I have a theory about commercial cleaning quotes. It goes like this: the more a quote resembles a magician’s act – full of flourish, misdirection, and a suspiciously cheerful assistant – the less you want to sign it. I developed this theory after spending enough years on the quoting side of the table to know exactly which levers get pulled, which numbers get buried, and which promises dissolve quietly into the atmosphere about six weeks after the contract starts.
The commercial cleaning market in London is enormous, competitive, and almost entirely unregulated in terms of how companies present their pricing. There is no standard format, no required disclosure, and no industry body standing over anyone’s shoulder ensuring that what you’re quoted bears any meaningful relationship to what you’ll eventually pay or receive. Some companies are completely straight. Others are experts at winning contracts on paper and delivering something rather different in practice. The gap between those two types is not always visible at the quoting stage – but it’s learnable, and once you know what to look for, it becomes quite hard to unsee.
Here is what twenty-odd years on both sides of this process has taught me.
Why Commercial Cleaning Quotes Vary So Wildly
The Inputs That Should Drive The Price
A legitimate cleaning quote is built on a relatively small number of variables. The square footage of the space to be cleaned. The frequency of visits. The checklist – which surfaces, which areas, which tasks are included. The specification of chemicals and equipment required. The number of hours needed to complete the scope to an acceptable standard. The labour cost for those hours, including employer’s National Insurance, holiday pay, and any relevant Living Wage obligations. Overheads, management, and margin on top.
That’s essentially it. A company that knows what it’s doing can price a straightforward office contract with reasonable accuracy from a site visit and a clear brief. When quotes for the same job come back ranging from £400 a month to £1,400 a month – which happens more often than anyone in the industry likes to admit – the explanation is almost never that one company has found a dramatically more efficient way to clean. It’s that they’re quoting different things, or quoting the same thing with wildly different assumptions about what corners will eventually be cut.
The Low Quote Trap And How It Works
The low quote exists for a reason, and the reason is that it wins contracts. A facilities manager with three quotes on the desk and a budget to hit will frequently go with the lowest number, particularly if the accompanying pitch is confident and the references sound plausible. The cleaning company knows this. Some of them build their entire business model around it.
The mechanics are straightforward. Quote low to win. Reduce hours gradually once the contract is running – not dramatically, just incrementally, in ways that take time to accumulate into a noticeable drop in standard. Substitute specified products for cheaper alternatives. Reduce the number of staff on site without informing the client. By the time the client notices, several months of invoices have been paid, the switching cost feels significant, and a renegotiation becomes the path of least resistance.
I am not suggesting every low quote is a trap. Some companies are genuinely more efficient. Some have better buying power on supplies. Some have lower overheads. But a quote that is substantially below its competitors without a clear explanation of why deserves scrutiny rather than celebration.
What A Proper Site Survey Should Look Like
The Visit That Tells You Everything
A cleaning company that quotes without visiting your site is guessing. They might be experienced enough to guess well, but they’re guessing nonetheless – and any subsequent claim that conditions were different from what they expected becomes a convenient justification for underperformance or price increases. A proper site survey is not optional; it’s the foundation of a quote that means anything.
During a site survey, a competent surveyor is doing several things at once. They’re measuring and noting the areas to be cleaned. They’re assessing the floor types, the washroom configuration, the kitchen facilities, the volume of waste, the accessibility of the building. They’re looking for anything that complicates the job – heavy footfall areas, specialist surfaces, security access requirements, out-of-hours constraints. They’re also, if they’re any good, asking questions about what the previous cleaning company did or didn’t do, and what the client’s actual priorities are.
A surveyor who breezes through in eight minutes, takes no notes, and sends a quote by the following morning has not done a site survey. They’ve done a site visit, which is a different and considerably less useful thing.
The Questions A Good Surveyor Asks
The questions matter as much as the observations. A surveyor who asks about the building’s busiest periods, the specific hygiene concerns of the space, the history of any recurring problems, and what a good clean looks like from the client’s perspective is building a picture that will result in a more accurate and more useful quote.
A surveyor who doesn’t ask any of these things and goes straight to square footage and frequency is pricing a generic service, not your office. Generic services are fine for generic problems. London offices tend not to have generic problems.
Reading The Quote Itself
What Should Be Explicitly Listed
A well-constructed commercial cleaning quote is a document, not a figure. It should list the areas covered and the tasks to be completed in each, the frequency of each task, the products or product types to be used, the number of staff and approximate hours per visit, the equipment to be provided, and any exclusions – things that are explicitly not included in the price.
That last category is particularly important. Exclusions are where the gap between a quote and a delivered service most often opens up. Window cleaning, consumables (soap, paper towels, bin bags), deep cleaning, specialist treatments, out-of-hours emergency response – these are commonly excluded from base contracts, and if the quote doesn’t mention them it doesn’t mean they’re included. It means the conversation about them hasn’t happened yet, and it will, eventually, in less convenient circumstances.
