You asked three cleaning companies for a quote on the same office, and you got back three numbers that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is $1,900 a month, one is $2,650, and one is $3,300. They can’t all be right, and staring at the three totals won’t tell you which one is.
Here’s the move that works. Knowing how to compare office cleaning bids starts with one fact: you can’t judge them as written, so you don’t try. You rebuild all three onto one scope, one frequency, and one honest count of cleaner hours first, and only then do you look at price.
Do that, and the order usually flips: the bid that looked most expensive is often the only complete one, and the cheapest is usually the one hiding the most missing work.
This is a worksheet, not a gut call. Five steps get three mismatched bids onto the same footing, and the last step gives you a single number that finally compares.
Why three bids never line up as written
Three variables sit inside every office cleaning price, and each one moves on its own: the scope (which tasks, in which rooms), the frequency (how many visits a week), and the cleaner hours behind each visit. Change any one and the total changes with it. The trouble is that each bidder made its own quiet assumptions about all three, and none of them wrote those assumptions where you can see them.
Picture one 6,000 square foot office quoted three ways. The $1,900 bid assumed three nights a week, trash and vacuuming and restrooms, and one cleaner for ninety minutes. The $2,650 bid assumed five nights a week, the same task list plus dusting and breakroom detail, one cleaner for two hours. The $3,300 bid assumed five nights, the fuller task list, restroom consumables restocked, and two cleaners so the building is done in an hour.
Same building, three completely different jobs. The numbers were never measuring the same thing.
So the totals are noise until you strip the assumptions out and set your own. That’s what the five steps do.
Step 1: Put all three bids on one scope
Start by deciding what YOU actually want cleaned, because right now each bidder decided that for you.
Take the most detailed of the three proposals and use its task list as your master scope. Then read the other two against it, line by line, and mark each task as included, excluded, or unclear. If a bid just says “general office cleaning” with no room by room breakdown, treat it as a placeholder and mark every specific task unclear until the bidder confirms it.
Reading a proposal this closely is a skill on its own, and it’s worth learning to read an office cleaning quote line by line before you sign anything.
By the end of step one you’ll have one task list and three columns showing exactly what each company promised to do and what it quietly left out. The gaps you just found are usually where the price differences are hiding.
Step 2: Put all three bids on the same frequency
Now fix the second variable. A five night bid and a three night bid can never compare on the monthly total, so convert every bid to a cost per visit and rebuild from there.
The math is simple. Take each monthly price and divide by the number of visits that bid assumed. A $1,900 bid at three nights a week is about 13 visits a month, or roughly $146 a visit. A $2,650 bid at five nights is about 22 visits, or roughly $120 a visit.
On the monthly total the first looked cheaper. Per visit, it’s actually the pricier of the two.
Once every bid is a cost per visit, multiply back up by the frequency YOU want. If your office genuinely needs five cleans a week, price all three at five. If three is plenty, price all three at three. Same frequency across the board, chosen by you, is what makes the next comparison mean something.
Step 3: Expose the cleaner hours behind each price
This is the number the bids don’t want you to see, and it’s the one that matters most. Office cleaning is mostly labor, so the honest question behind every quote is simple: how many cleaner hours per visit does this price actually buy?
Ask each bidder directly. How many cleaners, for how long, on each visit? A company quoting real work will answer without flinching, because they built the number from hours in the first place. A company that dodges the question, or gives you a price with no hours behind it, is handing you a guess and hoping you don’t check.
The hours also tell you when a bid is too thin to be real. In the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre area, a building cleaning worker earns roughly $18 an hour before you add payroll taxes, insurance, supervision, supplies, and the company’s own margin. So a loaded cleaner hour costs a legitimate company well north of that wage.
When a bid works out to far fewer hours than the others for the same scope, the company has simply planned to spend less time in your building, and you’ll feel the difference in the corners that get skipped.
If you want a fuller picture of what a real number looks like here, our guide to commercial cleaning cost in Pennsylvania lays out the ranges. And the hours question belongs on the same list as the other questions to ask before you hire a cleaning company.
Step 4: Add the excluded extras back into every column
By now you know each bid’s real scope, and you’ve spotted the tasks some of them left out. Put those back, in every column, so no bid gets to look cheap by quietly dropping work.
The usual suspects are the ones buyers forget to price:
- Restroom consumables: toilet paper, hand soap, paper towels, liners. One bid supplies them, another expects you to, and that gap is real money every month.
- Carpet cleaning and hard floor care: periodic extraction, strip and wax, buffing. Often quoted as “available” rather than included.
- Interior windows and glass: frequently excluded entirely.
- Day porter or extra event cleaning: almost never in the base number.
For each extra, put a real figure in all three columns, even if it’s $0 because a bidder already includes it. The point is that every column now covers the same work. These quietly dropped tasks are exactly the add ons most office cleaning quotes leave out, and they’re where a low bid turns into a surprise invoice.
