An office cleaning price should not begin with, “I charge CZK 350 an hour in homes, so I will use the same number here.” Your first commercial quote has to cover the whole job: washrooms, kitchenette, desks, floors, waste, travel, building access and the final walk-round. A trial shift may give you useful data, but it does not need to be free. A better arrangement is a proper site visit, an initial calculation and a paid first month with a scheduled review.
Why a domestic rate does not transfer neatly to an office
In a home, you usually deal with someone who knows where the spare cloths live and can tell you to leave the children's room for next time. An office is less forgiving. You may have a fixed evening window, employees still using the space and an office manager who only sees the result the next morning. Keys, alarm procedures and responsibility for locking up are part of the work even though none of them involves cleaning.
The layout changes the arithmetic too. Two hundred square metres of open carpet is a very different visit from 200 m² split between ten rooms, two washrooms, a shower and a kitchenette that fills with cups every Friday. Floor area tells you how much ground you will cover. It does not count bins, taps, door glass or trips to a badly placed sink.
Price the account, not simply “one cleaner for three hours.” The client is buying an agreed result within a particular access window. Your number must also pay for supplies, travel, administration and normal variations in use.
What to learn during the walkthrough
Bring a notebook, a phone for agreed reference photos and a simple zone sheet. Ask how many people actually attend on each weekday, not how many names appear on the company website. A hybrid company with 40 employees might have eight people in on Monday and 30 on Wednesday. That difference turns up in bins, washrooms, fingerprints and paper consumption.
Walk every surface. Carpet in the open office, vinyl in the corridor, tile in the washrooms and timber in a meeting room require different methods and different amounts of time. Record the number of desks, bins, toilets, basins, showers, glazed doors and kitchen appliances. Then inspect the cleaner's cupboard and the water point. I once saw a cupboard near Florenc that was barely bigger than its vacuum. The machine had to be stored on its side and rebuilt before every shift. A few awkward minutes per visit become real hours over a year.
Test the access route rather than discussing it at reception. Where do you collect the key or fob? Who sets the alarm? Does the lift operate after 8 pm? Can you stop near the entrance, or will you carry equipment from a paid parking space two streets away? Agree who answers if a fob fails at night. Waiting outside a locked building is still working time.
Waste and consumables deserve their own conversation. Does the office separate paper, plastic, glass and food waste? Where do full bags go? Who supplies bin liners, soap, paper towels and toilet rolls? If you monitor stock and place orders, describe that as a task. “Top everything up while you are here” is not a usable scope.
Estimating productive time
Break the site into zones you can repeat: open office, meeting rooms, kitchenette, washrooms, entrance and corridor. Give each zone its tasks and frequency. Bins and touchpoints may need attention every visit; skirting boards might be monthly; the inside of the fridge may be excluded unless separately ordered.
Estimate minutes by zone. For a fictional 230 m² office in Karlín, the first pass might read:
- open office and two meeting rooms: 50 minutes;
- kitchenette: 25 minutes;
- two toilets and a wash area: 35 minutes;
- vacuuming and mopping circulation space: 30 minutes;
- bins, setup, movement and final inspection: 25 minutes.
That totals 165 minutes, or two hours and 45 minutes of productive time. It is not a universal standard. It is a working hypothesis to test against your own visits. New providers often count only the minutes when a cloth touches a surface. Mixing solution, changing bags, walking to the sluice and checking the finished floor do not disappear from the shift.
The first visit will usually take longer. You are learning which doors stick, where the sockets are and which route through the floor avoids doing work twice. You may also inherit buildup left by a previous supplier. If the walkthrough condition is below the future maintenance standard, quote an initial deep clean separately. The client should not pay indefinitely for your learning curve, but you should not remove six months of limescale for free either.
Hourly, area-based or fixed pricing
Hourly billing works when demand changes or the scope is not settled. It is easy to explain for a one-off clean after a company event. For recurring office cleaning, however, the buyer will often want a predictable monthly cost, while you should be rewarded for delivering the result rather than for taking longer.
Area-based office cleaning rates fit uniform tasks such as machine-cleaning an empty corridor or washing a large run of accessible windows. As the only method for a mixed office, a square-metre rate is blunt. A hundred square metres of carpet and a hundred square metres of washroom space are plainly not the same job.
For routine work, I prefer a fixed monthly fee built from productive hours. Multiply the estimated visit time by the real monthly frequency and your internal charge-out rate. Add consumables, travel, administration, an allowance for ordinary variation and profit. The basic calculation is:
monthly price = visit time × visits per month × charge-out rate + supplies + travel + recurring extras
Suppose our model visit takes 2.75 hours and happens twice a week, about 8.7 times a month. That is just under 24 hours. Multiply it by your charge-out rate, not the amount you hope to take home. The rate needs to pay for tax and contributions, holidays, sickness, invoicing time and replacement equipment. Every operator has different costs, which is why a universal commercial cleaning pricing table can look precise while being useless to your business.
A hybrid model is practical: the routine scope has a monthly fee, while window cleaning, carpet extraction, post-party work and consumable purchasing sit outside it. Set a minimum call-out charge as well. One hour reached by travelling across Prague cannot cost the same as an extra hour attached to an existing shift in the building.
What the commercial cleaning quote must say
A good proposal is a shared map of the work. List zones, tasks, frequency, service days and access window. State whether VAT is included, and how and when you invoice. If you are not VAT-registered, say so plainly.
Exclusions need the same precision as included work. For example: window washing beyond fingerprints on entrance doors, employees' dishes, cupboard and appliance interiors, bulky-waste removal, work at height and cleaning after building work are outside the fee. That wording is not hostile. It prevents two people from signing the same document with different meanings of “clean.”
Separate supplies into three groups:
- your cleaning chemicals and equipment;
- the client's washroom consumables for staff;
- items billed according to actual use.
Document responsibility for keys, fobs and alarms. Include a change-control sentence too: a new floor, ten extra desks or a kitchenette that becomes a daily canteen will be measured and confirmed in a revised order. Quietly squeezing it into the same evening is how a sound contract turns into unpaid labour.
Reviewing month one without working for free
Call the first month an onboarding period, not a free trial. The client receives cleaning and pays for it. During the first four to eight visits, record arrival and departure, minutes by zone, exceptions and consumption. A basic phone spreadsheet is enough. Separate early route-finding from recurring problems such as a consistently overloaded kitchenette.
After two weeks, arrange a ten-minute check with the contact person. Do not settle for “it looks fine.” Walk through the washrooms, kitchenette, floors and one meeting room. Ask about observable results: missed bins, streaks or empty dispensers. Be equally specific if the actual use differs from what you saw during the walkthrough.
At the end of the month, compare the estimate with the records. If visits consistently take 150 rather than 165 minutes and the standard holds, you have a healthy buffer. If they take 205 minutes because there is another toilet on a different floor and twice as many bins, show the log and propose a price or scope change. That is not an argument based on feeling. It is a correction based on work completed.
Your first recurring office cleaning contract does not have to be estimated perfectly to the minute. It does need a walkthrough, a measurable scope, a paid onboarding period and an agreed method for handling change. Those four things let you take on a first B2B client without quietly subsidising their office every Tuesday night.
If you would like to compare your scope with the needs of a real workplace, send a no-obligation cleaning enquiry through the Čistýkout contact form. Čistýkout is a Prague-based option for matching clients with cleaning providers and clarifying the work before a final office cleaning price is agreed.
