Put three office cleaning quotes side by side and you might be surprised by how different the numbers are.
Same office. Same number of desks. Same washrooms. Same working week.
Yet one company might come in significantly cheaper than the other two.
So, what's going on?
After years of pricing, reviewing and taking over commercial cleaning contracts across London, we've seen just how differently the same building can be costed.
And here's the important bit.
A cheaper quote isn't automatically a bad quote.
Sometimes a cleaning company has found a genuinely more efficient way of delivering the service. But when there's a big difference between two quotes, there's usually a difference somewhere in what's being allowed for.
The trick is knowing where to look.
1. Start With the Cleaning Hours
This is probably the most important number on the entire quote.
Forget the monthly price for a moment.
How many actual cleaning hours are you buying?
Imagine two companies quoting for exactly the same office.
Company A calculates that the building needs 30 cleaning hours per week.
Company B allows 22.
Straight away, Company B has a considerable price advantage.
But the building hasn't got any smaller.
The toilets haven't disappeared. There aren't fewer bins. The kitchen still needs cleaning and somebody still needs to vacuum the carpets.
That doesn't necessarily mean the 22-hour quote is wrong. Perhaps they've proposed better equipment, changed the cleaning schedule or identified efficiencies the first company missed.
But it does mean you should ask how they arrived at 22 hours.
A good cleaning specification isn't simply a list of jobs. It needs to consider the building, occupancy, surfaces, frequencies, standards expected and the time realistically required to deliver them.
Cleaning industry body BICSc includes productivity and allocation analysis within its consultancy work, using site observations and operational data to assess specifications, service levels and productivity benchmarks.
So if one quote is substantially cheaper, cleaning hours are one of the first things worth comparing.
2. Look at the Productivity Assumptions
This is where things get a little more interesting.
Every cleaning quote contains assumptions about productivity, whether they're obvious to the client or not.
How much space can one cleaner reasonably cover in an hour?
Increase that number and something rather convenient happens.
The quote gets cheaper.
On a spreadsheet, increasing productivity can make the numbers work beautifully. In a real building, things aren't always so neat.
A cleaner isn't moving continuously across an empty rectangular floor.
There are desks to navigate. Bins to empty. Toilets to clean. Kitchens to deal with. Doors to open. Equipment to move. Lifts to wait for. Security procedures to follow.
Different surfaces and tasks also take different amounts of time.
This is why we'd be cautious about comparing cleaning quotes purely by price per square metre.
The more useful question is:
What productivity assumptions have been used to calculate the cleaning hours?
3. Supervision Is Easy to Remove From a Spreadsheet
Here's one of the less obvious differences.
You aren't only paying for somebody to clean the building.
Someone also needs to make sure the cleaning is being done properly.
Who's checking standards?
Who's speaking to the client?
Who's dealing with a cleaner being off sick?
Who's arranging supplies?
Who's retraining someone if a particular task isn't being completed correctly?
Who's spotting that standards are starting to slip before the client has to complain?
That's management and supervision.
And it costs money.
Real public-sector cleaning procurements frequently distinguish between cleaning operatives, supervisory responsibilities, management, quality monitoring and other elements of service delivery rather than treating cleaning as a single generic task.
It's an important distinction.
You can reduce the cost of a contract without taking a single minute away from the cleaner simply by reducing what's happening around them.
The client might not notice immediately.
Six months later, they might.
4. Check What's Happened to the Periodic Cleaning
The office might get cleaned every evening.
But what about everything that doesn't need doing every evening?
Carpet extraction.
Hard floor maintenance.
High-level dusting.
Deep cleaning.
Detailed washroom work.
Areas behind and underneath furniture.
Internal glass.
These jobs often sit outside the everyday cleaning routine.
And this is where two quotes that initially look like they're offering the same thing can start to drift apart.
One contractor may have built periodic work into the annual programme.
Another may quote it separately when it's required.
Neither approach is necessarily wrong.
The problem is comparing the two prices as though they're identical.
