Cleaning & janitorial
Commercial Cleaning Markup Calculator
Apply a markup to contract cost and see the margin it actually produces.
Result
Markup is measured against your cost, margin against the price you charge. A 50% markup is a 33.3% margin, not a 50% one. Pricing off the wrong one is the most common way a job that looked profitable turns out not to have been.
Get a Free Business AuditWhat moves the number
- Whether the cost base includes supervision, equipment and consumables.
- Mobilisation, which has to be recovered somewhere.
- Contract risk, which rises with term length and fixed pricing.
Where this one goes wrong
Marking up labour only. Supervision, equipment, consumables and mobilisation are all real costs of delivering the contract, and a markup applied to cleaner hours alone recovers none of them.
Questions
About this calculator
What should the markup cover?
Overhead, supervision not already costed, mobilisation recovery, risk on a fixed price, and profit. Listing them makes it clear why the number is what it is.
What margin is realistic in commercial cleaning?
Thinner than domestic work, which is why costing accuracy matters more. Small errors in production rate consume the whole margin.
Does contract length affect the markup?
It should. A longer fixed-price term carries more wage escalation risk and deserves either a higher margin or an escalation clause.
The formula
price = cost x (1 + markup%); margin = profit / price
Put this calculator on your site
Free to embed. Paste this where you want it to appear. It stays up to date automatically because it loads from BDEVY.
Please keep the attribution line. It is the only thing we ask in return.
How to use this calculator
- Your cost ($). Enter your own figure; the page starts at $108.
- Markup on cost (%). Enter your own figure; the page starts at 45%.
The result updates as you type, so you can try a figure, see what it does to price, and change it back. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or saved.
A worked example
These are the figures the calculator opens with. Every number in the results column below is produced by the same calculation the page runs, so you can follow it through before putting your own figures in.
What goes in
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Your cost | $108 |
| Markup on cost | 45% |
What comes out
| Result | Value |
|---|---|
| Price main result | $156.60 |
| Gross profit | $48.60 |
| Margin that gives you | 31.0% |
A 45% markup on $108 prices the job at $156.60, which is 31.0% margin, not 45%.
How sensitive the answer is
Holding everything else steady and changing only your cost, this is what happens to price. It is worth knowing which of your inputs the answer actually hinges on, and which barely move it.
| Your cost ($) | Price |
|---|---|
| $54 | $78.30 |
| $81 | $117.45 |
| $108 example above | $156.60 |
| $162 | $234.90 |
| $216 | $313.20 |
Every other input is held at the example value while this one changes, which is not how a real job behaves. Treat it as a guide to which number matters most, not as five separate quotes.
What each figure means
- Your cost ($)
- A money amount, starting at $108.
- Markup on cost (%)
- A percentage, between 0 and 500, starting at 45%.
What the results tell you
| Result | What it is |
|---|---|
| Price | The headline result. A money figure. |
| Gross profit | A money figure. |
| Margin that gives you | A percentage. |
Time is the variable that bites
Pricing that works out on paper fails when the job takes longer than quoted. First cleans, heavily soiled sites and access problems all run over, so it is worth pricing the first visit separately from the recurring one.
Estimating is the easy part
The jobs you never hear about cost more than the ones you mis-measure. BDEVY builds the marketing, systems and automation that bring them in.