Most cleaning firms set their first price by asking a friend in the trade, then never revisit it. Here is the version that survives contact with reality.
Your floor is what an hour of work costs you before any profit: wages plus employer taxes, travel time between jobs, consumables, insurance, and the share of the month nobody is booked. Firms routinely forget the last two and discover a year later that the busy months were subsidising the quiet ones.
Work the floor out per hour first, even if you sell per square metre. Area pricing is a conversion of an hourly reality — how many square metres one cleaner covers in an hour at your standard — and if you cannot state that number, your area price is a guess wearing a unit.
Most cleaning firms publish a price list. Open five competitors in your city and write down what they charge for the same service you sell, in whatever unit they use. Do not skip the ones that look cheap — they are the ones your customers are comparing you against.
The point is not to copy anyone. It is to find out where you sit, which is a fact you cannot know from inside your own business.
This is where most attempts fall apart. One competitor charges per square metre, another per hour, a third a fixed price per flat, a fourth by size tier. Comparing €1.20/m² with €25/hour tells you nothing until both sit on the same axis.
Convert everything to your own unit using your own throughput. If your team cleans 30 m² an hour, a €25/hour competitor is charging about €0.83/m². Now the numbers argue with each other properly.
Below the median wins bookings and loses margin on every one of them. Above it protects margin and quietly loses the price-sensitive half of your enquiries. Neither is wrong; drifting into one without noticing is.
The decision is yours and it depends on things no price list shows: your quality, your scope, whether you carry insurance, whether your crew stays. What a comparison gives you is the position — not the instruction.
Published prices move. A competitor who was above you in March may be under you by September, and you will not notice, because nobody watches their competitors' price pages for fun.
The cheap version is a calendar reminder before your busy season and twenty minutes of reading. The expensive version is finding out from a customer who tells you someone else quoted less.
Everything above is a job you can do by hand. It is also the job that quietly never happens twice. Competitor price monitoring for service businesses explains how the same reading works when something else keeps doing it.
Where service firms actually publish their prices, how to read a price list that hides behind a quote form, and what to record so the comparison is still useful next season.
The trade-offs between hourly and area pricing for service work, and how to convert between them so you can compare yourself with competitors who chose the other one.