Ask three cleaning companies for a restaurant quote and you’ll get three numbers that don’t compare, because they’re quietly quoting three different services.
There are eleven types of restaurant cleaning services a restaurant actually buys, and they sort into four groups by what makes you buy them: services you buy on a schedule, services you buy when something happens, services you buy on a wear cycle, and services you buy on a code clock. Each group is priced in its own unit, and the unit is how you tell them apart.
Two of them will be among the largest cleaning invoices you get all year, and neither one arrives from your cleaning company.
The Eleven Types of Restaurant Cleaning Services, Sorted by Trigger
| Service | What it is | How it’s priced | What triggers it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring janitorial | Nightly or weekly building condition work | Per visit, billed monthly | A schedule |
| Periodic deep clean | Equipment pulled out, behind and under, walls and grout | Per job or per square foot | A schedule |
| First deep clean | The baseline reset before a contract starts | Per square foot | A new contract |
| Post construction clean | Dust, adhesive and debris removal after a build | Per square foot | A renovation |
| Emergency or pre inspection reset | A one time blitz on a specific failure | Per job | A problem |
| Hard floor strip and refinish | Old finish stripped, new finish laid | Per square foot of floor | Finish wear |
| Scrub and recoat | Top coats renewed without stripping | Per square foot of floor | Finish wear |
| Carpet and upholstery extraction | Hot water extraction of soft surfaces | Per square foot of carpet | Traffic and staining |
| Window and glass cleaning | Interior and exterior glass, frames, sills | Per pane or per hour | Visible film |
| Hood and exhaust cleaning | Duct, fan and plenum cleaned to NFPA 96 | Per system, per visit | A code schedule |
| Grease trap pumping | Trap emptied and waste hauled | Per service, by trap size | A capacity rule |
| Pest control | Monitoring and treatment | Per visit, on contract | A code and an inspector |
That’s twelve rows for eleven services, because strip and refinish and scrub and recoat are the same purchase at two depths. Everything else is genuinely separate, with its own crew, its own unit, and often its own company.
Services You Buy on a Schedule
These two are the only ones that show up every month, and they’re what most people mean by “a cleaning contract.”
Recurring janitorial is the crew that arrives after close and works your building to a written task list: kitchen floors and degreasing, equipment exteriors, the dish area, restrooms in full, front of house, trash. It runs nightly for most full service kitchens and three to five nights for moderate volume. This is the service a restaurant cleaning contract actually covers, and it’s the one your staff’s closing routine sits alongside rather than inside.
Periodic deep cleaning goes where nightly work can’t reach: equipment pulled out and taken apart, behind and under, walls and ceilings, floor grout. Monthly for heavy fryer and grill operations, quarterly for moderate volume.
Published benchmarks for both:
- Per square foot per visit: roughly $0.12 to $0.22 for food service, against $0.12 to $0.40 for commercial space generally. Kitchens sit at the higher end of that band because grease raises the labor load.
- Per hour: $50 to $60 for a two person nightly crew, and $100 or more for a four person deep clean crew running specialist equipment.
- Per month: around $800 for a small cafe on a few visits a week, up to $9,000 or more for a large full service restaurant on nightly service with quarterly deep cleans.
- Crew hours per visit: 1.5 to 2.5 for a cafe, 2.5 to 4 for fast casual, 4 to 6 for full service, 6 to 9 for a large or high volume kitchen.
Deep cleaning is sometimes folded into a monthly figure and sometimes billed separately. Ask which, because a contract that quietly excludes it is cheaper for a reason.
Services You Buy When Something Happens
These three are one time purchases, and the trigger is always a change in the building rather than a date on a calendar.
The first deep clean is the reset that makes a recurring contract possible. It’s priced separately from the contract, commonly $0.50 to $1.00 per square foot, because it’s absorbing years of accumulation rather than one night of it. A crew that starts nightly work on a kitchen that’s never been reset spends months digging instead of maintaining.
Post construction cleaning follows a build, a remodel or an equipment swap. Construction dust is fine, abrasive and everywhere, and it needs multiple passes plus filter changes before the space is usable. It’s quoted per square foot at a multiple of a routine visit rate, and it’s a distinct service line rather than a heavy nightly clean.
The emergency or pre inspection reset is a blitz on one named failure: a drain backup, a grease fire aftermath, a re inspection date two days out. Quoted per job, because the scope is whatever the problem is.
