Three office cleaning quotes, three prices: how to read the gap before you sign

You have three quotes on your desk for maintaining your premises. One shows an hourly rate, another a monthly fixed fee, the third a price per visit. At first glance the comparison looks impossible: the three do not speak the same language. That is the real problem, and it has nothing to do with the headline price. In cleaning, the billing unit does not tell you what you are paying for, only how the provider chose to present it.

This article is written from the operator's side. We price commercial premises across the Paris region all year round, and we know exactly what a low price forces a provider to do next. The aim is not to sell you the most expensive quote — it is to give you the checklist that lets you spot, in ten minutes, which of the three will still hold in twelve months.

What a price gap between three quotes really tells you

When three companies price the same premises with a 40 % spread, the explanation is almost never margin. Sector margins are far too thin to absorb such a gap: a well-run cleaning company delivers 5 to 10 % net margin. Nobody can be 40 % cheaper by shaving 8 %.

The gap therefore comes from somewhere else, and there are only three possible explanations:

• The estimated time on site is different. The most frequent case by far. One provider planned 2 hours per visit, the other 1 hour 15. The hourly rate is identical; the service is not remotely the same.
• The scope is different. Internal glass, deep sanitary cleaning, periodic floor restoration, supply of consumables: these items are either included, billed separately, or quietly absent from the quote.
• The provider does not know their cost base. They looked at a competitor's price and took two euros off. That quote is the most dangerous of the three, because it will be honoured — right up until it cannot be.

The useful reflex is therefore not to compare billing units. A fixed fee is neither better nor worse than an hourly rate — both are legitimate ways of selling the same thing. It is to reduce every quote to a written scope: which zones, at what frequency, with which tasks and what committed standard. Two quotes covering different scopes are not comparable, whatever unit is printed on them.

What an invoiced hour actually funds

Here is the breakdown of one hour of office cleaning in the Paris region at two price levels. The figures come from our own cost structure: fully loaded employer cost of a qualified cleaner, supervision, equipment, overheads. One point worth noting as you read — we bill cleaning products and sanitary consumables separately, so they do not sit inside the hourly rate. If a competing quote claims they are included in its rate, that mechanically means less time on site for the same price.

The line to remember is the first one. At 22 EUR an hour, the cleaner's cost alone absorbs around 90 % of the price. Almost nothing remains for the supervisor who comes to inspect, for the stand-in cleaner when the regular one is absent, or for equipment. That quote is not commercially aggressive: it is structurally untenable.

The six variables that determine the real price of your premises

An hourly rate only becomes a price once crossed with the reality of your site. Two floors of identical area can require time on site differing by 60 %. Here is what a provider should have examined before handing you a figure.

If none of these questions was put to you, the quote you are holding is a guess, not a costing:

• Area, but above all partitioning. 400 sqm of open plan is handled far faster than 400 sqm split into twenty closed offices. Every partition adds door openings, corners and fragmented vacuuming runs.
• Headcount present, not floor area. The most underestimated variable of all. Thirty staff across 300 sqm soil the space far more than ten on the same area. Washrooms, touchpoints, bins and the kitchen scale with people, never with square metres.
• Floor covering type. Carpet, vinyl, wood, wide-jointed tiles, polished concrete: protocols, equipment and pace all differ. Some floors also require separate periodic treatments that must appear on the quote.
• Furniture and workstation density. A floor loaded with screens, cables and pedestals multiplies detail work. Dusting an occupied desk is nothing like dusting an empty one, and that is real time.
• Frequency and timing. Five evening visits allow steady pacing and a dedicated cleaner. Two weekly visits, a Sunday intervention or unsocial hours change the economics and the labour cost.
• Site accessibility. Upper floor without a lift, badge collection at reception, service cupboard at the far end of the building, security procedure on entry: every friction adds non-productive minutes to every visit, every day of the year.

This is why we do not give firm prices over the phone. Our base starts at 26 EUR an 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, because they genuinely cost more per hour: set-up, travel and quality control spread across fewer hours. An 85 sqm open-plan floor occupied by eight people, hard floors, one visit a week, falls between 160 and 220 EUR per intervention. We would rather write that down than advertise a single hourly rate that would apply to nobody.

The five ways an underpriced quote recovers

A provider who has underpriced a site does not call to tell you. They compensate, and they do so from a fairly predictable repertoire. Here it is, from most to least frequent.

