I’m Jeremy Craddock. I started Craddock’s Cleaning Services in 2016, and I’ve quoted commercial buildings all over Dallas since. The honest answer to what it costs is that it depends on three things no price list can see: the standard your building has to be held to, how often it gets cleaned, and its size and layout. Here is how those three set the price, and how a walkthrough turns them into a real number for your building.
Why an Accurate Quote Starts with a Walkthrough
A price per square foot doesn’t mean much until someone has actually stood in your building. When a company gives you a number over the phone, they’re quoting an average building, not yours. They haven’t seen your restrooms, your floors, your traffic, or the standard you have to meet. Every one of those changes the hours, and the hours are the price.
I’ll still give you a ballpark, because it’s fair to want one before you let anyone walk your building. Here’s what the Dallas market looks like.
What Commercial Cleaning Generally Runs in Dallas
Most cleaning companies quote by the square foot per month. That number leaves out the one thing you most need to know: how many times they actually clean the building in that month. A dime a square foot buys you one thing at four cleans and something completely different at twenty. So two quotes in that unit aren’t really comparable until you dig out the frequency hiding behind each one.
There’s a cleaner way to look at it: cost per square foot, per clean. That holds the one thing steady, which is the labor to clean a space once, to a set standard. Then frequency is your call, separate and out in the open. Your total is just the per-clean cost times how often you want us there.
The table below is the per-clean labor cost by area. I built it from published ISSA production rates (how much area a trained cleaner covers in an hour) and current Dallas-Fort Worth labor rates, figured at a fully-loaded wage of about $20 to $24 an hour. You can check my math: labor per square foot is the hourly rate divided by the production rate.
| Area (office example) | ISSA rate (sq ft/hr) | Labor cost per sq ft, per clean | Standard held to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open office and workstations | ~4,200 | ~$0.005 | Appearance clean, roughly APPA Level 2 |
| Lobby and common areas | ~4,000 | ~$0.005–0.006 | Presentable, high-touch disinfected each visit |
| Breakroom or kitchenette | ~2,500 | ~$0.008–0.010 | Food-contact surfaces sanitized |
| Restrooms | ~1,000 | ~$0.020–0.024 | Sanitized and restocked; most labor-dense area |
That table is why square footage alone never tells you the price. Cleaning a restroom costs four to five times what open office floor cleaning costs to clean, plain and simple, because a cleaner covers it four times slower. Two buildings the same size can land at very different numbers on restroom count alone.
Frequency is the multiplier, and it’s yours to set.
Take the per-clean cost and multiply by how often we’re in: roughly 4.3 times a month for weekly, 13 for three nights a week, 21.7 for nightly. That open-office square foot costs half a cent to clean once. What it costs you over a month depends entirely on how often you want it done, and I’d rather you see that choice plainly than have it buried inside a monthly rate.
These are labor figures, which is the biggest piece of any bill but not the whole of it. Supplies, equipment, and overhead sit on top. A recurring commercial cleaning and janitorial program is priced this way, per clean, while periodic jobs like floor strip-and-wax or carpet extraction and a one-time deep clean are quoted per service instead. What none of these general numbers can tell you is where your building lands. That’s what the walkthrough is for.
What the Walkthrough Measures
The walkthrough is how I move your building from a general per-clean figure to a number I’ll stand behind. I settle the standard each area has to be held to, and I look at everything the ISSA averages leave out: size, layout, frequency, floor types, traffic, and whatever compliance your kind of facility carries. On-site, what I’m really pricing is labor hours and equipment, because labor alone is 50 to 80 percent of any commercial cleaning bill. Here is what decides how many hours your building takes:
- Standard. What outcome is your facility held to, and is it regulated? An office cleaned to appearance and a clinic cleaned to an infection-control standard take very different amounts of time in the same square footage.
- Size and layout. Total cleanable area, and how it is broken up. Open floors clean fast; small partitioned rooms clean slowly.
- Restroom count and fixtures. Restrooms are the most labor-dense space in any building and the most commonly underestimated.
- Floor types. Carpet, VCT, polished concrete, and tile each need different equipment and maintenance cycles.
- Frequency. How many times a week you need service, which drives both crew and equipment cost more than most buyers expect.
- Traffic and use. A building with heavy foot traffic soils faster and needs more attention to hold the same standard.
- Compliance and documentation. Whether you need records that stand up to an inspector, and in which format.
How the Walkthrough Becomes a Committed Quote
The walkthrough takes about thirty minutes and it costs you nothing. It’s the difference between a number I can commit to and one I’d have to walk back later. Price a building without seeing it and you almost always have to reconcile it once the crew is in and the real hours show up. A quote built on the actual scope holds, because it came from what your building actually needs.
I take those measurements and write them into a scope for your building, then use industry-standard ISSA production rates and current Dallas-Fort Worth labor rates to turn the work into hours, and the hours into a price. You get a firm quote within 24 hours, itemized, no hidden fees, no surprise up-charges once we start.
