Stop using industry standards if you want to win

“What’s the going rate for an hourly clean?”

It’s one of the most-asked questions in every cleaning business group online. And it’s one of the most expensive questions you can ask.

The problem with “the going rate”

When you price by the going rate, you’re borrowing somebody else’s numbers. You don’t know their costs, their margins or their goals.

The business charging £18 an hour might be a sole trader working from home with no staff, no van and no insurance worth mentioning. The business charging £20 might be undercharging so badly they’ll be gone within a year. You have no idea.

Yet thousands of owners copy those prices, and then wonder why they’re working so hard and taking home so little.

The same goes for standard cleaning checklists, standard contract terms and standard ways of doing things. Industry standards tell you what’s normal. They don’t tell you what works for your business, your customers or your goals.

Work out what an hour really costs you

The only price that makes sense for your business is one built from your own costs. Here’s how to work it out. The figures below are an example, so swap in your own.

Step one: the cost of an hour of your cleaner’s time

Start with the wage. From April 2026, the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour. Then add everything that comes with employing someone:

Step two: account for the time you’re not billing

Your cleaners don’t spend every paid hour cleaning. They travel between jobs, and that travel time counts as working time for minimum wage purposes. They also have training, team meetings and waiting around when a customer isn’t ready.

Say 20% of their paid time isn’t billable. That means every billable hour actually costs you £15.00 ÷ 0.8 = £18.75.

Step three: add products and fuel

Say products, equipment wear and fuel cost around £1.25 per billable hour. Your cost is now £20.00.

Step four: add your overheads

Your business has costs that aren’t tied to any one clean. These include insurance, software, your phone, your accountant, marketing, uniforms and your own time running the business.

Say those come to £12,000 a year, and your team delivers 3,000 billable hours. That’s £4.00 per hour. Your total cost is now £24.00 for every hour you bill.

Step five: add the profit you need

A business that only covers its costs isn’t a business. It’s a very stressful hobby. You need profit to save for quiet months, replace equipment, invest in growth and pay yourself properly.

If you want a 20% profit margin, divide your cost by 0.8: £24.00 ÷ 0.8 = £30.00 an hour.

What that means

In this example, the business needs to charge around £30 an hour to be healthy.

Now imagine that owner had asked a Facebook group for the going rate, been told £22, and charged that. Every single hour they sold would lose them £2 before they’d paid themselves anything. The busier they got, the more money they’d lose.

Three better questions than “what’s the going rate?”

Every time you’re tempted to ask what everyone else charges, ask these instead:

Stop copying the standard service, too

Price isn’t the only standard worth ignoring.

Standard checklists

Most cleaning businesses offer the same generic list: dust, hoover, mop, kitchen and bathrooms. That’s why customers see no difference between them.

Design your service around the customer you actually want. A busy family with young children might value having the bedding changed, the kids’ playroom reset and a quick tidy before the school run. A professional couple might care most about a spotless kitchen and bathroom, and someone who’s there on the same day every week. A landlord wants proof, photos and a clean that passes an inventory check.

When your service is built for a specific customer, it stops being comparable. And when it isn’t comparable, you’re not competing on price.

Standard contracts and terms

Borrowing a template contract from someone else means borrowing their risks. Write terms that protect your business. That means cancellation notice periods, annual price reviews, payment terms, key and access policies, and a clear process for complaints and re-cleans.

Standard benchmarks

“A good cleaning business should have X% profit” or “you should have X customers per cleaner” can be useful for a rough sense check. But your most useful benchmark is always your own history.

Compare this month with last month, and this year with last year. Are your margins improving? Are customers staying longer? Is your average price rising? Those answers tell you far more than any forum post.

Being different is the whole point

If you look like everyone else and charge like everyone else, the only thing left for a customer to decide on is price. That’s a race to the bottom, and you don’t want to win it.

The businesses that pull ahead build everything from their own reality: their own costs, their own ideal customer and their own standard of service. They charge more, explain why, and serve the right customers brilliantly instead of serving everyone adequately.

Knowing your real numbers is the first step, and it’s exactly why we built Cadi to show you what your business actually costs to run and what each customer really earns you.

Rhianna