Some formal cleaning tenders explicitly separate daily, weekly, monthly and periodic requirements, including planned deeper cleaning tasks. That's a useful way of thinking about your own quote too.
Ask what's included now rather than discovering twelve months later that the carpets you've assumed were part of the contract are an additional cost.
5. Ask What Happens When Your Cleaner Isn't There
Your regular cleaner knows the building.
They know which door sticks.
They know the alarm procedure.
They know that the meeting room on the third floor gets hammered on Tuesdays.
They know where everything lives.
Then one evening they're ill.
What happens?
People get sick. People take holidays. People leave jobs.
That's normal.
The question is whether the cleaning contract has been built to cope with it.
Reliable cover requires organisation. Someone needs to know there's an absence, find an appropriate replacement and make sure that person has the information and access needed to clean the site properly.
A very lean contract can look great when everything goes according to plan.
It's often when something changes that you discover how much support was actually built into the price.
6. Make Sure You're Comparing the Same Equipment and Consumables
Another surprisingly simple one.
What's actually included?
- Cleaning chemicals?
- Bin liners?
- Machinery?
- Replacement equipment?
- Paper products?
- Soap?
- Hand towels?
- Equipment servicing?
Not every cleaning company structures these costs in the same way.
A lower monthly price might simply mean certain items will appear elsewhere on the invoice.
Again, that's not automatically a problem.
You just need to know.
If you're comparing three cleaning companies, give all three the same specification and ask them to clearly identify anything that isn't included in their price.
Suddenly, comparing the quotes becomes much easier.
7. Labour Cost Matters More Than You Might Think
Cleaning is a people-heavy service.
That means wages have a major influence on the cost of delivering it.
From April 2026, the statutory National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 per hour.
In London, the voluntary real Living Wage is currently £14.80 per hour.
And the hourly wage isn't the entire employment cost.
A cleaning company still has to account for the wider costs involved in employing, equipping, training and managing its team.
This doesn't mean a company charging more automatically has happier cleaners or delivers a better service.
It does mean there's a practical limit to how far labour costs can be squeezed while everything else remains exactly the same.
If one quote is dramatically below the others, it's reasonable to ask how the company has achieved it.
The Cheapest Quote Isn't Necessarily the Wrong Quote
This deserves saying clearly.
Sometimes the cheapest cleaning quote is the right one.
A contractor may have better equipment.
They may schedule the work more intelligently.
They might identify tasks that are currently being completed too frequently.
The building may have been over-specified previously.
Technology might reduce some manual processes.
Or they may simply run a very efficient operation.
Equally, the most expensive quote isn't automatically the best.
Price alone tells you remarkably little.
What matters is whether you understand what sits behind the number.
If one company can clearly explain how many hours they've allowed, how the building will be supervised, what's included, how absence is covered and how standards will be monitored, you've got something meaningful to compare.
That's far more useful than three monthly figures at the bottom of three PDFs.
How to Compare Office Cleaning Quotes Like-for-Like
Before choosing an office cleaning company, compare these ten things:
How to Compare Office Cleaning Quotes Like-for-Like
Before choosing an office cleaning company, compare these ten things:
Cleaning hours
How many operative hours are actually included each week?
Productivity
What assumptions were used to calculate those hours?
Supervision
How much supervisory and management time is included?
Cover
What happens when the regular cleaner is sick or on holiday?
Periodic cleaning
Which deep and periodic cleaning tasks are included?
Equipment
Who supplies, maintains and replaces the equipment?
Consumables
What's included and what will be charged separately?
Specification
Are all contractors pricing the same tasks and frequencies?
Quality control
How will cleaning standards be checked and reported?
Additional costs
What could result in extra charges during the contract?
One Final Question Worth Asking
If we had to reduce all of this to one question, it would be:
“Can you show me how you arrived at this price?”
A cleaning contractor should be able to answer it.
Because ultimately, you're not buying a monthly figure.
You're buying the people, time, equipment, management and planning required to keep your building clean.
And if two companies are promising exactly the same result for very different amounts of money, it's worth finding out what's different before you sign the contract.