APPA Cleaning Levels: The 5 Standard Levels Explained, & How to Use Them

What are APPA cleaning levels?

If you’ve read a janitorial RFP, a school custodial spec, or a cleaning contract that says “APPA Level 2,” this is where the phrase comes from.

APPA is the association for educational facilities professionals. It started out as the Association of Physical Plant Administrators and now goes by APPA: Leadership in Educational Facilities. It published its custodial staffing guidelines in 1992, revised them in 1998, and has kept updating them. The current fourth edition came out in 2023 and sets staffing for 23 room types.

The levels were written for schools and campuses. Offices, medical buildings and government facilities picked them up because they give an owner and a cleaning vendor one description of “clean” that both sides can walk a room and check.

That’s the whole value. “Keep it clean” means something different to every person who reads it. “Level 2 in the restrooms” doesn’t.

The five levels of clean

APPA describes each level by what you’d see walking through the space. The descriptions below are paraphrased from the published rubric. Universities that reproduce it word it a little differently from one edition to the next, and the full official text sits in APPA’s guideline book.

Levels 4 and 5 aren’t targets. They describe a building that’s understaffed or a vendor that stopped checking the work. The NCES planning guide for schools calls Level 4 not normally acceptable and warns that Level 5 can turn unhealthy quickly.

How to tell the levels apart, element by element

A one-line description is fine for a budget meeting. It isn’t enough for an inspection. APPA’s rubric grades five things in every room, and the difference between levels shows up differently in each one.

The rubric only spells out restroom fixtures at the top of the scale. Treat restrooms as a Level 2 space, whatever you choose for the rest of the building.

Two things stand out.

Restrooms and trash don’t drop between Level 1 and Level 2. The difference is in floors and surfaces, where Level 2 allows up to two days of dust and light marks to build up between cleans. That’s why Level 2 is the working target in so many buildings.

The line between Level 2 and Level 3 is where most budgets get decided. At Level 2, nothing looks neglected. At Level 3, the room is still usable and the trash is still going out, but a visitor notices the dust on the ledges and the edges of the carpet. In our experience, that’s where complaint emails start.

Why the APPA cleaning levels matters to the people in your building

Occupants judge a facility by what they see, and they notice the drop from Level 2 to Level 3.

The best-known evidence is an APPA study, co-sponsored by ISSA, that surveyed 1,481 college students. About 88 percent said a lack of cleanliness became a distraction at Level 3 and Level 4, and roughly 84 percent wanted Level 1 or Level 2 for a good learning environment. It’s a campus study from 2008, so treat it as direction, not a current number for your office. The pattern matches what cleaning managers still report: restrooms draw close to half of all occupant complaints, and restrooms are the first space people use to judge a whole building.

For an office property manager, the cost of slipping to Level 3 turns up later, in tenant complaints and a harder lease renewal conversation. A clinic feels it sooner, because patients read a dusty waiting room as a warning sign about everything behind the door.

Which APPA cleaning level should each space be cleaned to?

You don’t have to hold the whole building to one level, and most facilities shouldn’t pay to. The practical approach is a level for each kind of space. These are our starting recommendations. APPA doesn’t set them:

Be realistic about older buildings. Worn finishes and stained carpet can hold a space at Level 3 no matter how many hours you buy. Purdue University’s custodial team notes that a Level 1 or 2 average is usually unrealistic in older buildings. The fix there is floor restoration or replacement, and more nightly cleaning won’t move the score.

How much does a higher APPA cleaning level cost?

This is where the levels matter to a budget. A higher level means each cleaner covers less floor in a shift, so the building needs more cleaning hours.

The building-wide rule of thumb

The NCES planning guide publishes the square-footage ranges per custodian for an eight-hour shift that most people quote, drawn from APPA:

The right-hand column is our arithmetic from the midpoints of the NCES ranges. APPA doesn’t publish a multiplier. Read it this way: moving a building from Level 3 to Level 2 takes roughly one and a half times the cleaning hours, and moving it to Level 1 takes close to three times the hours of Level 3.

The multiplier changes by room type

A single building-wide ratio will mislead you, because a restroom and a corridor don’t clean at the same rate. Room by room. That’s how the math holds up. APPA’s newer method sets a separate staffing figure for every room type. Here’s how the level changes the labor for three room types, using the APPA-based staffing table published by SUNY Oneonta:

Look at the entrance row. An entrance takes about twice the labor per square foot of an office at the same level, because it takes the traffic, the grit and the glass. That’s the reason to set levels and price them room by room.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical 40,000 sq ft office building: 36,000 sq ft of offices and work areas and 4,000 sq ft of entrances and lobbies. Using the Oneonta figures above, plus the 10 percent that APPA-style staffing plans add for leave and training:

Lifting only the entrances to Level 2 adds about a tenth to the labor. Lifting the whole building adds about 70 percent. Restrooms and break rooms get worked out separately by fixture count, so a real plan adds them on top.

Two cautions. NCES calls its figures estimates, and real output depends on flooring, fixtures, clutter and layout. And a campus staffing table is a planning tool. It isn’t a quote for your building.

Because labor is most of what you pay for in commercial cleaning, price follows the hours closely. For how the level combines with square footage, space type, frequency and labor rates into a price, see our guide on commercial cleaning cost per square foot.

Writing a cleaning level into your cleaning contract

A level only helps if it’s written down next to the space it applies to. Public contracts show a few ways to do it:

• One base level for the building. The City of Wilmington, North Carolina, set a base service level of “APPA 3” in its janitorial RFP.
• A minimum level for daily cleaning. KIPP Atlanta’s school custodial RFP asked for a minimum daily cleaning level of 2 under the current APPA standards.
• A level per space type. More work to set up, fairer to price. Restrooms at Level 2, offices at Level 3, storage at Level 4, each listed in the scope.

You’ll also see two styles of specification. A frequency-based scope lists tasks and how often they happen: vacuum offices nightly, extract carpet twice a year. An outcome-based scope names the level and leaves the method to the vendor. The federal GSA custodial specification uses both, stating frequencies where they matter and holding the contractor to a performance standard everywhere else.

For most facilities, a mix works best. Set an APPA level for each space, then add minimum frequencies for the tasks you can’t afford to have skipped, like restrooms and trash. Put both in your scope of work so every bidder prices the same standard.

How to inspect a building against its APPA cleaning levels

APPA levels grade outcomes. An inspector walks a room and asks whether it meets its level, not whether each task on a list got done.

APPA doesn’t prescribe an audit form, and there’s no official formula that turns a level into a percentage score. Each facility builds its own. A method that holds up:

1. Group spaces by type and set the target for each. A restroom is judged as a restroom, an office as an office.
2. Sample every type of room. Walk a set number of rooms of each type on each inspection, and rotate which ones.
3. Score each room on the level scale. Check the five elements in the table above. If the target is Level 2, a 2 passes and a 3 is a finding.
4. Photograph what pulled the score down. Date it and note the room. When the vendor disagrees with a score, the photo is what you both look at.
5. Close every finding. Record it, re-clean it, re-inspect it, and ask the vendor why it happened and what changes.
6. Track the trend. One walk is a snapshot. The same method every month shows whether the standard is holding or drifting.

Request a Site Assessment for your Dallas-Fort Worth Facility

If you’re writing a cleaning spec or rebidding a contract, we’ll walk your building, suggest a level for each area, and show you what it takes to hold it. We cover the DFW metroplex from Lancaster and Arlington to Dallas and Fort Worth.

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