Free cleaning business tool
Is This Cleaning Job Actually Profitable?
Revenue is not profit, and doing the work yourself does not make labor free. Enter one cleaning job and see contribution profit, fully loaded profit, break-even price and the price required to hit your own target margin.
Decision support based on your inputs — not a national cleaning-price recommendation.
Updated August 2026
This job’s numbers
The values below are editable example inputs, not benchmarks or recommended prices. Replace them with one real job. Results update as you type, nothing is stored and the math runs in your browser.
What you charge the customer for this one visit.
Hours you personally spend cleaning at the property.
Paid cleaner hours on site. Two cleaners for two hours is four crew-hours.
Your drive time, restocking and setup attributable to this job.
Paid but unbilled cleaner time attributable to this job.
Consumables actually used on this visit.
Fuel and vehicle cost attributable to this job.
Parking, subcontracted work, equipment rental or anything else specific to this job.
Advanced assumptions — illustrative starting values, replace these with your actual numbersshow
Illustrative starting value at $30/hour. Replace with your own value: what it would cost to have someone else do the work you are doing on this job.
Illustrative starting value at $18/hour. This is not a recommended wage — use what you actually pay.
Employer FICA rate
7.65%
Fixed: 2026 employer Social Security 6.2% + Medicare 1.45%. Source: IRS Publication 15. Wage-base and additional-Medicare rules are not modeled.
Illustrative starting value at 5%. Replace with your actual state unemployment, workers compensation, benefits, payroll service and other employer-specific burden.
Illustrative starting value at 2.9%. Replace with your actual blended processing rate. Modeled as a percentage of price.
Illustrative starting value at $2,000. Fixed monthly costs that exist whether or not you clean today: insurance, software, phone, accounting, storage or rent, advertising, licenses. Do not include the direct job costs you entered above.
Illustrative starting value at 280. Productive crew-hours you expect to sell in a month. Used only to allocate overhead transparently.
YOUR TARGET, not an industry benchmark. Illustrative starting value 25%. This is the fully loaded profit margin you want a job to clear.
Modeled signal — based on your inputs and your chosen target margin
PROFITABLE — BELOW YOUR TARGET MARGIN
The target margin of 25.0% is a value you chose, not a cleaning industry standard.
Next step
This job is profitable but below your target margin — a pricing gap, not an emergency. The pricing guide and the target price above show the gap to close.
Owner labor cost
$105.00
3.5 hrs valued at $30.00/hr
Employee labor cost
$0.00
0 hrs at $20.28/hr loaded
Direct job cost before overhead
$124.64
Includes $4.64 payment processing
Contribution profit
$35.36
Contribution margin 22.1%
Allocated overhead rate
$7.14/hr
Monthly fixed overhead ÷ target monthly billable crew-hours
Allocated overhead for this job
$21.43
3 hrs of productive crew-time
Fully loaded cost
$146.07
Fully loaded profit
$13.93
Fully loaded margin 8.7%
Break-even price
$145.65
Price where fully loaded profit is zero after fees
Target price at 25.0% margin
$196.16
Your target margin, not an industry benchmark
Current price vs target
$36.16 below target
Profit per productive crew-hour
$4.64/hr
Fully loaded profit ÷ productive crew-hours
What these numbers mean
At $160.00 for this job, direct cost before overhead is $124.64, which leaves $35.36 of contribution profit (22.1%). Contribution is the cash the job throws off before any share of your fixed monthly costs is counted.
Your fixed overhead of $2,000 a month spread over 280 target billable crew-hours works out to $7.14 per productive crew-hour. This job consumes 3 hrs of productive time, so it carries $21.43 of overhead. Fully loaded cost is $146.07 and fully loaded profit is $13.93 (8.7%).
The job is genuinely profitable on a fully loaded basis, it just clears less than the target margin you set. That is a pricing or efficiency gap, not an emergency.
You are doing all of the work on this job, but owner labor was not treated as free. 3.5 hrs of your time (productive plus travel and nonbillable) was valued at $30.00 per hour, for $105.00 of labor cost. That is the economic cost of replacing yourself later — if you leave it out, the job only looks profitable because you are working for nothing.
To reach the 25.0% fully loaded margin you selected, this job would need to be priced at about $196.16 under these assumptions — $36.16 more than you charge today. That target margin is your assumption, not an industry standard.
Break-even for this job — the price at which fully loaded profit is exactly zero after processing fees — is $145.65. Anything below that is a modeled loss once your own labor and overhead share are counted.
What would have to change?
These are the five variables the model can move. Not all of them should be cut — the point is to see which one is actually driving the result for this job.
- Price
- Moving this job from $160.00 to $196.16 closes the entire gap without changing anything operational. Whether the client will pay it is a separate question.
- Productive hours / efficiency
- Labor is 72% of fully loaded cost on this job ($105.00). 3 hrs of productive time carries both the labor cost and the overhead allocation, so a shorter on-site time moves two lines at once. Shorter is only real if the work still meets standard.
- Travel and nonbillable time
- 0.5 hrs of travel and nonbillable time is attached to this job and costs money without producing billable output. Routing, clustering visits or adjusting the service area changes this line.
- Supplies, vehicle and other direct costs
- $15.00 of direct nonlabor cost is attached to this job, plus $4.64 of payment processing at 2.90%. These are usually the smallest lever, but they are also the easiest to measure accurately.
