What to charge for cleaning houses in the U.S.
By Josi L.Published
The message you get every week
It lands on Facebook, in Messenger, in your texts.
“How much do you charge?”
Sometimes it’s someone who really does need their house cleaned. Plenty of other times it’s someone curious who doesn’t even own a house, or someone in the same line of work checking what prices look like around your area.
So you answer. How many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, here’s what’s included. Then it stops there and nothing happens.
That’s half an hour of your day, over and over.
This is about putting a number on your work, writing it down once, and not having to explain it message by message. Once you’re clear on it, you leave it written on your page and it stays there while you’re inside somebody’s house.
National averages are not your price
Angi publishes that a house cleaning runs between $118 and $238 a visit. Thumbtack, on its own pricing page, says $174 to $256.
Both numbers are real. Neither one is yours.
Folded into those averages are franchises with an office, somebody staffing it all day, a big insurance policy, employees paid by the hour, and vans with the logo on the side. The customer pays for every bit of that, which is exactly why the average sits high. So when somebody tells you to charge the top of that table, look hard at what they’re asking. That is a number built out of costs you don’t have.
The other direction happens just as often, and it costs you more. You read the low end, and you decide to come in under it to get started.
Something else those tables never mention: what those same platforms charge you every time somebody writes to you from there. Thumbtack doesn’t publish that figure anywhere on its own site — here’s what an afternoon of looking turned up.
What the ones who wrote it down are charging
There are 27 owners with a page in this directory right now, spread across 18 states. seven of them sat down and wrote their own price on it, name at the top, nobody’s permission needed. Here’s how that looks, city by city:
| Where | Starting at |
|---|---|
| Dallas, TX | $110 |
| Denver, CO | $110 |
| Prescott Valley, AZ | $120 |
| Houston, TX | $130 |
| Las Vegas, NV | $140 |
| Denver, CO | $150 |
Now read that list again. The two biggest cities on it, Houston and Dallas, are not the two highest prices. And Denver shows up twice, forty dollars apart, two owners working the same city. Neither of them got it wrong.
By the house, not by the hour
Charging by the house is the normal way in this trade, and there’s a solid reason behind it.
By the hour punishes you for being good at this. Picture two people. One finishes the house in three hours because she’s been doing it twelve years and knows exactly where to start; the other takes five because she’s still learning. Same house, same result at the end of the day, and the one who knows more takes home less. Every year of experience quietly cuts your pay.
That stops the moment you price the whole house. You’re charging for the result, and any way you find to work smarter stays yours.
There’s a plainer reason too. A price for the whole house is something a customer understands right away. “Forty an hour” tells them nothing until they ask how many hours, and by then they’re doing math and second-guessing.
Quoting a house you haven’t seen
The final price doesn’t get settled from a distance. It gets settled when you see the house, or from photos the person sends you when the drive is long. Everything before that is an estimate, and an estimate is an average.
Five things are enough to give one:
- How many bedrooms. That’s the size, and they’ll tell you before you ask.
- How many bathrooms. This is where the real time goes. One bathroom done properly eats as much clock as two bedrooms.
- When it was last deep cleaned. A house cleaned three weeks ago and a house shut up for eight months are not the same job. Ask every time. Nothing else saves you as much from quoting too low.
- Whether there are pets. Hair works its way into the couch, the corners, the rug. It isn’t a complaint, it’s twenty more minutes of work, and that gets charged.
- How far you’re driving. Forty minutes out is eighty minutes round trip. That time comes out of your day whether you’re cleaning or not.
The driving isn’t a small detail here. Owners in this directory list 185 towns they travel to, on top of the 25 cities where they’re based. Driving is part of the trade, and it belongs inside the number.
With those five answers you can write the estimate and say what it is: “From what you’re describing, it runs around $140. Once I see it I’ll give you the firm price.” Nobody takes offense at that. It sounds like somebody who’s done this before.
The first visit costs more, and you say so up front
The first cleaning carries everything nobody got to. What settled on top of the cabinets, the oven nobody has touched, the glass door in the shower. That job looks nothing like next month’s visit, when you’re walking back into a house you left clean yourself.
Charging extra the first time is standard in this trade, and there’s no apologizing for it.
Put the first-visit price in the same message as the estimate, never after the work is done. Said before, it’s information. Said afterward, with the house already shining, the same number reads like a surprise on the bill.
Write it like this: “Regular cleanings start at $130. The first one runs higher because it takes longer, so that one’s $150 and we’re at $130 from there on.”
With the price written down, the conversation starts somewhere else
Back to the message from the beginning. “How much do you charge?”
When your price is on your page, whoever writes to you has already read it. They know you start at $130 and they wrote anyway. That conversation opens somewhere else entirely: not what it costs, but which day you can come.
And here’s the part nobody tells you. The person who was going to balk at your number balks before writing, and that one costs you nothing at all. Whoever is still there has already made peace with the price.
Look at what the big sites do. National averages, city averages, long thorough tables that look serious and that somebody clearly put real work into. And not one of them answers the thing people want to know first: what does this person charge.
“I’d rather people not know what I charge”
This is where a lot of owners stop, and the reasons make sense.
The most common one is people in the same line of work seeing it. That happens, it’s true. But what gets charged in your area is already published all over the place as an average, and your number doesn’t teach anybody anything new.
Others hold back for fear of coming in too low on a big house. That’s what the word “from” is for. Posting “from $120” doesn’t tie you to $120. It ties you to never going under it, which is a very different thing and the one that works in your favor.
And then there’s the bargain hunter, the one everybody dreads. That customer was going to write you anyway, was going to have you explain everything, and was going to walk. The only difference is that they’d walk after eating up your afternoon.
If today you still don’t feel ready, post a range. “Between $120 and $150 depending on the house” is a price too, and it says far more than saying nothing.
Ten minutes, today
Pull up the last three houses you cleaned. Write down what you charged for each one, how many bathrooms it had, and how long it honestly took you, driving included.
The cheapest of those three, if you walked away happy with it, is your “from.”
That’s it. No study, no complicated spreadsheet. Write the number, sit with it a day, and adjust it when you’ve got a reason to.
Then put it where whoever is searching right now can read it. What you write in Spanish comes out in English when you hit the button, and English is what the people hiring are typing into Google. Your price, on your page, with your name at the top. Next time somebody wants to know what you charge, they read it there.
If you’ve got questions about what shows publicly and what doesn’t before you publish, here’s what people ask most.