Sample home cleaning quotes and the template behind them for first-year owners

What to take away

A quote is a scope document with a number attached. Send the scope and the number together or you have sent an argument.
Eleven fields. Each one exists because leaving it out has cost somebody money.
The worked structures below use named variables rather than dollar amounts, because a printed figure would be wrong for your market and would be quoted back at you.
Put an expiry date on every quote. A quote with no expiry is a permanent price.
Record what you quoted and what the job actually took. That comparison is how the template improves.

Nothing here supplies a rate, a total or a benchmark. Fill the variables from your own cost model, and take tax treatment of anything you charge to an accountant.

The eleven fields

Every quote you send should carry all of these. Anything missing is a place a dispute can start.

Identity and date. Your business name, contact, license or registration details if your jurisdiction requires them on customer documents, and the date issued.
The property. Address, and the specifics the price was built on: bedroom count, bathroom count, approximate area, flooring types, occupancy, pets.
The service. Which package, and at what frequency.
What is included. Room by room, as tasks. Not adjectives.
What is excluded. The list customers assume is included: appliance interiors, interior windows, walls, blinds, dishes, laundry, pet waste, biohazards, heights beyond a stated limit, moving furniture over a stated weight.
Conditions that change the price. Condition materially different from described, added rooms, additional occupants or pets, access failure, requests outside the task list.
The number. Per visit, with the frequency stated, and the first visit priced separately if it is a different job.
Duration expectation. The allowance you built the price from, expressed as a range, with a note that the price is for the scope rather than for the hours.
Access and arrival. How the crew enters, what arrival window applies, and what happens if nobody is home.
Payment terms. When payment is due, by what method, and what happens on a late or failed payment.
Validity and remedy. An expiry date for the quote, and what you do if the work falls short: the remedy, and the window for raising it.

Field five is the one owners most often soften and the one that prevents the most arguments. Field eleven is the one that decides how a complaint is handled six weeks later.

The exclusion list is the field owners are most tempted to soften and the one that prevents the most arguments. Write it plainly, and put it on the same page as the price.

The recurring visit structure

Use variables, fill them from your own model, and keep the working alongside the quote in your records.

Let b be your fully burdened cost per crew hour, h the duration allowance in crew hours for this home, s the supplies per visit, t the travel hours attributable, o your overhead recovery as a share, and m your target margin as a share.

Visit price is approximately:

((b x (h + t)) + s) x (1 + o) x (1 + m)

Three cautions on using it. Build h from a high percentile of your own measured times for comparable homes rather than from the average, or roughly half your jobs will run over. Include t honestly, because a distant home genuinely costs more. And check the result against what whether the price clears break-even tells you about contribution, not just against what feels competitive.

The first-visit structure

A first clean before a recurring schedule is a different job. Quote it separately, with its own allowance.

Let h1 be the first-visit allowance, which will be materially larger than h. First-visit price is the same formula with h1 substituted, and it should be quoted on its own line so that the customer sees two numbers and understands why.

Pricing the first visit as a standard visit is the most common and most expensive quoting error in residential cleaning, because it happens on every new customer.

The one-time deep clean structure

Here the variance is larger and you have not seen the home before, so the quote should carry a mechanism rather than a single number.

Two workable approaches.

A range with a condition clause. Quote a range built from your measured distribution for comparable homes, state clearly what determines where in the range the job lands, and confirm the final figure after the walkthrough.

A fixed price after assessment. Do a short walkthrough or a structured photo assessment first, then issue a fixed quote. Slower to sell and far more defensible.

Either way, write down the assessment inputs you used. When the job runs long, that record is the difference between a requote and an argument.

The add-on line

List add ons individually with their own prices, not as a bundled uplift. Each one needs its own task definition, because "detail work" means whatever the customer imagines.

Take the add-on definitions straight from the home cleaning service packages rather than writing them fresh per quote, so that two quotes issued in the same week describe the same thing.

Claims hidden inside a quote

A quote is advertising. Every descriptive word in it is a claim you may be asked to support.

Watch four in particular: sanitizing and disinfecting, which describe specific outcomes tied to using a registered product according to its label including contact time; green or eco-friendly, which is the most scrutinized claim category there is; bonded and insured, which each mean something particular; and guaranteed, which is defined by whoever complains if you do not define it first. The Federal Trade Commission: Advertising FAQs: A Guide for Small Business guidance sets out what substantiation and clear disclosure require.

Keeping the quote file

Quotes are records, and they are the records that make your pricing improve.

Keep the issued quote, the assumptions behind the number, whether it was accepted, and, for accepted jobs, the actual on-site time against the allowance. The general recordkeeping expectation is set out in the Internal Revenue Service: What kind of records should I keep? guidance.

Then look at two numbers each quarter.

Acceptance rate by service and by price band. A very high acceptance rate is not good news. It usually means the price is below what the market would pay.
Allowance accuracy. The share of accepted jobs that ran over. If that share is high, the template is producing wrong numbers and the fix is upstream in the allowance.

The wage input behind b should be re-checked against area occupational wage data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Tables whenever recruiting gets harder, since a rate you cannot hire at makes every quote built on it fictional.

Sending it

Send the quote as a document rather than as a message, with the scope attached rather than referenced. Then call. In this trade the response speed to a first inquiry does more for conversion than the number does, and the quote that arrives in an hour beats the quote that arrives tomorrow at a slightly lower price.

What the local competitive picture will bear is a property of the local cleaning business market, and the structural logic underneath every field here is set out in the pricing structure behind the quote. If you need the method for arriving at the figure itself rather than the document, that is how to build the quote figure.

Common questions

Should I quote over the phone?

For recurring maintenance in a housing stock you know well, a structured phone assessment with a condition clause works. For deep cleans and move out work it does not, and the difference between a phone number and a walkthrough number is usually paid for by you.

How long should a quote stay valid?

Long enough to be considered and short enough that your cost model has not moved. Put the date on the document, and honor it.

Should the quote show an hourly rate?

Usually not for flat-priced work. Showing the rate invites the customer to manage the clock, and it turns every efficient job into a conversation about a refund. Show the scope and the price.

What if the customer wants to remove tasks to lower the price?

That is a legitimate request and it needs a real answer: a reduced scope with a reduced allowance and a reduced price, documented as its own package. What it cannot be is the same price with quiet omissions.