Nine published US cleaning price ranges, compared - and they do not agree.

Every figure below is a quotation. We measured nothing, surveyed nobody, and added no estimate of our own: each number is lifted from a source's own published text, and the code that renders this page refuses to build if a figure here is not present in the source it is attributed to. What is new is the comparison, which as far as we can tell nobody publishes - because the publishers whose numbers these are have no reason to.

Three things came out of putting them side by side. The bands are far wider than a "national average" implies: residential, per square foot is the tightest agreement on this page and its envelope still spans 2.0x. The apparent number of independent sources is inflated - 9 citations come from 5 organisations, and 1 of them aggregates others in the same list. And most of these numbers are undated: 3 of 9 sources state no date for the data at all.

Housecall Pro states on its own page that its figures are aggregated from other publishers. Housecall Pro states its own figures are aggregated from Angi, HomeAdvisor, HomeGuide and Thumbtack, so citing it next to HomeGuide is partly the same dataset counted twice.

That matters for anyone counting sources. Reading four guides that each say a standard clean runs $120 to $280 feels like four independent confirmations. If one of the four assembled its number from the other three, it is one dataset reported four times, and the agreement is an artifact of the citation graph rather than evidence about the market.

The same problem shows up inside a single publisher. HomeGuide gives post-construction cleaning as $0.10 to $0.50 per square foot in a paragraph of its general house cleaning guide, and $0.15 to $0.60 on its dedicated post-construction page - two different answers to the same question, from the same organisation, bylined twenty months apart. Both are in the table above, labelled by which article they come from. Anyone quoting "HomeGuide says" has to pick one, and which one they picked is invisible in the citation.

There is a third version we hit directly. Angi was named in fifteen source captions on this site. On 2026-08-01 the cost article those captions pointed at resolved to Angi's 404 page, and no live Angi cost article could be retrieved to replace it. One of the most-cited names in this category was, that day, not retrievable at all - so we removed it rather than leave a citation nobody could open. It is not counted anywhere on this page.

3 of the 9sources state no date for their data. Of the ones that do, the clearest example of the problem is HomeGuide's house cleaning page: the page is titled for 2026 and the byline on it reads April 29, 2024. We report the byline, because that is what the publisher actually states - but a reader who trusted the title would believe those numbers were two years fresher than the publisher claims.

Against a retail rate the guides put between $25 and $75 per cleaner-hour, a median wage of $17.07 is the floor everything else has to fit above: payroll tax, travel, supplies, insurance, the time spent quoting and invoicing, and whatever is left as profit. Read the two together and the low end of every published range stops looking like a bargain and starts looking like a business that is not covering its overhead.

This is also the one comparison on this page that is easy to get wrong. A wage is what the person doing the work is paid; a rate is what the customer is charged. Nothing here uses the wage to validate a price, and no source should.

We took every published source this site is permitted to cite, read the figures off each publisher's own page, and recorded what it said along with the date the publisher claims its data covers and the date we loaded it. Where two or more publishers describe the same job, they appear in a table together above. Where only one does, it is not on this page: a single source is a quotation, not a comparison, and the code enforces that too.

What this is not. It is not a survey - we did not ask a single cleaning business what it charges. It is not a market average, and none of these bands should be quoted as one. It is not evidence about any country other than the United States. And it is not adjusted, converted, or smoothed: the numbers are as the publishers printed them. The full sourcing and editorial policy, including who writes these pages and what credentials they do not hold, is on the pricing methodology page.

If a figure here is wrong, or a publisher has updated a page we cite, tell us and we will correct it - the source registry behind this page names the exact URL and retrieval date for every number, precisely so a correction is a small, checkable change.