Client Lifetime Value Calculator
A domestic cleaning client is rarely worth one clean. They are worth every clean until they leave. This calculator shows that number, and therefore what you can sensibly spend to win one.
Client Lifetime Value Calculator
What a cleaning client is worth, and what you can pay to win one.
Gross profit over an average 3.3 year relationship (£5,200 of revenue)
- Annual revenue per client
- £1,560
- Annual gross profit
- £702
- Average client lifespan
- 3.3 years
- Lifetime revenue
- £5,200
- Lifetime gross profit
- £2,340
- Max you can afford to spend winning one
- £780
- Value of your whole client book
- £187,200
- Worth of cutting churn to 25%
- +£37,440
You recover acquisition cost in 0.8 months and could justify spending up to £780 per client at a 3:1 ratio.
Keep them for the long run
A private client portal with their schedule, clean history, invoices and a request-a-clean button makes a client materially easier to keep.
Why the first clean is the wrong unit of value
A domestic client on a fortnightly £60 clean does not represent £60 of business. At a typical annual churn rate of 30%, that client stays around 3.3 years and generates roughly £5,100 of revenue. At 45% gross margin that is about £2,300 of gross profit from one client.
Once you see that number, the economics of acquisition change completely. Spending £40 on ads to win a client who returns £2,300 of gross profit is not a cost, it is a trade you should make as many times as you can afford to fund.
This is also why undercharging to win a client is so damaging. You are not discounting one clean; you are discounting eighty-six of them.
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Typical churn rates in UK cleaning
Domestic churn is heavily driven by life events: moving house, having a baby, losing a job, a relationship ending. You cannot prevent most of it, which is why the achievable target is 25% rather than zero.
What you can prevent is the churn caused by inconsistency: a different cleaner every visit, missed appointments, or a standard that slipped without anyone noticing. That is usually the difference between 25% and 45%.
| Client type | Annual churn | Average lifespan |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic, regular schedule | 25–40% | 2.5–4 years |
| Domestic, ad-hoc bookings | 60–80% | 1.2–1.7 years |
| Small commercial contract | 15–25% | 4–6.5 years |
| Large commercial contract | 10–20% | 5–10 years |
| End of tenancy / one-off | ~100% | Single job |
Cutting churn is worth more than winning clients
Take a business with 100 domestic clients at £60 fortnightly and 40% annual churn. Reducing churn to 25% extends average client life from 2.5 years to 4 years: a 60% increase in lifetime value across the entire client base, with no additional marketing spend at all.
Achieving the same revenue growth through acquisition would mean winning 60 additional clients. Retention is almost always the cheaper lever, and in cleaning the retention levers are unglamorous and operational.
- Send the same cleaner. Continuity is the single strongest predictor of domestic retention. Clients form a relationship with a person, not a company.
- Never miss a visit silently. A missed clean with no warning is the most common trigger for cancellation. A missed clean with two days' notice and a rebooking usually is not.
- Ask at three months. One short message asking whether the standard is right catches problems while they are still fixable.
- Notice the fade. A client cancelling two visits in a row is leaving. That is the moment to make contact, not after the third.
What you can afford to spend winning a client
The standard benchmark is an LTV to acquisition cost ratio of at least 3:1. If a domestic client is worth £2,300 in gross profit, spending up to roughly £760 to acquire one is defensible: far more than most cleaning businesses would ever consider.
The constraint in practice is not the ratio, it is cash. Acquisition is paid today and lifetime value arrives over three years. Watch the payback period: how many months of gross profit it takes to recover the acquisition cost. Under three months you can scale aggressively. Beyond twelve, growth will consume cash faster than the business generates it, however good the LTV looks on paper.