Only one of these three is optional. If you’re taking over a building or finishing a renovation, the reset isn’t a service you’re choosing, it’s a step you’re skipping at your own cost.
Services You Buy on a Wear Cycle
Floors, soft furnishings and glass wear out on their own schedule, and they’re quoted per square foot of the surface itself, not per square foot of the building. A 2,000 square foot restaurant with 600 square feet of carpet is a 600 square foot carpet job.
- Strip and refinish takes the old floor finish down to the substrate and lays new coats. Commercial work commonly runs about $0.25 to $0.85 per square foot, with consumer facing guides quoting higher for small residential jobs. Cadence depends on traffic and how well the finish has been maintained.
- Scrub and recoat removes the top layers and adds fresh ones without a full strip. Cheaper, faster, and the reason a floor kept on a recoat cycle needs stripping far less often.
- Carpet and upholstery extraction runs roughly $0.15 to $0.40 per square foot commercially, with high traffic and heavily soiled areas at the top of the band. Restaurant carpet holds grease as well as soil, which is why it needs extraction rather than shampooing.
- Window and glass is quoted per pane or per hour, inside and out priced separately, and it’s the one on this list a busy operator postpones longest.
A janitorial company often sells all four of these, and that’s normal. What it should not do is fold them silently into a monthly rate, because then you’re paying for a refinish you may not need this year.
Services You Buy on a Code Clock
Three services aren’t really your decision. Their schedule is set by a code, a capacity rule, or an inspector, and none of the three comes from a janitorial contractor.
Hood and exhaust cleaning covers the duct above your baffle filters, the plenum and the rooftop fan, worked to NFPA 96 by a certified contractor. The job ends in a certificate your insurer and fire marshal can ask to see.
Published pricing runs $300 to $450 for a single hood system, $800 to $1,500 for a mid sized restaurant with multiple hoods and ductwork, and $1,500 to $3,000 for a large commercial kitchen.
NFPA 96 sets the interval by cooking volume, not by square footage: monthly for solid fuel, quarterly for high volume including charbroiling, wok cooking and 24 hour operations, semiannually for moderate volume, and annually for low volume. Your inspector can require more if a check finds contamination. It’s the service most directly tied to how grease buildup turns into a kitchen fire, which is exactly why the schedule isn’t yours to set.
Grease trap pumping is a licensed waste operation with its own disposal requirements. Cost runs $175 to $2,500 per service, with a 1,000 gallon trap around $400 and systems over 3,000 gallons at the top of the range. The interval comes from your trap’s capacity and your local rules, not from how the kitchen looks.
Pest control runs as a monthly or quarterly contract, priced per visit, and the inspector will ask for the service records.
Those two big invoices are the hood and the trap. A mid sized restaurant on a quarterly hood schedule and a monthly trap service is spending real money that never touches a cleaning company’s monthly figure, and it’s the most common gap in a first year cleaning budget.
Your nightly cleaning and your floor refinishing are both quoted per square foot, which is how a $400 job and a $1,200 job on the same floor end up looking like the same kind of number.
Why Two Honest Per Square Foot Quotes Don’t Compare
Take one 2,000 square foot floor. A recurring janitorial quote at $0.20 per square foot is $400 a visit. A strip and refinish quote at $0.60 per square foot is $1,200 for the job. Both are per square foot, both are honest, and they’re three times apart on paper and forty times apart over a year, because one repeats every night and the other happens once.
Run the recurring number out and the gap gets wider. That $400 visit on a five night schedule is not $2,000 a month, it’s about $8,668, because a month holds 4.33 weeks, not four. Budgeting a five night contract on four weeks undercounts it by nearly eight percent.
Three questions turn any quote into something comparable:
- Per what, and how often? A per square foot number is meaningless until you know whether it’s per visit, per month, or once.
- Crew hours or person hours? Two cleaners for two hours and one cleaner for four are both four labor hours, and only one of them is likely to finish a full service kitchen well.
- What’s excluded? A proposal that excludes nothing either hasn’t thought about the code clock services or is hoping you won’t ask.
Condition moves the number more than square footage does, because what a quote is really buying is labor hours, and a heavily soiled kitchen simply takes more of them.
Which of the Eleven You Actually Need
Almost nobody needs all eleven in the same year. Sort yourself by what you’re running.
- Full service kitchen, nightly volume. Recurring janitorial nightly, a first deep clean up front, periodic deep cleaning monthly or quarterly, hood and exhaust on its code schedule, trap on its capacity schedule, floors on a recoat cycle. That’s six lines, and it’s the standard build.
