A solo house cleaner who does the work nets 30 to 50 percent because there's no payroll. The moment you hire cleaners, net margin drops to 10 to 25 percent after labor, payroll taxes, supplies, insurance, transportation, and overhead. A healthy company-with-employees target is around 20 percent net. If you're consistently under 10, the problem is almost always under-pricing or inefficient routes — not effort.
We run our own cleaning company in Tucson, so this is the math we live, not a guess. Here's where the money actually goes, why hiring halves your percentage even as total profit grows, and the levers that move the margin back up.
You are the labor, so there's no wage to pay out. Costs are supplies, gas, insurance, and any software. The catch: your income is capped by your own hours, and a sick day is a zero-revenue day.
Cleaner wages plus payroll burden become your biggest line. You take more jobs and total dollars grow, but the percentage falls. Pricing and route efficiency decide whether you're at 15 or 25.
Add a manager, more overhead, and marketing, and the margin tightens again — but on a much larger revenue base. The owners who clear good money here run tight systems and price for it.
For a company with employees, a rough split of every revenue dollar:
The fastest lever. Most cleaners under-charge out of fear. A 10% raise on a 20%-margin business roughly doubles your profit. Price from cost, not the cheapest flyer in town.
Bi-weekly recurring clients fill routes with predictable, lower-acquisition-cost work. A book of recurring homes is worth far more than a stream of one-time deep cleans.
Drive time is paid time that earns nothing. Cluster clients by neighborhood and day so cleaners spend hours cleaning, not commuting between jobs.
Inside-fridge, oven, windows, and move-out cleans carry strong margins and cost little to offer. Upsell at booking instead of leaving money on the table.
More volume doesn't fix a broken margin — it multiplies the loss. Fix the math first if:
Once your prices, routes, and recurring base are healthy, then it's worth paying to grow — because every new client lands on a profitable system instead of a leaky one.
Once the math works, the growth lever is a steady flow of recurring clients to keep cleaners booked. That is the part we build: a hand-built cleaning site that ranks for "house cleaning near me," shows your reviews, books recurring cleans, and uses 24/7 AI lead capture to turn searches into named, callable leads — so you fill route time with profitable, repeat work.
We run our own cleaning company on this exact stack. Our Start Getting Leads plan is $249/month — site, AI lead capture, hosting, and updates, month-to-month, and you own everything. See house cleaning website design, our pricing guide, house cleaning marketing, or SEO for home services. The AI receptionist books while your crew is cleaning.
We don't post stock testimonials. On a 15-minute call we screen-share the real dashboards behind our own businesses — live leads, rankings, and the exact page that produced each one. See the proof →
Around 20% net once you have employees, 30–50% solo. Under 10% with a team almost always means your prices are too low or your routes waste paid drive time.
Labor plus payroll burden is 50–65% of revenue. The percentage falls, but you can take far more work, so total profit grows. The goal is more booked jobs on a system priced to keep 20%.
Pricing, then recurring clients on tight routes. Raising under-set prices and filling open route time with bi-weekly homes moves the margin more than anything else you can do.
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