What does commercial cleaning cost per square metre in Australia?

Cost per square metre is a comparison metric, not a pricing method. Cleaning is sold in labour hours, and the number of hours a building needs has surprisingly little to do with its footprint. Two tenancies of identical area can differ by a factor of three in cleaning cost.

The reason is that cleaning time concentrates in a small number of high-effort zones. Bathrooms, kitchens and end-of-trip facilities absorb a disproportionate share of the hours. A 500 square metre open-plan office with one bathroom is quick. A 500 square metre office split into small rooms with three bathroom blocks, a full kitchen and a shower facility is not.

Ceiling height, floor finish, furniture density, waste volume, headcount and access constraints all move the figure further. This is why a contractor who quotes per square metre without seeing the building is quoting a market average and will either lose money or cut hours.

Before comparing any two rates per square metre, check that both are measured against the same area. In Australian commercial leasing the lettable area on the lease is not the same as the area a cleaner actually services, and the gap can be significant.

Cleanable area excludes the parts of the tenancy that are never cleaned: plant rooms, comms rooms, riser cupboards, under fixed joinery, and floor space occupied by furniture and fixed equipment. In a densely fitted-out office, cleanable floor can be substantially less than lettable area.

It also frequently excludes common areas if those are cleaned under a separate base building contract, and it may include external areas such as entries, balconies and end-of-trip facilities that are not on the lease at all. Ask every contractor to state the area figure their price is based on, and compare like with like.

The arithmetic is straightforward and it is the only honest way to arrive at a per square metre figure for your own building. Work in monthly terms, because that is how cleaning is invoiced.

Take the hourly charge-out rate. Multiply by the number of cleaner hours in one attendance. Multiply by the number of attendances in a month. That gives the monthly cost. Divide by the cleanable area in square metres. That gives the cost per square metre per month.

Worked through with the Pro Clean Corp bands: general commercial and office cleaning is quoted at $35 to $50 per hour. A tenancy needing three hours per visit, three visits a week, is roughly thirteen visits a month, or thirty-nine hours. At the middle of the band that is comfortably inside the published $600 to $1,200 per month range for a small office cleaned three times a week. Divide by a 250 square metre cleanable area and you get a figure in the low single digits of dollars per square metre per month.

Run the same calculation on every quote you receive. If two quotes produce very different rates per square metre, the difference is almost always in the assumed hours, not in the hourly rate. That is the number worth negotiating.

Pro Clean Corp publishes indicative monthly ranges by facility type on its commercial cleaning prices page. These are useful as a first sanity check because they already bundle labour, materials, insurance, supervision and margin into one figure.

Treat these as bands to test a quote against rather than as a price. A quote well below the band usually means the labour hours have been cut rather than the work being cheaper to perform. A quote well above the band should come with an explanation, and usually there is a good one: heavy public traffic, an unusually high bathroom ratio, or a specialist requirement.

The same dollar per square metre figure means completely different things across facility types, which is why cross-sector benchmarking is usually misleading.

A warehouse has an enormous area and a very low cleaning intensity: most of the floor is a periodic sweep or scrub, with the real labour concentrated in the office, amenities and lunchroom. The rate per square metre is therefore very low, but the hourly rate is higher because the work involves ride-on equipment and industrial conditions. Warehouse and industrial work is quoted at $45 to $65 per hour.

A medical centre has a small area and very high intensity. Between-patient and terminal cleaning protocols, colour-coded equipment, hospital-grade products at correct contact times and documented procedures all add labour. Specialist and medical work is quoted at $55 to $75 per hour and produces a high rate per square metre on a small footprint.

An office sits in the middle at $35 to $50 per hour, and a strata common area is different again because the cleaned area is corridors, lifts, lobbies and bin rooms rather than tenancy floor. Compare per square metre figures only within the same facility type.

When a contractor leads with a rate per square metre, four things are usually invisible, and each of them is where the actual service level lives.

The first is frequency. A rate per square metre with no frequency attached is meaningless, because the same building at five visits a week costs roughly two and a half times what it costs at two. The second is the hours per visit, which determines whether the scope can physically be completed. The third is what is included: consumables, periodic tasks, carpet extraction, external glass. The fourth is who attends, and whether the same team returns each visit.

Ask for those four things in writing. A quote that states the frequency, the hours, the inclusions and the staffing model can be compared honestly against any other. A rate per square metre cannot.

Cost per square metre earns its keep in exactly two situations. The first is benchmarking your own portfolio: if you run eight similar offices and one of them costs twice as much per square metre as the others, that is a question worth asking. The second is tracking your own building over time, where a rising rate per square metre against a static scope tells you something has drifted.

It fails as a procurement tool, because it invites contractors to compete by assuming fewer hours rather than by working more efficiently. A tender that asks for a rate per square metre and nothing else reliably produces the cheapest assumption rather than the best service.

The better procurement approach is to specify the scope and frequency yourself, ask every bidder to price that specification, and require each of them to state the labour hours their price is built on. Then calculate the rate per square metre yourself, from figures you defined. That is when the metric becomes useful rather than misleading.