What a £40 Cleaning Hour Actually Pays You: The Maths Nobody Puts on the Quote
Photo: cleaning business owner working out hourly rate with calculator, invoices and notebook on desk, via spotonmaids.com
Quick one before we start: nobody in this trade is short of work. Plenty of cleaning businesses are short of profit. The gap between those two things is almost always the same — a headline rate that sounded impressive down the phone and never had a chance of surviving contact with a real week.
You've seen the message in a Facebook group a hundred times. 'I charge £40 an hour, I'm fully booked, and I've got £60 in the bank until Friday. What am I doing wrong?' The answer is usually nothing to do with effort, and everything to do with arithmetic.
The number on the quote is a price, not a wage
When you tell a client £40 an hour, they hear a wage. So do you, if you're honest, at least at the start. But that £40 has to carry the van, the chemicals, the insurance, the hours you spend quoting jobs you don't win, the reclean you do for free because a skirting board got missed, and the six weeks a year you'd quite like to spend somewhere other than a bathroom in Croydon.
Strip all of that out and what's left is your actual pay. For a lot of sole traders quoting £40, it's closer to £18–£20. Not because they're bad at the job, but because nobody ever showed them the sum.
Where your week actually goes
Start with time, because time is the thing you're really selling. A realistic solo cleaning week looks nothing like the number of hours you bill.
| What you're doing | Hours per week |
|---|---|
| Cleaning on a client's clock (billed) | 22 |
| Driving between jobs | 5 |
| Quoting, enquiries, site visits | 3 |
| Invoicing, chasing, bookkeeping | 3 |
| Recleans and callbacks | 2 |
| Shopping, kit, training, marketing | 3 |
| Total at work | 38 |
That's 22 billable hours out of 38 worked — a utilisation rate of about 58%. Which is normal. Genuinely, painfully normal. If you're running at 58%, you are not doing anything wrong; you're just not being paid for 16 hours of it.
The £40 hour, stripped back
Now the money. Take those figures across a year of 46 working weeks (more on the missing six shortly).
- Billed hours: 22 × 46 = 1,012 hours
- Revenue at £40: £40,480
Now the costs that come out of that before you see a penny:
| Cost | Per year |
|---|---|
| Consumables (chemicals, cloths, bags, bin liners) | £1,300 |
| Van: fuel, insurance, tax, MOT, servicing, depreciation | £4,900 |
| Public liability and tool cover | £320 |
| Phone, software, accountant, bank charges | £640 |
| Marketing (van signwriting, ads, leaflets) | £480 |
| Kit replacement, uniform, PPE | £400 |
| Training and certification | £150 |
| Total overheads | £8,190 |
Profit before tax: £32,290.
Divide that by your 1,012 billed hours and you get £31.91 — which still feels decent. But you didn't work 1,012 hours. You worked 1,748. Divide by the real number and you land at £18.47 an hour of actual work.
And that's before HMRC. Once income tax and Class 4 National Insurance are taken off, a sole trader on those figures is taking home somewhere around £15.50 for every hour they spent on the business.
£15.50. From a £40 rate.
The six-week hole nobody prices in
Five point six weeks of statutory holiday, a few sick days, the odd day lost to a van that won't start. Call it six weeks where the work stops but the van insurance, the liability cover and the software subscription keep rolling. Most sole traders simply don't earn during that period and quietly absorb it, which is one reason January feels so brutal.
If you do want to take a holiday without the business bleeding, you have to charge for those weeks in the other 46. That's a 13% uplift baked into your rate — roughly a fiver an hour on top of a £40 quote, and it's the single most skipped line in every pricing spreadsheet I've seen.
The formula that sets a rate which actually pays you
Forget benchmarking off what the franchise down the road charges. Work backwards from what you need.
- Decide your target annual take-home, pre-tax. Say £35,000. Not a fantasy number — the amount that makes this worth doing instead of driving for a supermarket.
- Add your annual overheads. £35,000 + £8,190 = £43,190 of revenue required.
- Work out your realistic billable hours. Hours at work per week × weeks worked × utilisation. So 38 × 46 × 0.58 = 1,014 hours.
- Divide. £43,190 ÷ 1,014 = £42.60 per billed hour.
That's the honest rate. Not £40, and certainly not the £25 that gets thrown around in local Facebook groups. And notice what the formula exposes: to take home £35,000 you need to charge about £43, because roughly half your working life is unpaid.
A shortcut you can hold in your head: whatever you want to earn per hour of real graft, double it. Want £20 an hour for your time? Your quote needs to start with a four.
What this means on Monday morning
Three practical moves, in order of urgency.
Check your utilisation before your rate. If you're driving 40 minutes between jobs in a sprawling rural patch, you don't necessarily need a higher headline rate — you need a tighter round. Two hours of dead travel a day is 400 hours a year.
Build the six-week uplift into every quote from now on. Don't present it as a surcharge. It's just the rate.
Stop quoting hourly where you can avoid it. A fixed price per visit, based on the hourly figure you calculated above, protects you when a job overruns and stops clients doing mental arithmetic on how long you were actually in the house.
And if a long-standing client is on an old rate that no longer holds — this is the week to have that conversation. Not next April.