A quote that arrives as a single monthly figure with a brief description is not a quote you can evaluate meaningfully. It’s an opening position in a negotiation that hasn’t started yet.
The Consumables Question Nobody Thinks To Ask
Consumables are, in my experience, one of the most reliably overlooked elements in commercial cleaning contracts, on both sides of the table. Whether the cleaning company supplies toilet paper, hand soap, hand sanitiser, and bin liners – or whether these fall to the client – can represent a significant cost difference over a year, and it almost never comes up clearly in the initial quoting conversation.
I’ve seen clients assume for months that consumables were included, and cleaning companies assume equally confidently that they weren’t, with neither party having actually established this in writing. The result is a running tension, a supplier relationship that nobody planned for, and at least one pointed email exchange about whose responsibility the soap dispenser is. Clarify it upfront. Put it in writing. It sounds tedious because it is tedious, but tedious and clear is considerably better than ambiguous and expensive.
References, Contracts, And The Details That Protect You
How To Use References Properly
References are standard practice in commercial cleaning procurement and almost universally underused. Most clients ask for them, receive two or three names, make one call that confirms the company exists and seems reasonable, and consider the box ticked. This is not entirely useless, but it’s not far off.
A reference call that actually tells you something useful asks specific questions. How long have you used this company? Has the standard changed since the contract started? How do they handle complaints or missed tasks? Have there been any staff turnover issues that affected service quality? Has the price changed since the original quote, and if so under what circumstances? Has the scope of work shifted in ways that weren’t in the original contract?
These questions produce answers that a prepared reference can’t easily script around. The responses tell you things about a company’s consistency, honesty, and reliability that no pitch document or sales conversation will volunteer.
What The Contract Should Actually Say
A cleaning contract that protects you is not the same as a cleaning contract that a company is willing to sign. The distinction is worth sitting with for a moment.
Standard contracts presented by cleaning companies are written, not unreasonably, to favour the cleaning company. Termination notice periods, price review clauses, liability limitations, and scope change provisions all warrant a careful read rather than a scan and a signature. Notice periods of three months or longer for a straightforward office clean are not unusual in standard contracts and are worth negotiating. Price review clauses that allow annual increases above a specified threshold, or that tie increases to indices the client has never heard of, deserve scrutiny. Liability clauses that limit the company’s exposure in the event of damage or theft to figures far below the actual risk are common and not always in your interest.
None of this requires a solicitor for a modest contract. It requires reading the document, asking questions about anything that isn’t clear, and being willing to negotiate on terms that don’t work for you. A company that treats a reasonable request for contract clarity as an obstacle is, in a sense, telling you something useful before you’ve even started.
After The Quote – Managing The Relationship That Follows
Why The First Three Months Set The Standard
The period immediately following the start of a cleaning contract is the most important one in its entire life, and most clients don’t treat it that way. The first three months are when standards are established, when the cleaning team learns the building and its priorities, and when any gaps between the quoted scope and the delivered service first become apparent.
Active management during this period – regular walkthroughs, prompt feedback on anything substandard, a clear communication channel to the account manager – sets a tone that tends to persist. Cleaning companies, like most service providers, calibrate their effort at least partly to the level of client engagement. An attentive client who notices things and says so gets a different quality of service than one who pays the invoice and hopes for the best.
This isn’t cynical. It’s just how sustained professional relationships work. The clients whose offices I was proudest of over the years were the ones who told me quickly when something wasn’t right and equally quickly when it was. The feedback loop kept standards honest on both sides.
What To Do When The Service Slips
It will, at some point, slip. A regular team member leaves and the replacement hasn’t been briefed properly. A busy period reduces the care taken on tasks at the edge of the scope. A product gets substituted without notice. These things happen in every long-running service contract, and the response to them when they first appear determines whether they’re corrected quickly or whether they become the new normal.
The new normal is the thing to avoid. A single missed task, raised promptly and addressed, remains a single missed task. A single missed task that isn’t raised becomes a precedent. Three precedents become a pattern. A pattern becomes the service you’re actually receiving, which at that point diverges from the service you’re paying for by a margin that will require a difficult conversation to close.
Raise things early, raise them specifically, and keep a brief written record of anything significant. Not because you’re preparing a case – but because a service relationship with a clear shared record of standards and expectations stays honest in a way that a vague, verbal-only arrangement tends not to.
Getting a fair commercial cleaning quote, it turns out, is only partly about the quote. It’s mostly about understanding what you’re buying, who you’re buying it from, and staying engaged enough with the result to know whether you’re actually getting it. That’s less exciting than a glossy proposal and a very firm handshake. But it’s considerably more useful.
