I spent time looking at how residential cleaners actually price jobs, and almost everyone makes the same mistake: they quote off gut feeling instead of a formula.

Here's the math most cleaners skip:

Base rate should come from square footage + bedroom/bathroom count + cleaning type (standard, deep, move-out). That's your floor.

Add-ons are where the margin lives. Ovens, fridges, interior windows, pet hair, and heavy-dirt jobs all take real extra time — if you're not charging a line-item for each, you're working for free on the hardest parts of the job.

Labor + supplies + travel have to come out before you call it profit. A lot of cleaners look at revenue and think they're doing great, when net profit after gas, product, and time is actually thin.

The fix isn't complicated — it's a spreadsheet with the right formulas built in once, so every quote takes 30 seconds instead of a guess. That's exactly why I built Cleaning Business OS — an Excel/Sheets toolkit that does the quote math, tracks customers and recurring appointments, and gives you a simple profit dashboard. One-time $19, no subscription.

If you're quoting jobs by feel right now, start writing down your actual costs for one week — you'll probably find you're underpriced by more than you think.