And you get something a phone quote never includes: a scope you can hold me to. Every task, every area, every frequency is written down. That’s what lets a supervisor verify the work on every visit through our CleanProof System. The walkthrough isn’t a sales call. It’s the measurement that makes the price accurate, and makes me accountable for it.
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The Factors That Determine Price
Three factors move the number more than any other: standard, frequency, and size. Here is what each one does.
Standard, the Factor That Sets the Floor on Cost
“Clean” isn’t one thing. It’s whether a space meets a standard, and the standard depends on what the space is used for and how it’s regulated. This is the factor that explains why two buildings the same size can carry very different prices. It’s also the one I’d most want you to understand before you compare quotes, because it’s where most of the difference lives.
The industry’s rough shorthand for this is the APPA five levels of clean, running from Level 1, orderly spotlessness, down to Level 5, unkempt neglect. Those levels describe how a space looks, not what it takes to get there, and holding a space to a higher level costs more labor. But looks are only the start. For most Dallas facilities the real standard is set by regulation, and it changes not just building to building but area to area inside the same building.
How the standard differs by area and facility type
The table reads by area down the side and facility type across the top. The same physical area is held to a different standard depending on the building it sits in, and that difference is labor, product, and documentation, which is to say cost.
| Area in the building | Office | School | Medical / Dental | Warehouse | Retail / Food |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General floor space | Appearance clean, vacuum/mop routine | Cleaned to a health standard, more frequent | Clean-then-disinfect, logged | Kept clear, dry, hazard-free per OSHA 1910.22 | Presentable sales floor; food areas sanitized |
| High-touch surfaces (handles, switches, shared devices) | ~Once daily | Multiple times daily in illness season | Minimum daily, more in patient areas | Daily where staff congregate | At least daily; carts and counters frequently |
| Restrooms | Daily clean and restock | Daily-plus, child-height fixtures | Daily-plus, disinfected, logged | Daily | Daily-plus in food/customer areas |
| Specialized areas | Breakroom, kitchenette | Cafeteria, gym, nurse’s office | Exam rooms, equipment (1910.1030) | Dock, production floor | Kitchen/prep under TFER 25 TAC §228 |
| Documentation required | Optional | Plan documented | Mandatory, inspector-ready | Safety records | Inspected ~every 6 months |
Read any row straight across and you’ll see it: the same restroom, the same door handle, the same stretch of floor costs more to clean as you move from an office toward a medical facility or food setting. Not because anyone marked it up, but because the standard there asks for more frequency, more specialized product, and a record proving it got done. A church usually sits close to the office column, right up until it runs a nursery or a kitchen. Then those parts of the building jump to the stricter rules, same as a school would. That’s the whole reason I walk the building first. I’m not pricing your square footage. I’m pricing the standard each part of it has to meet.
Frequency and Size, the Efficiency Factors
Frequency does more than run up the total. It changes what each visit costs. Put a crew in one building five nights a week and they spend nearly all their paid time cleaning, with the equipment already on-site. That’s high utilization, and it drops the cost of every visit. Split that same crew across small sites and you’re paying them to drive and haul gear, none of which cleans anything. The equipment makes it worse: floor scrubbers and burnishers rent by the day, with a delivery and a pickup charge, not by the hour. A machine that lives at your building for a recurring contract costs a fraction per use of one trucked in for a single job.
Size works on the same logic from the other end. Give a crew a large open warehouse floor and they can run big, fast equipment in long straight passes. Box them into small partitioned rooms and everything slows down, the machines shrink, and the same task covers less ground per hour. So a small building costs more per square foot than a large one doing the identical work. Restrooms are the one place this flips, cleaning about four times slower than open floor no matter the building, which is why restroom count moves a price more than people expect.
None of these three act alone. A small building, cleaned once a week, held to a high standard is the most expensive square footage you can put together, because all three push the same way at once. A big building, cleaned nightly, held to an office standard is the cheapest. Yours sits somewhere in between, and the walkthrough is how I find exactly where.
SUMMARY: What Commercial Cleaning Costs in Dallas-Fort Worth
For a typical Dallas office, cleaning labor runs roughly half a cent to two cents per square foot per clean, depending on how much of the space is restroom and breakroom versus open floor. Supplies, equipment, and overhead are added to reach the delivered price. Your monthly or annual cost is that per-clean figure multiplied by how often you clean.
Where your building lands depends on three things:
- the standard it is regulated to
- how often it needs service, and
- its size and layout.
A medical or food facility sits at the higher end, because compliance sets the floor on labor. A warehouse sits lower, on open floor. An office falls in between. DFW pricing runs modestly below coastal metros, because local cleaning wages sit below the national average and Texas has no state income tax.
A company built to hold a standard is rarely the cheapest bid, and I think it’s worth knowing why. What the extra buys you is a standard that stays put and compliance you can prove. Go cheaper and skip that, and you become the quality control department yourself:
- walking the building after the crew
- chasing the tasks they missed
- explaining the failed inspection to someone above you
A vendor who holds the standard and documents it hands those hours back to you. For most facility managers I’ve met, that time is worth a lot more than the gap in the rate.
Your building’s number is knowable. Just not over the phone. Walk it with me and you’ll have it in writing inside a day.
