Is a cleaning business profitable? A Paris operator's full cost breakdown

The question comes up constantly, and almost every answer available online is wrong. You will routinely read that cleaning delivers 25 to 35 % margin. That is a brochure figure, not an operating figure. None of the articles quoting it break down a single invoiced euro, none give the true cost of a cleaner hour, and none state whether the owner is actually paying themselves.

This article starts from the opposite end. We operate an office cleaning company in the Paris region with 35 salaried cleaners and more than 150 B2B clients. What follows is the cost structure as it actually appears when you run the schedules, the replacements and the invoicing. The core message fits in one sentence: cleaning is profitable, but the margin is thin and it is won on organisation, never on revenue.

What is the profitability of a cleaning company?

A properly structured cleaning company delivers EBITDA of 15 to 25 % and a net margin of 5 to 10 % of revenue. The sector is therefore profitable, and fairly predictably so: permanent demand, recurring revenue, modest start-up investment. But the useful question is not whether it is profitable. It is how much is left, and for how much owner labour.

Three margin levels must be separated, because generalist articles systematically confuse them and publish the first as though it were the third. That is how you routinely read « 25 to 35 % margin » — a figure that roughly matches gross margin, and never what the company keeps:

• Gross margin, after fully loaded direct labour: 30 to 40 %. What remains once the cleaner, contributions, paid leave and absences are covered. Nothing else is funded yet — not supervision, not overheads, not equipment.
• EBITDA: 15 to 25 %. The indicator banks and acquirers look at. It measures what operations generate before depreciation, financial charges and tax. It is the figure most often quoted for the sector, and it is correct — provided you do not mistake it for profit.
• Net margin actually retained: 5 to 10 %. After depreciation of equipment and vehicles, financial charges and tax. Result before tax generally sits between 8 and 15 %. An excellent year reaches 10 to 12 % net. Presenting 20 or 25 % as a French norm is fiction.

One condition must be attached immediately to the word « net ». If the owner works fifty hours a week and draws almost nothing, the company can post an attractive accounting margin while buying its profitability with the owner's unpaid labour. Add back a market-rate manager salary and the reported margin often halves.

Breakdown of 100 EUR invoiced to a client

This is the table nobody publishes, and yet it is the only one that truly answers the question. Here is how 100 EUR of service breaks down in a properly organised company in the Paris region.

Taking a central example: 100 EUR invoiced yields roughly 63 EUR of labour, 4 EUR of equipment, 7 EUR of supervision, 11 EUR of overheads, 4 EUR of sales, leaving about 11 EUR. This is precisely why revenue alone means nothing in this trade.

The true cost of a cleaner hour against a 26 EUR rate

This is where most founders go wrong, and the mistake is fatal because it stays invisible for the first six months. A cleaner paid around 12 to 13 EUR gross per hour obviously does not cost the company 12 to 13 EUR.

To reach the cost of a genuinely billable hour, you have to stack:

• employer contributions and mandatory health cover;
• paid leave, public holidays and absences;
• non-productive time: briefings, restocking, equipment preparation;
• travel between sites depending on how the round is organised;
• training, workwear, equipment and its replacement;
• the cost of emergency replacements, which always price higher;
• the share of administrative management attached to each employee.

Once everything is stacked, the economic cost of a genuinely billable hour easily reaches 19 to 21 EUR in the Paris region, sometimes more. At 26 EUR invoiced, that often leaves 5 to 7 EUR to absorb supervision, overheads, sales and still produce a result.

The practical consequence is brutal. A service sold at 22 to 24 EUR per hour in the Paris region is a high-risk service: a little dead time, one poorly optimised journey or one replacement is enough to work for nothing. At 26 EUR the balance exists, but it demands excellent productivity and tight geographical clustering.

Why a published hourly rate tells you almost nothing about profitability

Our invoicing base starts at 26 EUR per hour excluding VAT on volume contracts — larger areas, multiple weekly visits, clustered sites — exclusive of cleaning products and sanitary consumables billed separately. Small sites and single weekly visits are priced as a fixed fee after survey: an 85 sqm open-plan floor occupied by eight people typically falls between 160 and 220 EUR per visit. That is not an inconsistency, it is the direct consequence of what follows: the real cost of a site depends on variables the hourly rate hides completely.

• Surface area and density. A 400 sqm open-plan floor is not cleaned at the same pace as a 400 sqm floor partitioned into twenty offices. The second takes longer for the same area.
• How many people occupy the premises. The most underestimated variable of all. Thirty staff across 300 sqm soil the space far more than ten. Washrooms, touchpoints and bins scale with headcount, not with square metres.
• Floor type. Carpet, vinyl, wood, wide-jointed tiles, polished concrete: protocols, equipment and pace all differ, and some floors require separate periodic treatments.
• Furniture and computer workstations. A floor densely equipped with screens, cables and pedestals multiplies detail work. Dusting a loaded desk is nothing like dusting an empty one.
• Frequency and timing. Five evening visits a week allow steady pacing. Two visits, or a Sunday intervention, change the economics and the labour cost.
• Accessibility. Upper floor without a lift, badge collection, service cupboard at the far end of the building, security constraints: every friction adds non-billable minutes to every visit.

