“Your quote is nearly double the one underneath it, and I can’t see what the difference is.”
He was right that he couldn’t see it. Nothing in either document showed him where the money went – two pages of service descriptions, a monthly figure at the bottom, and no way of telling which one was arithmetic and which one was a guess. Cleaning is sold as a service and priced as a payroll, and the gap between those two things is where most bad contracts are signed.
So here is the payroll, opened up.
What does £2.40 a square foot buy in a London office?
Around £2.40 per square foot per year is where a five-night daily clean lands on a mid-size London office floor. Call the working range £1.80 to £3.20. The low end is an open-plan floor with one washroom core and a bin at every desk cluster. The high end is a cellular layout with meeting rooms, two kitchens, a client-facing reception and a managing agent who inspects.
On a 10,000 square foot floor, £2.40 is £24,000 a year, or £2,000 a month. That figure covers a cleaner in the building five evenings a week for something like three and a half hours, a supervisor across the site, the equipment, the insurance, the training and vetting, and whatever margin the contractor has managed to hold on to.
It does not cover a great deal else, which is the second half of this article.
The hour is the unit, not the square foot
Square footage is a convenient way to compare two quotes. It is not how anyone prices the work. What a contractor builds is a labour schedule, and the square footage only tells them how many hours to put in it.
For standard daily office cleaning – desks, bins, washrooms, kitchens, a vacuum through – a working cleaner covers somewhere around 2,500 to 3,000 square feet an hour. Break the floor into small rooms and that rate falls off a cliff, because doors, corners and separate bins eat time that open floor does not. Add a second washroom core and it falls again, since washrooms are the slowest square footage in any building by a distance.
The hours are the money. Everything else on the invoice is a rounding error by comparison, and any conversation about price that does not start with the hours on site is a conversation about nothing.
Where does the money go once you have paid the invoice?
Take the £24,000 apart.
Direct labour, including everything that sits on top of the hourly rate, runs to something between £16,000 and £17,000 of it. Call it seventy per cent. Supervision, mobile cover and account management take around £2,000 – the supervisor who walks the site, the person who finds you somebody when your regular cleaner’s child is ill. Materials, machinery and equipment replacement come in near £1,200. Insurance, training, DBS checks, COSHH documentation and the rest of the compliance overhead take another £1,000 or so.
What’s left is the margin, and on a competitive London daily contract it sits between five and ten per cent. That is thinner than most clients assume when they are pushing for another five off.
Look at the shape of that breakdown rather than the individual figures. Seventy per cent of what you pay walks into your building wearing a uniform. The hours are the money, and a contractor who tells you they have found savings in procurement or efficiencies in their operating model has found them in the rota, whatever the covering letter says.
The on-costs nobody quotes separately
A cleaner on the London Living Wage costs £14.80 an hour. That is not what they cost the contractor.
Holiday pay adds 12.07 per cent for staff on the accrual method. Employer National Insurance runs at 15 per cent on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year, which was cut from £9,100 in April 2025 and is frozen until the end of the decade. That cut mattered enormously in this trade and went almost unremarked outside it. Cleaning runs on short shifts, and a part-time cleaner earning £8,000 a year used to sit under the old threshold entirely. Now most of that wage is inside the charge.
Add pension contributions where the earnings trigger auto-enrolment, sick pay, uniform, and the paid time a supervisor spends inducting somebody new. The £14.80 becomes something closer to £18 before a mop has moved. When a client tells me the maths of a quote doesn’t add up, this is usually the part they have left out.
What is not in the price?
Consumables are the first surprise. Paper towels, toilet rolls, hand soap, bin liners, sanitary units – these sit outside almost every daily cleaning specification in London and get billed on top, at whatever the contractor’s mark-up happens to be. A busy 100-desk floor can run to £3,000 or £4,000 a year in washroom consumables alone. Two quotes are not comparable until you know whether either of them includes this.
Periodics are the second, and the larger, surprise. The daily clean keeps a building presentable. It does nothing for the carpet, which needs extraction once or twice a year, or the vinyl, which needs stripping and resealing, or the kitchen extract canopy, which needs cleaning to a schedule your insurer may care about more than you do. Windows are almost always a separate line. So is the annual high-level dust.
Budget for the periodics separately or they will arrive as a series of unwelcome quotes across the year, each one presented as an exception, each one entirely predictable. A sensible planned maintenance schedule on a 10,000 square foot floor adds perhaps £3,000 to £5,000 a year on top of the daily contract, and it is the difference between a floor that ages gracefully and one that needs recarpeting two years early.
Above head height is always extra
The daily specification stops at the height a cleaner can comfortably reach standing on the floor. Everything above that line – partition tops, ductwork, light diffusers, the ledges above the door frames, the ceiling void grilles – is out of scope unless somebody wrote it in.
Nobody notices for about three years. Then the office gets a refit, or the lease ends and a surveyor arrives with a torch, and the dust that accumulated across those three years turns into a line on a schedule of dilapidations. The daily contract was never going to touch it. The annual high-level clean nobody bought would have.
How does the quote underneath yours come in a third cheaper?
The hours are the money, so a cheaper quote is a quote with fewer hours in it. There is no other lever of any size. Materials and margin together are barely a quarter of the price, and no contractor can find thirty per cent in there.
What they can do is put two and a half hours a night on the schedule where the building needs three and a half, and hope the client doesn’t count. They can price the labour at the statutory National Living Wage of £12.71 rather than £14.80, which is legal, and which produces exactly the staffing churn you would expect at that gap. They can leave the supervisor off the site and manage the account from an office in Croydon by phone. They can strip out cover, so a sickness absence means your floor gets missed and nobody rings to say so.
Each of those is a real decision by a real contractor, and each of them shows up on your floor within about four months.
Four ways the hours disappear
Watch for a specification with no hours in it at all – “cleaning to be carried out to the required standard” is a phrase that commits nobody to anything. Watch for a headcount without a shift length. Watch for washrooms folded into the general area rate, since washroom time is the first thing a short-priced schedule steals from. And watch for consumables priced generously against a suspiciously thin labour line, which is a contractor telling you where they intend to make their money back.
A quote that names the hours per night, the supervisor’s visit frequency and the periodic schedule can be argued with. A quote that names none of them cannot be compared to anything.
Is your building being cleaned more often than it needs?
Here is the part that costs me money to write.
A great many London offices are on five-night contracts for buildings that hold three days of people. Occupancy settled after the pandemic into a pattern everyone in facilities now recognises – full Tuesday to Thursday, sparse either side – and the cleaning specifications largely did not move with it. Friday night on a floor that held eleven people is not a cleaning requirement. It is a habit with an invoice attached.
I would rather sell four nights done properly than five done thin, and I say so at tender more often than my sales figures would like. Move the money instead of cutting it: four full nights, a proper Monday reset after the weekend, and the saved night’s budget put into the periodic schedule that everyone underfunds.
What we did off Jamaica Road
A client of ours took 14,000 square feet in a converted warehouse off Jamaica Road, SE16, and inherited a five-night specification from the previous tenant. Their people came in Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. We dropped Friday nights, put the hours into a longer Monday and a quarterly carpet extraction that the building had never had, and the annual cost came down by about eleven per cent. The floor looks better than it did on five nights, because the carpet is now cleaned and the desks were never the problem.
The one thing I would not touch was the washrooms. Those get done every day the building is open, whether four people used them or ninety, and that line is not negotiable at any price per square foot.
