Just a note: The problem with using general numbers per square foot when calculating a job cost is you are NOT looking at your particular job or costs involved. Try using this little guide to see what you should charge for a cleaning job.

Lets Try it:

Now lets use an example...

You have to clean a concrete sidewalk for a single business. Now the sidewalk has gum on it so you will need a product like Taginator to apply to it. 1 gallon of Taginator covers 250 sq. ft, so thats all you need for the spots of gum. The sidewalk is 75 ft long and 6 ft wide. Thats 450 sq. ft. You rented a rotary surface cleaner for $80 for the day. The business location is 100 miles away, up and back. One last thing, lets assume you pay yourself or crew $20 per hour.

Lets get to work and calculate our time...

The surface cleaner covers 12,000 sq ft and hour and lets say you covered to side walk twice to clean it. The surface cleaner cleans 12,000 sq ft per hr or 200 sq ft per minute. So take our sidewalk twice, 900 ft divided by 200 = 4.5. So it takes you physically 5 minutes to use the surface cleaner.

The Taginator takes 30 minutes to use and 10 minutes for cleanup so we will use 40 minutes.

So the job is going to take you 45 minutes to complete @ $20 per hour (or 33 cents per minute) = $14.85 in labor costs.

So we have the cost of our labor - $14.85 plus

The Rental of the surface cleaner - $80.00 plus

The cost of the gallon of Taginator - $43.00

SUBTOTAL = $137.85

plus your Travel Expenses - (ex. average cost per mile nationwide includes gas, insurance & repairs is 42 cents per mile) So take how many miles you have to travel both ways and multiple by .42. So we know its 100 miles up and back so that equals $42.00.

$137.85 plus $42.00 = $179.85.

Now we look at markup percentages. This will determine how much YOU WILL MAKE on this job. This is totally up to you depending on the area of the work and how difficult the work is. Heres some examples...

So if your costs are $179.85 and you want to make %10 on the job, just multiply $179.85 by 1.111. Thats $199.81.

Now you have a job cost for this particular example. Record every job you complete and the costs involved. Soon you will have your own contractor pricing guide that you can adjust as needed. You are your best job estimator. You know how much labor is involved. This is a general example an easy way to get started and cover your bases. This is in no way set in stone. Contact us if you have any sugestions or questions. BROWSE our line of cleaning compounds here.