An office cleaning cost should not come from square metres alone. In a small office, the real time is often hiding in two toilets, a busy kitchenette, ten individual bins, building access and whatever the client means by "the usual cleaning". Treat the walkthrough as a timed map of a future visit. Once you have minutes by zone, task frequency and a clear boundary around extras, a monthly price stops being a guess.
If you are still building your first commercial proposal, start with the broader guide to pricing a first office cleaning job without losing money on a trial shift. This article takes the next step and turns recurring work into a monthly rate.
Measure the work, not only the floor area
A 50 m² open office can be quick. Put the same area inside a beauty studio and you may have hair in corners, product drips on the floor, heavy daily waste and a restroom used by clients all day. Area is one useful number. The operation creates the workload.
Break the site into workstations, kitchenette, toilets, entrance and the waste route. For each zone, note the surfaces, objects that must be moved around, frequency of use and obstacles. Ten clear desks are faster than six desks crowded with screens, cables, mugs and paperwork.
Then ask about the quiet time costs. Where can you park after 6 pm? Who supplies the key, entry fob and alarm code? Does the building lock at a fixed time? Is the bin store downstairs or through another entrance? Can the cleaner work while staff are still there?
I have seen a small Vinohrady office add fifteen minutes to every visit because the key had to be collected, two doors were separately alarmed and the bins went into a rear courtyard. Twice a week, that is more than two hours a month. A floor plan will never show it.
Turn each zone into minutes per visit
After the walkthrough, estimate standard tasks zone by zone. Avoid one comfortable-looking number such as "about two hours". Smaller estimates can be checked later: 35 minutes for workstations and floors, 20 for the kitchenette, 25 for two toilets, then 15 for bins and the waste run.
Add setup and close-down time. Water has to be prepared. Cloths and mops need sorting, rinsing and storing. Someone checks the windows, sets the alarm and locks up. Those ten or twenty minutes matter on a compact job. The office gets smaller; the entry routine does not.
One 85 m² office in Karlín looked almost empty at the walkthrough, so the first estimate was 90 minutes. Twelve people used the small kitchen every day, though, and waste had to go to a garage through the next entrance. The first visits took nearly two hours. The cleaner was not slow. The estimate had missed fifteen minutes in the kitchen and another ten in transit.
Price the first clean separately when the current condition is worse than the future maintenance standard. Old limescale, dust under every desk and a fridge that has not been wiped for months did not come from your recurring service. A one-off reset protects the regular rate and gives the client a clear starting point.
Build a monthly rate from the real hourly cost
A commercial cleaning monthly rate starts with labour time, but the selling rate must cover more than active wiping and vacuuming. Include wages or your own working pay, payroll costs where relevant, travel, chemicals, equipment wear, administration and a sensible allowance for small variations.
A simple calculation works well:
- Calculate paid time per visit, including setup and locking the building.
- Add travel and routine chemical costs.
- Multiply by the average number of visits in a real month.
- Add overhead and the margin the business needs.
For a twice-weekly service, do not automatically use eight visits. The average month has about 4.33 weeks, which means 8.66 visits. That extra 0.66 seems harmless. Across a year, it is close to eight whole cleans that can disappear from the quote.
Here is a worked example. A visit takes 2 hours 10 minutes. The fully covered selling hour is 480 CZK, and travel plus chemicals add 120 CZK per visit. One clean comes to roughly 1,160 CZK. At 8.66 visits, the monthly base is about 10,050 CZK before VAT. This is not a market price to copy. It shows how to price small office cleaning from your own costs.
A regular-client discount only makes sense when regularity genuinely saves money through a reliable slot, a shorter route or less administration. The companion guide explains why a discount for regular cleaning is not an obligation. Fifteen unpaid minutes every visit is not a discount. It is free work.
Define the standard and keep irregular work separate
A useful office cleaning scope of work tells both sides what the price buys. The standard may cover vacuuming and mopping accessible floors, wiping clear work surfaces, cleaning washrooms, wiping the outside of kitchenette units, emptying bins and restocking supplies already on site.
Not every task needs the same frequency. Toilets and bins may be serviced every visit, window sills weekly, and doors or skirting boards monthly. An office cleaning quote is much easier to read when each task says "every visit", "weekly" or "monthly".
Keep window cleaning, the inside of the fridge or oven, chair extraction, machine floor cleaning, post-event mess and unusually heavy soil outside the monthly standard. In a salon, that could mean hair dye. In a photo studio, it might be packaging after a shoot. These jobs do not occur predictably, so burying them in the rate usually punishes the supplier.
Consumables deserve their own line. Cleaning chemicals used to deliver your service may sit inside the price. Bin liners, toilet paper, hand towels, soap and dispenser refills are the client's operating supplies. You can monitor and order them, but state who pays for the goods and whether purchasing or delivery time is chargeable.
Make the quote survive "while you are here"
The first "while you are here" request rarely stays at five minutes. A shared corridor leads to a neighbouring meeting room, three glass doors and boxes left after catering. Without a rule, a favour quietly becomes standard work while the monthly invoice stays fixed.
Attach a short scope and frequency schedule to every price. Extra work can be approved by email or message, then charged at an hourly rate, a minimum time block or a separate fixed price. The office manager and the person cleaning on site should know the same rule.
Add a review trigger as well. The quote can be revisited if headcount rises, another floor opens, visit frequency changes, opening hours extend or consumable use jumps. That is not a threat to increase the price. It identifies the point where the original assumptions no longer describe the office.
Check the estimate against the first month
Use the first month to calibrate. Record entry time, active cleaning, equipment cleanup and departure. Do not chase a spreadsheet target by pushing someone to skip PPE, rush across wet floors or cut corners in the washrooms.
Track supplies and repeated requests alongside time. Which bin always overflows? Where does dirt build up? Does soap run out twice as quickly as expected? Four weeks is usually enough to see whether the estimate works or every visit is drifting twenty minutes over.
Fix the gap early. You may move a low-priority task to a weekly cycle. In other cases, the rate needs to change. Twenty extra minutes across 8.66 visits is nearly three unpaid hours every month. Leave that for half a year and the small error has become a loss-making account.
The right office cleaning cost is not the lowest number in the inbox. It is the number that lets you deliver the promised standard, month after month. If you want to compare options for regular office cleaning in Prague, send Čistýkout a no-obligation enquiry through the contact form.
