I am putting a bid in for 12000 sqft of commercial carpet cleaning. The carpets have not been cleaned in a long time. They have some heavy soil. I was thinking of charging them .12 including vacuuming. Do you think that a good deal. They want it done 2 times a year, I was going to give them 3 times for the price of 2 times. Let them know its easier for us to clean so we would give them the same price. Should I charge more for the first cleaning because of the heavy soil. Also what is a good price for carpet protector on commercial work like this, Thanks for all your help. If anyone else have any advice I would appreciate it. I have to have the bid in by monday, thanks Sorry one last thing. On the cms bid sheet it breaks it down per month. Do you bill them every month or get it up front per cleaning? thanks

Personally I have found if you charge more for the first cleaning and less for addtionals. 3 things happen first another cleaner will most certain come in and charge the same amount for each cleaning not more on the first. 2nd thing is the next following cleanings have lost value and the customer may elect to hold off and have cleaned only once a year.Lastly just because they tell you they are going to get on a maintenenace program doesn't make it so things happen.
I would bid the price of .10-.12 depending on time needed to complete the job and what you need to make. Hope this helps.

Initial cleaning at .12 per sq ft would be appropriate.
Then give 'em a rate of .09 per sq ft for successive cleanings.

Try to get them set up with a maintenance program.

Applying protector at .07 per sq ft is appropriate.

Hope you get it!










Rick Gelinas

We have several places we clean that are around 10,000 - 12,000 sf. Most of them I clean at .15 sf. One of them I clean at .18 sf. That being said, if you are bidding against someone you might not get it at a higher price but sometimes you will. Personally, I would not offer the third time for free, because then what you would be doing is cleaning for .08 sf per time vs. .12 a sf.

Also, I am almost never the cheapest bid and still land plenty of jobs. You just have to prepare yourself to lose a few from time to time. Just because they have dirty carpet doesn't necessarily make them a good customer for me. So be confident when doing the estimate and give a price you can make good money at and let us know what happens.

Good luck.

Kevin Pearson

I would try to find out why it has been so long since it has been cleaned. I agree with Kevin on pricing. We do several in that square footage range and charge .16 a square foot. BTW they are under contract with cleaning frequencies already established.

Hey guys thanks for all the info. It has been a really slow 2009 for us right now. We are trying to get new clients. So any work would be better than no work for us. I was thinking of charging them .10 or .12. I figured out that if it took us 8 hrs to clean we would gross around 1208 and net around 728 so that around 91 and hour. not bad. Now would you guys do the monthly cleaning program? Do you clean every month of does it just split up the bill for them?

No matter what the cleaning frequencies are, we always divide by 12 and bill them monthly. This always works for us. After all they have budgets too. We have never had a problem billing this way (always got paid) and it has sealed a lot of deals we would have missed.

Ray that is a great way to do business. Many time the client will also have more cleaning done when billed this way also.


Setting up auto debit from a company card makes is easy to do, they may be points for fly miles that way.

David