Where our prices come from - and where they do not.

Cited figures. Under every price table you will find the publications the numbers came from, with a link and the date the data covers. If a range in that table is not covered by one of those publications, it is not left to look as if it were.

Estimaid's own figures. Some things nobody publishes: a price ladder by bedroom count, a dollar range per US region, a monthly plan total, a solo-versus-agency hourly grid. Where we still show one, because it is genuinely useful to a cleaner writing a quote, the row or the whole table says Estimaid model, not a published figure. It is our estimate. Treat it as a starting point to argue with, not as evidence.

The calculators are entirely our own model. Every calculator on this site runs on a rate card we wrote: a flat call-out fee plus per-room and per-square-foot amounts, adjusted for the type of clean, the condition and the frequency. No publisher prints a formula like that. We tuned it so a typical job lands inside the published range on the same page, but the output is our arithmetic, not market data.

For a row backed by more than one source, we publish the span of the sources cited on that row- the lowest low and the highest high among them. It is a deliberately cautious rule. An average would invent a precision none of the sources claim, and it would hide the fact that two reputable guides can disagree by a hundred dollars on the same visit. Where one source sits clearly inside the span in a way worth knowing, we say so in the row note - for example, Thumbtack's booking data for a one-time house clean ($174 to $256) sits inside the wider $120 to $280 the cost guides publish.

Where we derive a figure by arithmetic from a cited rate - a square footage times a published per-square-foot price, say - the row says Estimaid arithmetic from the cited rate. The input is sourced; the result is ours.

They are not a quote. Nobody has seen your home or your building. Condition, clutter, pets, access, travel and how much work a cleaner already has this week all move the real number, and none of them are in any range on this site.

They are not a local rate card. The cited figures are United States national ranges. When the site shows prices in another currency, it is taking that US figure and applying a per-country price level that is our own estimate - it is not sourced, it has no per-country citation, and it is not evidence about what cleaners charge in that country. It is a rough translation so the page reads sensibly, and nothing more.

Wage data does not validate a retail price. The only government sources we cite are the US Department of Labor wage figures: a median of $17.07 an hour for maids and housekeeping cleaners and $17.71 for janitors and cleaners. Those are what cleaners are paid. A retail rate has to cover that wage plus payroll tax, supplies, travel, equipment, insurance and profit - at $25 an hour retail there is roughly $8 an hour left for all of it. So the wage data sets a floor beneath which a price cannot be real. It does not confirm that any range on this site is correct, and we never present it as if it does.

These pages are written and maintained by the KUBERSTAR product and editorial team - the people who build Estimaid, the quoting app this site belongs to. What that team can honestly claim is this: we build quoting and invoicing software for cleaning businesses, we read the published sources named on this page, and we check the arithmetic on every figure we derive. That is the whole of our expertise here.

What we cannot claim: no one on this team holds a cleaning-trade credential, and no one on this team has run a cleaning company. We have not conducted a survey of cleaners. There is no proprietary dataset behind any number on this site, and no sample size, because there is no sample. Where you see an Estimaid figure, it came from reading the published sources and reasoning about them - not from data we collected.

Industry review is not yet in place. No working cleaning-business operator has reviewed these pages. We are looking for one - if you run a cleaning company and would review our cost pages for what they get wrong about the actual job, we would pay for your time and name you here. Write to support@kuberstar.com. Until that is arranged, read these pages as software people reporting what published cost guides say, which is exactly what they are.

The sample clauses in our cleaning contract template, our cleaning invoice template and our cleaning estimate template are a starting point for a conversation with a lawyer, not a finished agreement.

This is not legal advice. Nobody on this team is a lawyer, and no lawyer has reviewed these templates. They are written against United States practice and they take no account of the law in any other country, or of the rules of any particular US state - notice periods, cancellation terms, liability limits, late-payment interest, deposits and worker classification are all governed by state law and vary widely. Sales tax on cleaning services differs by state too.

Before you use any of it on a real job, have a lawyer in your own jurisdiction read it. If you work outside the United States, treat the templates as an outline of what a cleaning contract usually covers, not as clauses to sign.