This is why a price per square metre quoted without a site survey is a dangerous approximation for both parties. Our pricing starts from an actual survey: area, headcount, floor coverings, furniture, frequency, access. The resulting quotation holds — which protects the company's margin and the client's delivered quality in equal measure.

The five profit killers, ranked by danger

After several years of operation, here is what genuinely destroys margin, in the order we have observed it. It is not the order most founders expect.

1. Unbilled time

Ahead of unpaid invoices, ahead of everything else. Half an hour of travel between two clients looks harmless. Multiply it: thirty minutes, by several cleaners, by several days, by several weeks. You end up with dozens, then hundreds of hours paid by the company and never invoiced. Tight geographical clustering is not a logistics comfort, it is a financial decision.

2. The mis-estimated job

The classic case: you quote a 300 EUR fixed price expecting eight hours of work. On site it takes twelve. The problem is not the fixed price — well controlled, it is actually the better billing model, because it pays you for an outcome rather than for minutes, and it lets you keep the benefit of your cleaners' productivity. The problem is the estimate. You did not sell 300 EUR of service, you sold twelve hours at 25 EUR an hour when your model required more. Deep cleans and post-construction jobs are the most exposed, because there the gap between quote and reality is measured in days, not minutes.

3. Client concentration

A contract representing 30 to 40 % of revenue looks magnificent — until the client leaves, changes management or launches a tender. The company, meanwhile, has been sized for that contract. Beyond 15 to 20 % of revenue on a single client, the question stops being commercial and becomes existential.

4. Absenteeism and turnover

Every emergency replacement costs more than a normal hour: search time, a cleaner who is slower on an unfamiliar site, complaint risk, and sometimes a supervisor check visit. High turnover mechanically turns a 10 % margin into a 4 % margin, without any line of the P&L flagging it clearly.

5. Selling without knowing your cost base

The silent killer, and the most widespread. The pattern is always the same: « the competitor charges 25, I will charge 24 »; then « I will find cheaper cleaners »; then « I will take on lots of clients ». Result: the more revenue grows, the more losses grow. A cleaning company that does not know its fully loaded hourly cost is not steering anything, it is collecting cash and hoping.

Which services actually generate margin

Not all cleaning services are economically equal. Here is our ranking, provided each service is correctly priced — that proviso makes all the difference.

1. Window cleaning and specialist services. The best potential. The client is not buying « an hour of cleaning »: they are paying for a skill, equipment and the ability to do something they cannot or will not do themselves. The price is far easier to defend.
2. Technical one-off work and correctly estimated deep cleans. Excellent when time is perfectly controlled and the fixed price is high. Catastrophic if the hours are underestimated by 40 %. The most volatile service in the portfolio.
3. Well-organised recurring cleaning. Thinner margins, but regularity, visibility and fixed-cost absorption. It is the backbone, not the margin engine.
4. Highly competitive office contracts. Attractive volume, tight margins. Only worth taking when the geographical cluster already exists and the price genuinely covers travel and supervision.
5. Poorly prepared emergency and one-off jobs. The sector's great myth. « One-off equals big margin » is false the moment the estimate slips. It is often the service that destroys the most value.

The right mix is therefore not « recurring » or « one-off ». It is a recurring base that funds the structure, plus specialist services that lift the average margin. A company selling only market-priced recurring office work plateaus permanently around 5 % net margin.

Cash flow, working capital and the structuring threshold

A cleaning company can make money and still die of cash starvation. The mechanism is simple and merciless: wages and social contributions are paid immediately, business clients settle at 30, 45 or 60 days. In between, you must fund payroll, contributions, insurance, products, fuel, equipment, software, the accountant and VAT depending on the regime.

The more B2B you develop, the wider the gap — and the more your growth consumes cash. That is the sector's paradox: the companies that fail are not always those losing money, they are often those growing too fast without reserves.

Our benchmark: never start, and never accelerate, without two to three months of fixed costs and payroll in reserve. The idea that « clients will fund the growth » holds in steady state, never during expansion.

As for the structuring threshold, it has nothing to do with a client count. It arrives when you hold enough regular, geographically clustered and correctly priced hours to absorb fixed costs. In a small company we place it around 8 to 12 active cleaners, or the equivalent in billed hours, with a recurring portfolio large enough for the owner to step out of production.

Summary table: the profitability benchmarks to remember

So should you start a cleaning business in 2026?

Our honest answer fits in one sentence: yes, but only if you build, from day one, a company that sells profitable hours rather than simply hours of cleaning. The difference between the two is neither sales talent nor client volume — it is knowing your cost base.

Three conditions strike us as non-negotiable. One: know the full cost of a productive hour, not the cleaner's wage. Two: decline contracts that do not cover travel, absences and supervision, whatever their size. Three: build a recurring base while developing higher value-added services, to improve the margin mix.

The sector's most persistent myth remains this one: « cleaning is easy because everyone knows how to clean ». Cleaning is easy. Running a profitable cleaning company is an entirely different trade — scheduling, absences, travel, pacing, replacements, quotations, contracts and cash flow. That is where margin is won or lost, never on the quality of the wipe.