Restaurant cleaning cost per hour runs $30 to $75 per crew hour for routine work and $50 to $150 per hour for deep cleaning a kitchen. Per individual cleaner, the working number is $20 to $40 an hour.
Those two framings are the reason hourly quotes look impossible to compare. One company prices the crew, another prices the person, and neither says which it’s doing.
So two quotes, one at $50 an hour and one at $100 an hour, can come to exactly the same price for exactly the same work.
Restaurant cleaning cost per hour, what the bands cover
Here’s what the published bands actually cover.
| What you’re buying | Typical hourly rate |
|---|---|
| Routine cleaning, priced per crew hour | $30 to $75 |
| Routine cleaning, priced per cleaner | $20 to $40 |
| Kitchen deep cleaning, per crew hour | $50 to $150 |
| Floor mopping and machine scrubbing | $30 to $60 |
| Wall and ceiling cleaning | $40 to $70 |
| End of lease or move out cleaning | $50 to $200 |
The median for a commercial kitchen deep clean sits right around $100 an hour, with $85 the more common average across restaurant work generally. Specialty jobs sit outside the hourly world entirely: a grease trap runs $150 to $300 per trap, a hood and vent clean $80 to $150, and pressure washing a full kitchen $250 to $500 or more as a flat job.
Notice how wide the routine band is against the deep clean band. That’s not a quality gap. It’s a units problem.
Per cleaner or per crew, the split behind the spread
A cleaning company quoting $50 an hour and a cleaning company quoting $100 an hour can be charging the identical rate.
Industry pricing guidance is direct about this: a two person crew may cost around $50 an hour, a four person crew around $100, and the sensible way to budget is $20 to $30 per cleaner, per hour. Both of those crews cost $25 per person per hour. The four person crew just does the job in half the clock time.
Run it as a bill and the point lands:
- Two cleaners at $50 per crew hour, four hours on site: $200 and eight labor hours
- Four cleaners at $100 per crew hour, two hours on site: $200 and eight labor hours
Same money. Same labor. Half the disruption.
That’s why the first question on any hourly quote isn’t the rate. It’s how many people, for how many hours. Until you have both, an hourly number tells you nothing you can compare, and the $30 to $150 spread everyone quotes is mostly just the same handful of dollars counted two different ways.
The larger crew usually costs slightly more in total, because more people means more travel, more equipment, and more supervision. What you buy with that premium is a shorter window, which matters enormously if your kitchen has to be back in service by 6 AM.
What one crew hour actually buys
An hour of cleaning isn’t a fixed quantity of work. It moves with the surface.
Industry production standards put an open hard floor at roughly 4,200 square feet an hour for machine cleaning, and restrooms at about 1,000 square feet an hour. A commercial kitchen is slower than either. Degreasing is a chemical process with dwell time built in, equipment has to be pulled out and pushed back, and most of the surfaces that matter are hand detail work rather than anything a machine touches.
Which is why the same 3,000 square feet takes wildly different amounts of time depending on what’s in it. Here’s what a nightly visit typically absorbs:
| Restaurant type | Crew hours per visit |
|---|---|
| Cafe or coffee shop | 1.5 to 2.5 |
| Fast casual or quick service | 2.5 to 4 |
| Full service restaurant | 4 to 6 |
| Large or high volume kitchen | 6 to 9 |
A full deep clean is a different animal. A four person crew typically needs four to five hours on a standard restaurant, which is 16 to 20 labor hours in one night.
Those hour figures are the missing half of every hourly quote, and they’re also the fastest sanity check you have. If you already pay a monthly fee, you can reverse that fee back into crew hours per visit and see whether the hours you’re buying match the hours the building actually needs.
What drives the rate up and down
Five things move an hourly rate, and only one of them is the company’s appetite for profit.
Scope is the biggest single lever. Wiping, sweeping, mopping and restroom service sit at the bottom of the band. Add degreasing, equipment breakdown, hood filter service and quarry tile scrubbing, and you’ve moved into a different soil class that needs different chemicals, different tools, and a crew trained to use them.
Condition sets the size of the first bill. A kitchen that’s been maintained nightly cleans on schedule. A kitchen nobody has degreased in eighteen months carries catch up labor that no hourly estimate can predict accurately, which is exactly why serious companies won’t quote one over the phone.
