Two numbers that do not move together
Put the defaults through the form and the week comes to 48.9 hours of task time: 25.7 on the carpet, 6.0 on the hard floor, 6.3 on the breakroom and the gym, 8.0 in the restrooms and 2.9 on the trash and door rounds. Add the 12 percent allowance and you are paying for 54.7 hours a week, which over five nights is 10.9 a night.
Ten point nine does not fit in an eight hour shift, so you send two people. They finish in five and a half hours each. The building has not got bigger and the work has not got harder — you are simply paying for sixteen scheduled hours to get eleven hours of work done, and the 5.1 idle person-hours a night, which the page prices at just under $29,000 a year, are what the shift being a shift costs.
Where the blended rate goes
The fastest line in the defaults is the hard floor at 5,000 square feet per cleaner-hour. The carpet, which is two thirds of the area, runs at 3,500. Once the whole building is counted the figure is 2,711 — 54 percent of the best rate in the form. The gap is not slower work; it is the restrooms and the fixed rounds, which together are 10.9 of the 48.9 hours of task time and do not fall when the floor gets faster.
This is the arithmetic behind a familiar argument. Somebody buys a wider machine, the carpet rate goes from 3,500 to 4,500 — a 29 percent improvement — and the week drops from 48.9 hours of task time to 43.2. That is 5.7 hours saved, which is 11.7 percent of the week rather than the 29 percent the machine promised. The restrooms did not care.
The frequency column is the one to argue about
Everyone negotiates the production rate and almost nobody negotiates the frequency, which is odd, because frequency is a straight multiplier and the rate is not. Dropping the breakroom and gym line from five cleanings a week to three takes 2.5 hours out of the week directly. Getting the same 2.5 hours out of the carpet rate would mean going from 3,500 to 3,900 square feet an hour, which is a different machine and a different argument with the person pushing it.
The one thing the calculator cannot tell you is which areas tolerate a lower frequency. That is a conversation with whoever occupies the building, and it belongs in the specification rather than in a spreadsheet.
What this does not model
It assumes the night divides evenly between the people on it. It does not. A floor is a route and a restroom block is a loop, and two people working three floors will not both finish at the same minute — one of them will be waiting or will be handed a piece of somebody else's route badly. The per-person figure here is a lower bound on the real one.
It also assumes the production rates are yours. A rate copied from a trade association table, from a competitor, or from the machine manufacturer describes somebody else's building, somebody else's furniture density and somebody else's people. The way to get your own is dull and takes a fortnight: time the same person on the same floor five times and take the middle figure. Every number this page prints is only as good as that one.
Questions people ask
How many cleaners does a 26,500 square foot building need?
On the figures in the form it needs 10.9 hours of work a night, which two people on an eight hour shift can cover in about five and a half hours each. Change the shift to six hours and it is still two. Change it to five and a half and it becomes two people who are both nearly full. The headcount is set by the shift length as much as by the building, which is why the same square footage staffs differently under different rosters.
What production rate should I use for carpet?
Your own, measured on your own floors. The form ships with 3,500 square feet per cleaner-hour as a placeholder to overwrite, not as a recommendation, and this page does not publish a rate for anything. Time one of your people over a real floor with the machine they actually use, do it more than once, and take the middle result. Furniture density moves that number more than the machine does.
Why is the whole-building rate so much lower than the area rates?
Because restrooms and fixed rounds do not scale with floor area. In the defaults they are 10.9 of 48.9 task hours, or 22 percent of the week, and no floor machine touches them. That is why the building blends to 2,711 square feet per cleaner-hour while its fastest area line reads 5,000, and why savings promised on a floor rate arrive smaller than expected.
What belongs in the allowance percentage?
Everything that is paid for and is not a task: breaks, lifts and stairs between floors, filling and dumping, restocking the cart, the badge in and the badge out. The way to find yours is to add up the task minutes for a night and compare them against what the timesheet says for the same night. The difference divided by the task time is your allowance, and it is usually larger in a tall building than a flat one.
Does this tell me whether the building is being cleaned well enough?
No, and it cannot. It is arithmetic on hours: area divided by a rate you supplied, multiplied by a frequency you chose. Whether the result meets a specification, a contract or anybody's expectation is a judgement about the specification and the inspection regime, not about this total, and nothing here is an adequacy verdict.