Cleaning Contract Tender Calculator
Commercial tenders are won on a build-up, not a guess. Enter the site, the specification and your costs, and get a full annual contract value with every cost line shown: the way a procurement team expects to see it.
Cleaning Contract Tender Calculator
Build a commercial cleaning bid that wins and still pays.
£5,476 per month · £252.72 per visit
- Cleaner-hours per visit
- 10.4 hrs
- Cleaner-hours per year
- 2,713 hrs
- Direct labour
- £44,098
- Supervision
- £3,640
- Materials
- £2,628
- Machinery
- £2,200
- Management & overhead
- £7,228
- Net profit per year
- £5,914
This bid sits in the normal band. Before submitting, request the TUPE employee liability information, transferring staff on historic rates are the most common reason a won contract loses money.
The tender build-up, line by line
If your build-up puts labour below 55% of contract value, check your hours. You have almost certainly under-resourced the specification and the contract will fail at audit. If labour exceeds 70%, there is not enough left to cover management and margin, and you will be running the contract for free.
| Cost line | Typical share of contract value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Direct labour + on-costs | 55–70% | The dominant cost in every cleaning contract |
| Materials and consumables | 3–6% | Higher if washroom supplies are in scope |
| Equipment and machinery | 2–5% | Depreciation, servicing, hire |
| Supervision | 4–8% | On-site supervisor hours |
| Management and overhead | 8–14% | Area management, admin, insurance, compliance |
| Net margin | 5–12% | What you actually keep |
What actually wins cleaning tenders
Price matters, but on most UK commercial tenders it carries only 40–60% of the evaluation weighting. The rest is quality, mobilisation, compliance and social value, and that is where a smaller contractor can beat a national one.
- A credible mobilisation plan. Week-by-week, named roles, TUPE handled properly. Incumbents lose contracts on this more often than on price.
- Demonstrable compliance. COSHH assessments, RAMS, training records, insurance certificates, ICO registration. Have them ready as an appendix, not a promise.
- Named site supervision. Procurement teams have been burned by contractors who win on price and are never seen again. A named supervisor with stated site hours is worth real points.
- Real KPIs and reporting. Audit scores, response times, and how you report them. If you can show a live compliance dashboard, show it.
- Social value. Local employment, real living wage commitments, training. Increasingly weighted on public sector work.
TUPE: the thing that sinks first-time bidders
If you win a contract where an incumbent contractor already provides the service, TUPE will usually apply. The existing cleaners transfer to you on their existing terms: including pay rates, length of service, and any contractual entitlements you did not budget for.
This means you cannot assume you will staff the contract at your standard rate. Request the TUPE information: the employee liability information, early in the process. You are entitled to it and bidding without it is guessing.
Common surprises: transferring staff on above-market historic rates, long service creating substantial redundancy exposure, unresolved grievances, and accrued holiday you inherit. Price all of it into the bid or it comes straight out of your margin.
Sense-checking before you submit
- Per m² per month: does it land in the £1.20–£3.20 band for a standard office spec? (That is about £0.07–£0.22 per m² per visit.)
- Hours per visit, walk the building in your head. Can one cleaner genuinely do that in that time?
- Cost per productive hour: is it above your true employed cost including on-costs?
- Annual value versus your capacity: can you actually mobilise this without damaging existing contracts?
- The exit: what does it cost you if the client terminates at 12 months? Machinery bought for one site is a stranded asset.