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Pricing & Quoting

Carpet and Upholstery Price Calculator

Carpet and upholstery work is priced by the piece and lost on the driving. Count the rooms, the stairs and the furniture, add what it takes to get there and set the hoses up, and this gives you the job price, the time it holds and what the hour is really worth.

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Carpet Cleaning Price Calculator

Rooms, stairs, sofas and mattresses, priced as one job.

min
£
The job comes to
£110

No VAT, not registered

4 pieces, 2.9 hrs door to door
Carpet
£110.00
Upholstery
£0.00
Stain protection
£0.00
Time with the machine running
2.5 hrs
Travel and setting up
0.4 hrs
Effective rate, door to door
£37.71/hr
CarpetUpholsteryProtection

Say the drying time on the quote as well as the price. Hot water extraction leaves a carpet damp for hours, and the complaint you get is almost never about the cleaning.

In CleanFlo

Quote it from a price list you set once

Put these prices into the services catalogue and every quote is built by picking rooms and pieces off a list rather than adding them up again. The cleaner photographs the carpet before and after against the job, the machine sits on the equipment register with its serial number, and the safety data sheet for whatever you spray lives in the document vault where a commercial client can be shown it.

A carpet job is priced by the piece, not by the property

Every other kind of cleaning on this site is priced by the property: bedrooms, floor area, condition. Carpet and upholstery is not. It is priced by what is actually being cleaned, because a four-bedroom house with laminate downstairs and one carpeted bedroom is a smaller job than a two-bedroom flat that is carpeted throughout with two sofas in it.

That is why this calculator counts pieces. Rooms, staircases, two-seaters, three-seaters, mattresses and rugs, each with its own price and its own time, added into one job.

It is also why the quote has to be given after somebody has seen the rooms or been told exactly how many there are. A price given down the phone for "the downstairs" is the classic way to arrive at a job that turns out to be a through-lounge, a hall, a landing and a set of stairs.

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The prices this calculator opens on

These are CleanFlo’s own Carpet & Upholstery shelf: the starting prices and times a new account is offered in the services catalogue, editable before anything is added to it. They are a starting guide rather than a survey of your area, and the file they come from says so of itself.

They also sit inside the two ranges this site already publishes for the work: £30 to £60 a room on the quote calculator, and £25 to £40 a room where carpet cleaning is sold as an extra on an end of tenancy.

The pieceStarting priceStarting time
A room of carpet, hot water extraction£3040 min
A staircase run£2030 min
Whole house, every carpeted room£902 hrs
Two-seater sofa£451 hr
Three-seater sofa£551 hr 15
Mattress, single or double£3545 min
Rug, collected and returned£2530 min
Stain protection, after the clean£15 a roomOn the visit

The whole-house price is worth reading beside the room price rather than instead of it: at £90 it is three rooms, so anything above three rooms is where the bundle earns its place, and anything below it is where quoting room by room does.

Three things decide whether a carpet job pays

  • The driving and the setting up. A single room at £30 is 40 minutes of cleaning and can easily be 40 minutes of everything else: getting there, parking, running the hose through the house, waiting for the machine, packing up. Two jobs in the same postcode on the same morning are worth more than two jobs on opposite sides of town at a higher price.
  • The minimum charge. Almost every carpet cleaner who lasts has one, because the arithmetic above is unavoidable. Set it at what half a day is worth to you, put it on the website, and stop quoting under it.
  • The upsell that happens in the house. Stain protection, a sofa, the mattress in the spare room. It is offered to somebody who has just watched their carpet come clean, which is the easiest sale in cleaning, and it carries almost no extra travel.

Domestic, letting agent and commercial are three different books

Domestic customers book one job, pay on the day and choose you on the strength of a photograph of somebody else’s stairs. The work is one-off, the margin is good, and the whole business problem is being found again next year.

Letting agents book against a check-out and want a receipt naming the property, because the tenancy agreement often requires professional carpet cleaning with proof. They pay on account and on their own terms, so the price includes waiting for the money.

Commercial contract work is priced by the square metre and is a different job again: it happens at night, it is bought against a specification, and it will be asked for with a risk assessment and a safety data sheet for whatever you are spraying. If most of your book is commercial, the price per square metre calculator is the one to use.

What CleanFlo does with this, and what it does not

The prices above go into the services catalogue once, and a quote is then built by picking the rooms and the pieces off that list rather than adding them up again on the back of an envelope. The quote converts to an invoice when the customer says yes, with VAT on it only if you are registered.

On the job itself the cleaner’s photographs carry a before or after label against the job, which is the evidence a letting agent asks for and the picture a domestic customer shares. The machine goes on the equipment register with its serial number and condition, and the safety data sheet for the chemistry you use sits in the health and safety document vault where a commercial client can be shown it.

What there is not is anything carpet-specific. No fibre or stain lookup, no dilution chart per product, and no stock deducted from a bottle when a job is done: the dilution calculator on this site is the nearest thing and it is a page, not a module. Anybody buying software for a fibre database should know that before they start rather than in week three.

Frequently asked questions

01 How much should I charge for carpet cleaning per room in the UK?
This site publishes two ranges for the work: £30 to £60 a room for carpet cleaning generally, and £25 to £40 a room where it is sold as an extra on an end of tenancy clean. The calculator opens on £30 a room and £20 a staircase, the starting prices in CleanFlo’s own services catalogue. Whatever you settle on, price the driving and the setting up into it rather than pretending the job is only the 40 minutes the machine is running.
02 What should a minimum charge for carpet cleaning be?
Work it out rather than copying one. Take the time the job really holds, the cleaning plus the round trip plus setting up and packing down, multiply it by the hourly rate you need to earn, and that is the floor for any job at all. This calculator shows the effective rate door to door for exactly that reason: a single room at a full price can still be a poor morning.
03 How long does it take to clean a carpet?
On the starting times in CleanFlo’s catalogue, a room of carpet is about 40 minutes with hot water extraction, a staircase run 30 minutes, a three-seater sofa an hour and a quarter and a mattress 45 minutes. Add the round trip and the time to run the hoses in and out, which is often as long again on a one-room job. Drying is separate: tell the customer the carpet will be damp for several hours.
04 Should I sell stain protection?
It is the highest-margin line on the sheet and it is sold to somebody who has just watched their carpet come clean, so yes, if you can do it honestly. CleanFlo’s starter catalogue prices it at £15 a room applied after the clean. Say what it does and what it does not: it buys time to blot a spill, it does not make a carpet spill-proof, and a customer who was told the second thing will not call you back.
05 Do I charge VAT on carpet cleaning?
Only if you are VAT registered. Cleaning services are standard rated at 20%, and registration is compulsory once taxable turnover passes the UK VAT threshold in any rolling 12-month period. Carpet work sold mostly to households is the case where it hurts most, because a household cannot reclaim it, so crossing the threshold is either a 20% price rise or a 16.7% pay cut.
06 How do I price upholstery cleaning?
By the piece, the same way as the carpet: a two-seater, a three-seater, an armchair, a mattress, each with its own price and its own time. It is worth pricing generously relative to carpet because it is slower per pound of turnover and it almost always happens on a visit that has already been paid for by the rooms.