. Too low and you have won the right to clean a four bedroom house at a two bedroom price, every two weeks, for a year.

A cleaning quote is not a talent. It is a form. Five inputs describe almost every residential job, and a worksheet that prices those inputs the same way every time beats a decade of gut feel.

The five inputs every quote needs

Square footage. The base measurement. It sets the scale of everything else and it is the number clients already know or can read off a listing.

Bedrooms and bathrooms. Bathrooms carry the real labor in a house clean: fixtures, glass, tile, hair, product buildup. Two houses with the same square footage and different bathroom counts are different jobs, and the quote should say so.

Service type. Standard, deep, move-in or move-out, and short term rental turns are different work at different rates. A deep clean is not a standard clean with extra effort. It is a different checklist and a different price, and naming it on the quote is what makes the checklist at the job match the price on the invoice.

Condition. First time cleans on a house that has not been professionally cleaned in a year take longer than maintenance cleans on a house you cleaned two weeks ago. Rate condition in plain bands: maintained, average, heavy. The band adjusts the price before the crew discovers the truth at the door.

Frequency. Weekly and biweekly clients are worth more over a year than one time clients, and a small frequency discount is a rational trade for a route that fills itself. Price it as a line on the quote, not as a favor granted on the phone.

The math under the form

Every quote is time in disguise. Your worksheet should convert the five inputs into estimated minutes, multiply by your hourly floor, and round to a clean number. The hourly floor is the rate below which the business loses money after labor, supplies, drive time, and taxes. Set it once, from your real costs, and let it reprice the whole menu when your costs move. When a quote feels low, the answer is in the inputs: the condition band was wrong, or the bathroom count was. Fix the input. Do not shave the floor to win the job, because a job won below the floor costs money every single visit.

Walkthroughs still have their place. Houses over a certain size, heavy condition, and move-outs with inside appliance work are worth seeing before you commit to a number. The form tells you when: quote the standard jobs from the worksheet, walk the exceptions.

What the quote document should show

The client facing quote is one page: the service type, the rooms and tasks included from the matching checklist, the price, the frequency if it is recurring, how long the price is valid, and the line that protects you later: work outside the listed scope is quoted separately. That last line is the whole defense against scope creep, the fridge that becomes the oven that becomes the garage. It does not make you rigid. It makes extra work a quick second quote instead of an unpaid argument.

Send the same policies with the quote or right behind it: cancellation window, lockout, reschedule, and payment terms. A client who reads the policies before the first clean is a client who does not test them after it.

Track the quotes, not just the jobs

A quote you sent and never heard back from is data, if you wrote it down. Keep a simple log: date, client, service type, price, outcome. Once a month it answers questions gut feel cannot. Are deep cleans priced right, or do they close at half the rate of standard cleans? Do move-out quotes win but lose money, which means the condition band is doing no work? Follow up once, three or four days after sending, with a short message. Quotes rarely die from price. They die from silence, on both sides.

The Cleaning Starter 3-Pack is built around this quote: a quote worksheet that prices itself from square feet, beds, baths, service type, and condition and rounds to the nearest five dollars, a price menu driven by your hourly floor, room by room checklists for standard, deep, move-in and move-out, and Airbnb cleans, plus the intake form, invoice, and message scripts that carry the job from quote to paid.