Equipment travels with the rate. An auto scrubber, a steam unit, a pressure washer and a wet vacuum all cost money to own, maintain and haul. A crew arriving with a mop bucket and a crew arriving with machines are not selling the same hour.
Skill and turnover show up in the number. A crew that knows your building works faster than one that doesn’t, and companies that pay enough to keep people have to charge enough to fund it. Cheap hourly rates are frequently just high turnover with a bill attached.
The shift changes the labor cost. Which deserves its own math.
The night premium, quantified
Most restaurants can only be cleaned after close, so overnight work isn’t an upgrade, it’s the job. The question is what that costs.
Shift differentials for night work generally run 10 to 15 percent above base pay, with some employers going to 25 percent or paying a flat $1 to $5 an hour extra. It isn’t required by federal law, but round the clock operations pay it because they can’t staff the shift otherwise.
That premium doesn’t pass straight through to your rate, because labor isn’t the whole bill. In the pricing formulas cleaning contractors actually use, loaded labor works out to roughly 55 to 65 percent of the billed hour once supplies, equipment, overhead and margin are stacked on top. Apply a 15 percent wage premium to 60 percent of the bill and you get about 9 percent on the rate, or three to four dollars on a $45 crew hour.
So a modest overnight uplift is honest. A 40 or 50 percent overnight surcharge isn’t a shift differential, it’s a scheduling penalty, and it’s worth asking a company to break out.
The same logic explains weekend and holiday pricing, and it explains why a company that already runs overnight crews across a route quotes closer to its daytime rate than one that has to wake somebody up for you.
The arithmetic floor, and what a rate below it means
Hourly quotes have a bottom that has nothing to do with negotiation.
Start with wages. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median hourly wage for janitors and building cleaners at $17.27 as of May 2024. Contractors then apply a labor burden multiplier of 1.25 to 1.35 to cover payroll taxes, workers compensation and insurance, which turns that $17.27 into roughly $21.60 to $23.30 in real cost per hour worked.
Commercial cleaning contracts typically target a 30 to 45 percent gross margin, and running the loaded cost through that margin lands the billed rate somewhere around $33 to $42 per cleaner hour.
That’s the national picture, and it explains why the $20 to $30 per cleaner band you’ll see quoted online only works at the light end: lower wage markets, lighter scope, thinner margins, or some combination.
Northeast Pennsylvania is one of those lower wage markets. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the mean hourly wage across all occupations in the Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton metro at $26.59 in May 2024 against $32.66 nationally, roughly 19 percent below. Local labor costs less here, so the local floor sits below the national one.
It doesn’t disappear. A quote at $15 or $18 per cleaner hour for kitchen work still has to come out of somewhere, and the usual sources are unpaid overtime, no workers compensation coverage, or a crew that leaves before the work is finished.
When hourly is the right way to buy, and when it isn’t
Hourly pricing is a tool for uncertainty. Use it where the scope genuinely can’t be known in advance.
Buy by the hour when:
- Nobody can say how long it’ll take: a kitchen after a long neglect, a post construction clean, a flood or fire recovery
- You’re testing a new company on a one time job before committing to anything
- The work is genuinely variable week to week
- You want a specific list of tasks done and don’t care how long it takes, as long as you’re capped
Don’t buy by the hour when:
- The scope is fixed and repeating. Nightly service on the same building is the most predictable work in this industry, and pricing it hourly means you’re paying for the company’s uncertainty instead of buying its efficiency
- You need a budget number for the year
- Multiple locations have to be compared against each other
For recurring service, the sensible units are a flat monthly fee or a rate priced against the building. Both are steadier than the clock, and the per square foot approach to restaurant pricing is the one most owners find easiest to compare across companies. If you’re weighing whether to commit at all, the math on paying per visit against signing a monthly contract settles it in one division.
The hybrid works well for most restaurants: a fixed monthly fee for the recurring work, and an hourly rate agreed in advance for the odd jobs that fall outside it.
How to compare two hourly quotes
Six questions turn hourly quotes into numbers you can actually put side by side.
- Ask for the crew size and the estimated hours, not just the rate. Two numbers, or the quote is incomplete.
- Multiply them out to a total per visit and compare those totals. Never compare rates directly.
- Ask what happens if it runs long, and whether there’s a cap or a not to exceed figure. A good company will give you one after a walkthrough.
- Ask what’s inside the hour and what’s billed separately. Supplies, equipment and travel are the three that usually aren’t.