1. Quiet reduction of time on site

Mechanism number one, by a wide margin. The contract specified 2 hours; the cleaner spends 1 hour 10 because there are three other sites to cover that evening. Nothing changes on the invoice. What changes is the skirting boards, under the desks, the internal glass and the kitchen — everything that does not show in week one.

2. The skipped visit when someone is absent

A replacement costs more than a normal hour: urgent search, a cleaner who is slower on an unfamiliar site, complaint risk. When the margin does not fund it, the visit simply does not happen. You notice the next morning, and you are told the cleaner was unwell.

3. Permanent cleaner rotation

An underpaid provider pays badly, so they retain badly. You see a different cleaner every two months. Each one has to relearn your premises, your priorities and your access constraints. Quality does not collapse — it simply never improves. It is the most reliable symptom of a loss-making contract.

4. The price revision at month three or six

The honest version of the recovery. The provider comes back explaining that the scope was underestimated. You end up renegotiating from a weak position, with an incumbent already installed and a change that would cost you time. The introductory price has done its job.

5. Scope drifting into extras

Internal glass, periodic floor restoration, post-meeting cleaning, sanitary consumables: items that were implicitly expected become additional lines. The hourly rate has not moved; your annual budget has risen by 20 %.

The checklist: what to verify on every quote

Run each quote through these six points. The exercise takes ten minutes and it usually eliminates one of the three proposals straight away.

Checklist: the six points to verify on a quote

What a solid office cleaning quote always contains

Beyond price, the shape of a quote says a great deal about the rigour of the costing behind it. Here is what we consider the minimum standard, and what appears on ours.

• The committed scope, zone by zone. Offices, circulation areas, washrooms, kitchen, meeting rooms: each zone with its agreed tasks and frequency. It is the backbone of the quote, whether expressed in hours, as a fixed fee or per visit.
• Frequency and intervention time slots, with explicit mention of the days covered and how public holidays are handled.
• Service detail by zone. Offices, circulation areas, washrooms, kitchen or break room, meeting rooms: each zone with its own frequency. Washrooms are not treated at the same cadence as corridors.
• The list of exclusions and periodic services. Window cleaning, floor restoration, year-end deep clean: either included with a frequency, or excluded and priced separately. Never left vague.
• The replacement and quality control arrangement. Who inspects, how often, and how an incident is handled. That is what distinguishes a contract from a simple supply of labour.
• How cleaning products and sanitary consumables are handled — paper, soap, hand towels. We keep these explicitly outside the hourly rate and bill them separately, which keeps the price of an hour readable and comparable. A provider advertising an all-inclusive hourly rate is paying for those supplies with time on site.

A quote containing these six elements can be compared with another quote that contains them too — even if one is a fixed fee and the other hourly. A quote showing only an amount, with no written scope, compares to nothing: it asks you to trust without giving you anything to verify.

Price per square metre: an output, never a starting point

The question « what is the office cleaning rate per square metre in Paris? » comes up in almost every consultation. It is a legitimate question, but it approaches the problem backwards.

The price per square metre is what you obtain at the end, by dividing total cost by area. You get there by first estimating the time genuinely required using the six variables above, then applying the fully loaded hourly cost, then indirect costs, then margin. The per-sqm ratio comes out of that chain — it does not go into it.

A per-sqm price quoted before any survey therefore only has value as a very broad order of magnitude. It may be accurate by chance on a standard floor, and wrong by 50 % on partitioned, densely occupied or carpeted premises. Use it to frame a provisional budget, never to choose between two providers.

If you want to understand the full economics of the trade — why margins are so thin and what actually remains on 100 EUR invoiced — we set it out in our analysis of cleaning business profitability. It is the clearest way to see what a low price mechanically forces a provider to sacrifice.

How to decide between three quotes, in practice

Start by eliminating what is not comparable. Bring all three proposals to the same written scope — same zones, same frequencies, same tasks — before looking at a single figure. In most consultations we see, that step alone reveals that the cheapest quote did not commit to the same zones or the same frequency.

Then apply the floor rule to the implied hourly price, not the advertised one: divide the amount by the stated time on site. Below 24 EUR an hour on that basis, ask explicitly how supervision, quality control and replacements are funded. If the answer is vague, you have identified the quote that will recover later. This is rarely bad faith — it is usually a company that has not done the maths.

Finally, keep in mind what changing provider actually costs: writing the specification, running the consultation, the bedding-in period, incidents in the first weeks, internal time absorbed. A quote 10 % cheaper that forces you to start again in eight months will have cost far more than the gap on paper. The right criterion is not the lowest price, it is the lowest price that holds twelve months without renegotiation.