- Cafe or coffee shop, limited cooking. Recurring janitorial two or three nights, a quarterly deep clean, carpet or upholstery once or twice a year, and a much longer hood interval. Four lines.
- Fast food or QSR, high grease and long hours. Nightly janitorial, monthly deep cleaning, an aggressive hood schedule, and hard floors on a genuine recoat cycle rather than an emergency strip every two years.
- Just took over a building. Buy the first deep clean before you sign anything recurring. You need to know what the room is under the buildup before you can price maintaining it.
- Just finished a renovation. Post construction cleaning is its own line, and no nightly crew will absorb it. Get it quoted separately and get it done before you reopen.
One company can honestly cover most of this list. Recurring janitorial, deep cleaning, hard floors, carpet and post construction sit comfortably under one contract with one point of contact, which is worth real money in coordination alone.
The hood, the trap and the pest contract come from elsewhere, every time. A company that tells you plainly where its own list stops is the one giving you a usable budget, and the full picture of what a restaurant cleaning contract covers sets out where each of those boundaries sits.
We work with restaurants across northeastern Pennsylvania and quote each of these as its own line rather than one blended number. If you’re weighing options, a walkthrough that prices them separately is the fastest way to see which ones you actually need this year.
The hood and the grease trap arrive on their own schedule, from companies you haven’t met and can’t negotiate the timing with. A cleaning budget with no line for either isn’t a budget, it’s a number waiting to be wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does restaurant cleaning cost per square foot?
Recurring restaurant cleaning runs roughly $0.12 to $0.22 per square foot per visit, against $0.12 to $0.40 for commercial space generally. Kitchens sit toward the top of the range because grease and food contact work raise the labor per foot. A first deep clean is separate and commonly runs $0.50 to $1.00 per square foot, since it’s absorbing accumulation rather than one night of soil.
Is deep cleaning included in a monthly cleaning contract?
Sometimes, and you have to ask. Some contracts fold a monthly or quarterly deep clean into the monthly figure, others bill it separately each time. A monthly rate that looks unusually low is often a nightly only scope with deep cleaning excluded. Get the frequency of every deep clean written into the task list rather than agreed verbally.
Do cleaning companies do floor stripping and waxing?
Many janitorial companies do, as a separate service on its own line. Commercial strip and refinish commonly runs about $0.25 to $0.85 per square foot of floor, and scrub and recoat costs less because it renews the top coats without taking the finish down to the substrate. What matters is that it’s quoted separately, since a floor on a good recoat cycle needs a full strip far less often.
How much does restaurant hood cleaning cost?
Roughly $300 to $450 for a single hood system, $800 to $1,500 for a mid sized restaurant with multiple hoods and ductwork, and $1,500 to $3,000 for a large commercial kitchen. It’s performed by a certified exhaust cleaning contractor working to NFPA 96, not by a janitorial crew, and the job ends in a certificate your insurer and fire marshal can request.
How often does a grease trap need to be pumped?
The interval comes from your trap’s capacity and your local rules rather than from how the kitchen looks. Pumping runs $175 to $2,500 per service depending on size, with a 1,000 gallon trap around $400 and systems over 3,000 gallons at the top of the range. It’s a licensed waste operation, billed separately by a separate company.
Can one company handle all restaurant cleaning?
One company can cover most of it: recurring janitorial, deep cleaning, hard floors, carpet and post construction all sit comfortably under one contract. Hood and exhaust cleaning, grease trap pumping and pest control come from separate licensed or certified trades. Any company claiming all eleven under one nightly rate is worth a careful read of its exclusions.
What is post construction cleaning for a restaurant?
It’s the removal of construction dust, adhesive residue, paint spatter and debris after a build, remodel or equipment swap, done in multiple passes because fine dust keeps settling. It’s quoted per square foot at a multiple of a routine visit rate and is a separate service line. A nightly crew will not absorb it, and reopening before it’s done spreads the dust through your kitchen.
Do restaurants really need professional carpet cleaning?
If you have carpet in the dining room, yes, and more often than an office does. Restaurant carpet takes in grease along with soil, which bonds to the fibers and holds odor, and vacuuming alone doesn’t lift it. Hot water extraction runs roughly $0.15 to $0.40 per square foot of carpet commercially, with high traffic lanes at the top of the band.