- Overhead allocation and utilization
- Overhead is allocated at $7.14 per billable crew-hour, adding $21.43 to this job. Selling more billable hours a month spreads the same fixed cost thinner; cutting fixed overhead does the same from the other direction.
Why revenue can look better than the job really is
A $160 house that takes three hours feels like a good job. The invoice is visible, and most of the costs are not. Supplies leave the shelf a little at a time. Drive time is paid whether or not anyone bills it. Card fees are deducted before the deposit lands. Insurance, software and the phone bill are paid monthly whether the schedule is full or empty. Owner labor is invisible entirely, because it never shows up as a payment to anyone.
None of those are unusual costs. They are simply spread across time and accounts, which is why a business can be busy, collect every invoice and still find nothing left at the end of the month. Job-level analysis puts the costs back on the job that caused them.
Contribution profit vs. fully loaded profit
Contribution profit is price minus the costs this job creates: owner labor at your replacement value, paid employee labor including attributable travel time, supplies, vehicle cost, other variable costs and payment processing. It answers a cash question: does taking this job leave you better off today than not taking it?
Fully loaded profit subtracts a share of your fixed monthly overhead as well. It answers a business question: if every job on the calendar looked like this one, would the company as a whole be profitable? Those two answers routinely disagree, and the disagreement is the useful part. A job with positive contribution and negative fully loaded profit is not a job you must drop immediately — but a schedule full of them is a company that cannot pay for itself.
Why owner labor is not free
“I do the work myself” is the single most common reason a cleaning job appears profitable when it is not. Your labor has an economic replacement value: the cost of paying someone else to do the hours you are personally covering. The moment you hire, that cost becomes real payroll. If your prices were built on unpaid owner hours, the margin does not survive the transition.
This calculator applies your entered replacement value to your productive hours plus your attributable travel and nonbillable hours. Choosing that number is your call. Setting it to zero is also a choice — it simply models a business that only works while you keep working for nothing.
How the price floor is calculated
Overhead is allocated transparently rather than guessed: overhead rate = monthly fixed overhead ÷ target monthly billable crew-hours, and that rate is applied to the productive crew-hours this job consumes.
Payment processing is a percentage of price, so it cannot simply be added to a cost total when solving for price — raising the price raises the fee. Instead the model builds a base cost that excludes the percentage fee (labor, supplies, vehicle, other variable cost and allocated overhead) and solves around it:
- break-even price = base cost ÷ (1 − fee rate)
- target price = base cost ÷ (1 − fee rate − target margin)
That second formula uses margin, not markup. A 25% margin means profit is 25% of the price, which is a larger number than adding 25% on top of cost. If your fee rate and target margin add up to 100% or more, the denominator collapses and no price satisfies the assumptions — the calculator says so instead of printing a nonsense figure.
What this tool does not know
- What cleaning services should cost in your market. Every figure here comes from your inputs.
- Whether the client would accept the modeled target price, or leave.
- Your actual overhead, if the monthly figure entered is an estimate rather than a number from your books.
- Employment, tax, payroll, insurance and worker-classification requirements — the calculator makes no determination on any of these.
- Whether hours were recorded accurately, including drive time and unbilled setup.
- Route effects: a job that is marginal alone may be fine as part of a dense route, and a well-priced job can be poor if it strands a day.
- Referral value, client tenure, seasonality and the cost of replacing the job if you drop it.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between contribution profit and fully loaded profit?
- Contribution profit is price minus the costs the job itself creates: labor, supplies, vehicle, other variable costs and payment processing. Fully loaded profit also subtracts a share of your fixed monthly overhead, allocated by the productive crew-hours the job consumes. A job can show positive contribution and still lose money fully loaded.
- Why does the calculator charge me for my own labor?
- Because replacing yourself has a price. If your time is entered as free, the model will report a margin that disappears the moment you hire someone to do that work. The calculator uses a replacement value you enter per hour, applied to your productive plus attributable travel and nonbillable hours on the job.
- How is the price floor calculated?
- Payment processing is a percentage of price, so the break-even price is solved rather than added: base cost excluding the percentage fee, divided by one minus the fee rate. The target price divides the same base cost by one minus the fee rate minus your target margin, which is a margin calculation rather than a markup.
- What target margin should a cleaning business use?
- This tool does not supply one. The target margin field is your own assumption about what a job should clear once labor and overhead are counted. We do not publish an industry target margin we have not verified.
- Does a positive result mean I should keep the job?
- No. The output is a model of one job under your inputs. It does not know your local market, the client's behavior, whether the work leads to referrals, or how the job fits your schedule and route.
Once the job economics work, test whether they support hiring
Profitable jobs are what make payroll possible. When the recurring work on your schedule clears your target margin, the next question is capacity: can you afford to hire your first cleaner — what the loaded payroll costs, how many productive hours it creates and how much reserve it takes to survive a slow month. And once one visit makes sense, see what the recurring client contributes across a month and a modeled year with the client profitability calculator. More tools are on the free cleaning tools hub.
Sources and references
- IRS Publication 15 (Circular E), Employer's Tax Guide — Employer share of Social Security (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%), used for the fixed 7.65% employer FICA rate applied to paid employee hours.
- Jobber Profit Margin Calculator — Standard margin framing: price minus cost, divided by price. Referenced for methodology only; Jobber is not affiliated with this calculator and does not endorse it.
- Jobber Service Price Calculator — Methodology context that a service price should account for labor, materials and expenses, overhead and profit.
- Jobber job costing documentation — Job-level framing of revenue, labor, expenses and profit. Used as documentation context, not as an endorsement.