The first question every facility manager asks is what commercial cleaning should cost. The honest answer is that the price itself tells you almost nothing until you know what it buys — and that is exactly why two quotes on the same building can differ by half.
The number that actually matters is cleanable square footage. Not the square footage on the lease: the floor area a person has to walk, wipe, and vacuum. A 10,000 square foot suite that is mostly open office cleans very differently from 10,000 square feet chopped into thirty private offices with four restrooms, and any company that quotes you off the lease number without walking the space is guessing.
The second driver is frequency, and it is not linear. Five nights a week does not cost five times what one night costs. Soil never gets a chance to build up on a nightly account, so each visit is faster. Going from weekly to nightly typically does not multiply your invoice the way people expect — it is often the better value per visit.
The third is scope, and this is where cheap quotes hide. Restroom restocking, interior glass, high dusting, floor machine work, and detail work like vents and baseboards are frequently written as "periodic" with no defined interval, which in practice means never. A scope that reads "general office cleaning" is not a scope. A scope that reads "restrooms: disinfect fixtures nightly, restock nightly, machine scrub floors monthly" is one you can hold someone to.
Where you can genuinely save is by matching frequency to reality. Most small offices do not need five nights. Two well-executed visits a week, with a monthly detail and a quarterly carpet encapsulation, keeps a space in better condition than five rushed ones — and costs less.
Where you should not save is on restrooms and floors. Those are the two things every visitor forms an opinion from, and floors in particular are the only part of a building where deferring maintenance destroys an asset. Refinishing VCT that has been let go costs several times what keeping it on a recoat schedule would have.
We give free written estimates with a task list by area and frequency, so you can compare us against anyone else line by line. Call Superior Cleaning Solutions at (312) 468-4970 for a free walkthrough anywhere in Cook, DuPage, or Will County.