Cleaning Profit Margin Calculator
Revenue is vanity. This calculator strips a cleaning job back to what you actually keep: after wages, on-costs, materials, travel and your share of overheads.
Cleaning Profit Margin Calculator
See what you keep from every job, contract and hour.
£42.40 kept from £180.00
- True cost per cleaner-hour
- £16.00
- Labour
- £96.00
- Materials
- £8.00
- Travel
- £12.00
- Direct cost
- £116.00
- Gross profit
- £64.00 (36%)
- Overhead share
- £21.60
- Net profit
- £42.40
- Annualised revenue
- £4,680
- Annualised net profit
- £1,102
Break-even price for this job is £131.82, anything below that costs you money once overheads are counted.
What margin should a cleaning business make?
Gross margin here means price minus the direct cost of delivering the job: cleaner wages including on-costs, materials and travel. Net margin is what survives after your overheads: insurance, vehicles, office, software, supervision and your own time managing the business.
A commercial cleaning contract running at 5–12% net is normal and healthy. The reason contract cleaners chase volume is that the margin percentage is thin but reliable, and overheads scale slowly.
| Business type | Gross margin | Net margin |
|---|---|---|
| Sole trader, own labour | 70–85% | 45–60% |
| Small domestic agency | 35–50% | 10–18% |
| Commercial contract cleaning | 25–40% | 5–12% |
| Specialist (carpet, jet wash) | 50–70% | 20–35% |
| Franchise operation | 30–45% | 8–15% |
The on-cost multiplier nobody applies
If you pay a cleaner £12.50 an hour, that job does not cost you £12.50 an hour. Employer National Insurance, auto-enrolment pension contributions, statutory holiday pay accrual, and the cost of covering sickness and no-shows all sit on top.
Across UK cleaning businesses the realistic multiplier is 1.25 to 1.32. So £12.50 gross pay is roughly £15.60 to £16.50 of genuine cost per delivered hour, before you have made a penny.
Quote against the multiplied figure. Businesses that quote against the payslip figure are usually running 10–15 percentage points below the margin they think they have.
Which cleaning work carries the best margin
- Recurring domestic rounds: high gross margin, low acquisition cost once established, but capped by how many hours exist in a week.
- Specialist services: carpet, oven, jet washing and window cleaning carry equipment-led rates and the best net margins per hour worked.
- Multi-site commercial contracts: thin percentage margins but large absolute profit and predictable cash flow.
- One-off deep cleans and end of tenancy: strong headline rates, but acquisition cost is paid again every single job.
Fixing a low-margin contract
The instinct is to cut hours. That usually fails: the specification stays the same, the cleaner rushes, complaints arrive, and you lose the contract in month nine having damaged your reputation.
The three levers that actually work are specification, frequency and equipment. Renegotiate the scope so what you are paid for matches what you do. Move a five-night contract to three nights with a deeper spec on each. Or invest in machinery that raises productivity per hour: a scrubber-drier can halve floor time on a large site and pays back inside a year.
If none of those are available and the contract sits below your overhead recovery rate, it is not a contract, it is a subsidy. Give notice and put the hours into work that pays.