House cleaning prices: what a clean actually costs in 2026.

Those are starting points, not a quote. The real cost of house cleaning moves with a handful of levers - home size, the type of clean, how often you book, the property's condition, and your local cost of living. The fastest way to see where your home lands is to enter the rooms and size below.

One thing to be straight about: the calculator below runs on Estimaid's own rate card, not on market data. We built it to land inside the published ranges on this page, but it is our estimate. Every table here marks which rows come from a named publisher and which are ours, and our pricing methodology spells out where each number came from and when it was checked. If you want to see how far apart the published sources are from one another before you trust any of them, our US cleaning price study puts all nine side by side on the same jobs.

One thing to watch: agencies quote a rate per cleaner, not per visit. A two- or three-person team finishes a home in a fraction of the time, but you are paying every cleaner's hourly rate at once - so a $40 per-cleaner rate on a three-person crew is $120 of clock time per hour. The trade is speed and a faster turnaround against a higher headline number. Solo cleaners are slower but cheaper per hour, which is why they sit at the bottom of the range.

No single line on this list is the "right" price - they are different views of the same job. A cleaner who quotes a flat $150 for a 3-bed home is implicitly charging about $0.10 / sq ft and roughly $40 per cleaner per hour on a three-to-four-hour visit. The flat number is what most clients want to hear; the per-room and per-square-foot figures are how the cleaner builds it.

A one-time clean is the most expensive per visit: the cleaner is resetting a home that has not been kept on a schedule, so the job takes the most hours. Switch to weekly or every-two-weeks service and the home never builds up between visits, so each clean is faster - and most cleaners pass that back as a recurring discount, typically 10 to 15 percent below a one-time rate.

The difference between "maid service" and "house cleaning" is mostly framing. House cleaning is the broader term and covers one-time, deep, and move-out jobs; maid service almost always means an ongoing schedule, often through an insured agency that sends the same team each visit. Because a maintained home is lighter work each time, maid plans are quoted as a recurring per-visit price 10 to 15 percent below a one-time clean - so the more often you book, the less each visit costs.

Monthly plan totals are not something we found published anywhere, so the next figures are Estimaid's own arithmetic: a discounted visit price multiplied by the visits in a month. On that basis a weekly maid plan works out at $320 to $640 a month, every-two-weeks about $200 to $360, and monthly the least per month but the most per visit, since a full month lets build-up creep back in. An insured agency prices above a solo independent because its rate has to cover payroll, supplies, travel, and liability insurance.

Within every region, major metros sit at the very top. A standard clean in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Seattle, or Washington, DC commonly runs well above the regional figures here, because local wages, demand, and travel distance all push the rate up. A cleaner in a high-cost metro has to charge more just to cover the same hour of labor - which is why the "national average" is only a starting point, not a quote for your zip code.