Price is not a number you pick — it is a number you build. It must recover burdened labor, overhead and risk, and still leave margin to reinvest, or the busiest company can quietly work its way toward failure.
What you'll be able to do:
By the end of this chapter you will no longer ask "what should I charge?" You will know how to calculate what your company must charge.
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A "three-bedroom property" might be a compact condominium with two beds and no laundry. It might also be a 2,700-square-foot home with eight sleeping surfaces, multiple bathrooms, a hot tub, two kitchens, outdoor spaces and six loads of linen. Bedroom count is useful. It is not a measure of effort.
Pricing also feels difficult because the person asking wants the number now. The property has not been walked, the linen system has not been reviewed, the check-in window is unknown. Pressure for speed encourages guesses. Guesses become permanent prices. Permanent underpricing becomes an operating problem.
A turnover price is not payment for wiping surfaces. It is payment for the controlled delivery of a guest-ready property inside a fixed operating window — cleaning, resetting, inspection, documentation, linen handling, supply checks, issue escalation, scheduling coordination and accountability.
Every price begins with cost — not to create accounting complexity, but to stop the company mistaking cash collected for profit earned. Direct costs exist because a specific turnover happened: crew wages, payroll taxes and workers' compensation, chemicals and consumables, laundry labor and utilities. Indirect costs support the company across every job and still have to be recovered through price.
Owner labor is a cost. Scheduling at night, answering readiness questions, driving replacement linen, inspecting properties, processing payroll, covering call-offs. When that work carries no cost, the company can look profitable only because the owner is working without pay.
A cleaner at $20.00 an hour with a 24% burden costs $24.80 per paid hour — before supplies, travel, overhead or profit. On six team labor-hours that is $148.80 of direct labor, not $120.00.
Track team labor-hours and elapsed turnover time separately. Three cleaners working two hours produce six labor-hours, even though the property was finished in two.
There are three workable ways to structure a base price — flat, hourly and hybrid — plus portfolio pricing for multi-property accounts. All four work when matched to the property, the service model and the customer relationship. None works when chosen by habit.
The minimum profitable price is the lowest price meeting the company's cost and profit requirements under normal conditions. It is a floor, not a quote.
Travel, laundry, supplies and restocking, add-ons, urgency and unusual conditions are priced separately when appropriate — a laundry price built only from the cost of detergent is one of the most expensive mistakes in this chapter.
A price delivered apologetically invites negotiation. State the number, state what it includes, and let the scope carry the justification. The VALUE response framework™ gives you the structure for the conversation that follows, and discount guardrails for the moment someone asks.
Then verify it. The estimated vs actual review is what turns a quote into a policy: compare the hours you priced against the hours you spent, and change the price when the gap is real rather than when the customer complains.
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There is no transferable answer, because a two-bedroom property is not a unit of work. One might be a compact condo with two beds and no laundry; another a 2,700-square-foot home with eight sleeping surfaces, multiple bathrooms, a hot tub and six loads of linen. Build the price from that property’s actual effort, not from its bedroom count.
A competitor’s number carries their standards, their staffing, their costs and their profitability — none of which you can see. Copying the number without the operation behind it means inheriting someone else’s margin problem and calling it market research.
No. Wage is not labor cost. A cleaner earning $20.00 an hour with a 24% labor burden costs the company $24.80 per paid hour once payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, paid training, paid travel and uniforms are included — before supplies, travel, overhead or profit.
Yes. Scheduling at night, driving replacement linen, inspecting properties and covering call-offs are all real labor. When that work carries no cost, the company can appear profitable only because the owner is working without pay.
The full chapter — with the worked examples, tables and action plan — runs to pages 100–133 of The STR Cleaning Blueprint™. All 427 pages are free.