- Ask which shift the rate assumes, and what changes if the crew has to come in overnight, on a Sunday, or on a holiday.
- Require a walkthrough first. A phone quote on a kitchen nobody has seen is a guess, and it’s one of the most reliable warning signs in this trade.
Those six sit alongside the broader set of questions worth asking before you hire, and together they’ll tell you more in one conversation than three weeks of collecting rates.
Getting a real number for your kitchen
An hourly rate on its own is close to meaningless. An hourly rate attached to a crew size, a task list and a walkthrough is a price you can hold somebody to.
Excellence Janitorial Services has been cleaning restaurants across Northeast Pennsylvania for more than a decade, and we build the plan around how your kitchen actually runs rather than a template. We’ll walk the space, tell you how many people and how many hours it genuinely takes, and quote it in whichever unit makes sense for your operation. Estimates are free with no obligation. Call (800) 851-0806 and we’ll come look.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a restaurant cleaning service charge per hour?
Routine restaurant cleaning runs $30 to $75 per crew hour, and deep cleaning a commercial kitchen runs $50 to $150 per hour, with the median around $100. Per individual cleaner, budget $20 to $40 an hour. Always confirm which unit a quote uses, because a per crew number and a per cleaner number for the same job can differ by three times and still be the same price.
Why did one company quote $50 an hour and another quote $100?
Almost always because they’re quoting different crew sizes. Two cleaners at $50 an hour and four cleaners at $100 an hour are both charging $25 per person, and both finish the same eight labor hours of work for $200. The four person crew just does it in half the clock time. Ask each company for crew size and estimated hours, multiply them out, and compare the totals.
How long does it take to clean a commercial kitchen?
A standard nightly clean takes three to four hours of crew time for most restaurants, ranging from about 1.5 to 2.5 hours for a cafe up to 6 to 9 for a large high volume kitchen. A full deep clean typically takes a four person crew four to five hours, which is 16 to 20 labor hours in a single night. Condition matters as much as size, since a neglected kitchen carries catch up work no estimate predicts precisely.
How much do cleaners charge per person per hour?
The standard band is $20 to $30 per cleaner per hour for routine commercial work, and up to $40 for kitchen and specialty tasks. That figure is what most companies build their crew rates from, so multiplying it by the number of people on site should get you close to the crew hour rate you’re quoted.
Is it cheaper to pay hourly or a flat rate for restaurant cleaning?
For recurring work with a fixed scope, a flat monthly fee is nearly always cheaper, because the company can route crews efficiently and doesn’t have to price in uncertainty. Hourly is better for one time and variable scope jobs where nobody can predict the time honestly. Many companies quote new clients hourly and repeat clients flat for exactly that reason.
Do cleaning companies charge more for overnight work?
Usually a little, and it should be a little. Night shift differentials generally run 10 to 15 percent on wages, and since loaded labor is roughly 55 to 65 percent of a billed cleaning hour, that works out to about 6 to 9 percent on your rate. A company adding 40 percent for overnight service isn’t passing through a differential, it’s charging you for scheduling difficulty, and it’s fair to ask them to itemize it.
How do I know a cleaning company isn’t padding hours?
Ask for time records tied to the site rather than a monthly total. Most commercial cleaning companies now use apps with location verified clock in and clock out, and any company billing you hourly should be able to show which crew was on site, when they arrived, and when they left. If hourly billing makes you uneasy, that’s a good reason to move the recurring work onto a fixed fee and keep hourly for extras.
Is a cheap hourly cleaning quote a red flag?
It can be, and the arithmetic tells you where the line is. A cleaner’s wage plus payroll burden plus a normal margin puts the floor somewhere near $33 to $42 per cleaner hour nationally, and lower in markets like Northeast Pennsylvania where wages run about 19 percent below the national average.
A kitchen quote well under the local floor is usually being funded by something you don’t want to be part of, whether that’s missing workers compensation coverage or a crew leaving before the job is done.
How much does it cost to deep clean a commercial kitchen per hour?
Deep cleaning runs $50 to $150 per hour, averaging around $100, against $20 to $40 an hour for routine service. The gap is real work rather than markup: deep cleaning means pulling equipment out, degreasing hoods and walls, scrubbing quarry tile and grout, and detailing surfaces that nightly service only wipes. Most restaurants need it a few times a year on top of regular cleaning, not instead of it.