Step 5: Now compare, on cost per cleaner hour
Here’s where the worksheet pays off. Every bid now covers the same scope, at the same frequency, with the extras priced in every column. Divide each rebuilt price by the cleaner hours behind it, and you get one clean number: cost per cleaner hour.
That single figure is the honest comparison the three totals could never give you. Read it like this. The bids should land within a reasonable band of each other, because they’re all buying the same labor in the same market. A bid that comes out far below the others usually can’t deliver the hours it promised, and the shortfall shows up as skipped tasks a few weeks in.
A bid far above the others should carry a reason you can name, like a dedicated day porter or specialized floor work, and if you can’t find the reason, ask for it.
Most of the time the real winner is the one that looked expensive at the start, because it was the only bid that priced the whole job. That’s the bid that looked most expensive turning out to be the only honest one, which is exactly what you couldn’t see when you were staring at three monthly totals.
How to compare office cleaning bids in one worksheet
Keep this next to the three proposals and work down it. It fits on a single page.
| Step | What you do | The number it produces |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scope | Use the most detailed bid as the master task list; mark every task include, exclude, or unclear for all three | One task list, three columns |
| 2. Frequency | Divide each monthly price by its assumed visits, then multiply back up by the frequency you actually want | Cost per visit, at one frequency |
| 3. Hours | Ask each bidder for cleaners times minutes per visit | Cleaner hours per visit |
| 4. Extras | Price consumables, carpet, floors, windows, day porter in every column | Same work in all three |
| 5. Compare | Divide each rebuilt price by its cleaner hours | Cost per cleaner hour |
If a bidder won’t give you the numbers for steps 1 and 3, that’s your answer about that bidder before price ever enters the room.
Comparing bids assumes you already know what you want cleaned and how often, so if you don’t yet, the office cleaning services guide is the better first stop.
What to do with what you find
Run the five steps and you’ll see one of two things. Either the three bids come into focus and one is clearly the best value at an honest hour count, or one bidder refuses to give you the scope detail and the hours you asked for.
If a bid comes back complete and its cost per cleaner hour sits in the same band as the others, that’s a real number you can trust. Hire on the whole picture, the crew, the supervision, the references, not on the monthly total alone.
If a bidder dodges the scope or the hours, send them your master scope from step one and ask all three to re-quote against it. A company that priced the work honestly will re-quote in a day and probably come back close to where it was. A company that was counting on you not to look will either sharpen its number or drop out, and either way you learned what you needed to know.
Give every bidder the same spec and the same questions, and you stop comparing sales pitches and start comparing the actual job.
Frequently asked questions
Why are commercial cleaning quotes so different from each other?
Because each one is really three decisions bundled into a single number: which tasks, how many visits a week, and how many cleaner hours per visit. Bidders make different assumptions about all three and rarely spell them out, so two quotes for the same office can differ by 40 percent and both be sincere. Once you set the scope, frequency, and hours yourself and make every bid answer to them, the differences shrink to something you can actually judge.
How many cleaning bids should I get?
Three is the useful number. One gives you no comparison, two often leaves you guessing which is the outlier, and three lets you see the honest middle and spot a bid that’s too high or too low. More than three rarely adds information and mostly adds work, since you have to normalize every one of them the same way.
Should I give bidders my own scope, or let each propose their own?
Let them propose first, then standardize. The first round of proposals is useful precisely because each company reveals what it thinks the job needs, and the most thorough one becomes your master scope. After that, hand every bidder the same scope so the second round is a true head to head. Standardizing from the start can hide a good company’s ideas; standardizing after the first round keeps the ideas and kills the confusion.
Why shouldn’t I just pick the cheapest bid?
Because the cheapest monthly total is usually the one buying the fewest cleaner hours, and hours are the work. A bid that saves you a few hundred dollars a month by putting one cleaner in your building for half the time just buys you less cleaning, and you pay for it in complaints and in the deep cleans you end up ordering to catch up. Compare on cost per cleaner hour and the cheap bid stops looking cheap.
What is a fair number of cleaner hours for my office?
It depends on square footage, layout, and how much of the space is restrooms and breakrooms, which are slow to clean. Rather than chase a rule of thumb, use your three bids: the hours the bidders quote will cluster, and the cluster is your fair range. A bid well below the cluster is the one to question, not the one to celebrate.
Is an on-site walkthrough better than a phone quote?
Yes, for a real contract. A company that walks your building sees the traffic patterns, the floor types, and the restroom count that drive the hours, so its number is grounded in your actual space. A phone or online quote is fine for a ballpark, but before you sign, the bidders you’re serious about should see the building. A quote given sight unseen is the one that’ll change on you after the first month.