How much does a maid service cost?

How much does it cost to hire a house cleaner? And what can affect the price for cleaning your home?

There are two types of housekeeping vendors you can choose: 1) an individual (solo) cleaner or 2) a company. An individual cleaner will be generally less expensive and charge anywhere from $25 to $50 per hour. A company will typically charge between $40 and $60 per hour. The former is more affordable and can form a more personal relationship with your household. The latter is much more likely to carry worker’s compensation and liability insurance and business license - to protect you in case of an accident or a property damage. It also carries administrative and management staff that resolves any issues and provides a layer of customer support.

Amongst the house cleaning companies or maid services, there are two types of pricing models: flat rate and hourly rate. Flat rates are based on the size of your home, i.e. scope of work. For both models, the pricing is roughly based on the labor hours it takes to clean the property and at the end of the day is approximately equal. The average range of a one-time full house cleaning cost for a medium-sized home is between $170 and $250. Larger properties will cost significantly more.

What can affect the price for cleaning your house? The most important factor is how long it’s going to take for a maid service to clean your home. This is affected by:

1. The overall condition of the home. How would you rate it on a scale from “my mother-in-law is coming to visit tomorrow” and “we’ve had a Category IV hurricane go through it”?

2. Related to the above, how many pets and kids do you have living in the household? We love them and they’re worth it, but they tend to create extra amount of things to clean, as every mom knows.

3. The relative amount of clutter. If it takes more time for a maid to even get to any surface, the cleaning company’s costs will be higher.

4. The age of the home. Sometimes if the surfaces are older, there maybe an additional layer of grime and discoloration that may take longer to remedy.

5. Weirdly enough, how nice you are to your cleaning personnel. Everyone loves working with … well… nice people. Because nice people are accommodating with any hiccups and allow vendors to keep their costs and their nerves down.

On the other hand, the price of the house cleaning is unaffected by:

1. Number of properties. If you are a business that has multiple properties but don’t have the right budget to allow for a professional cleaning, having multiple amount of orders, aka “volume” is not sustainable as the maid service will lose money every time they will clean them.

2. How long it takes you to clean your house yourself. Your typical cleaning would be less thorough than a professional cleaning because not all surfaces would be included and the standards would generally be lower. A good house cleaning company would aim to clean to the standards of the most demanding customers.