A real question from a sister-run two-person cleaning team: do you price a job as one flat number, or per person since there are two of you? The uncertainty is common enough to be the actual reason a lot of new team operations hesitate to start advertising at all.
Two people starting a cleaning business together -- sisters, friends, a couple -- run into this almost immediately, and it's genuinely confusing the first time: do you quote a job as a single flat price, or price it per person since there are two of you doing the work? Getting stuck on this is common enough that it's a real reason teams delay advertising at all, not just a minor detail to sort out later.
The short answer: quote one flat price for the job, based on the scope of the work -- home size, bedrooms and bathrooms, condition, general vs. deep clean -- not on how many people show up to do it. A client is paying for a home cleaned to a certain standard, not for a specific number of bodies in the house, and pricing per head (effectively charging double just because two people came instead of one) is both unusual in the market and a hard thing to justify to a client comparing you against solo cleaners who'd charge a single rate for the same result.
Here's the part that makes a flat, scope-based price work in your favor rather than against it: two people working together typically finish the same job meaningfully faster than one -- real production-rate estimates put a two-person team at roughly 800-1,000 sq ft per hour combined, against roughly 500 sq ft per hour for a solo cleaner. That's not twice as fast (two people in the same rooms hit diminishing returns), but it's a real, meaningful speed advantage. Pricing by the job instead of by the hour means that speed advantage becomes extra bookable time in your day, not a reason to charge the client less for getting done faster.
Quote the client one number, but build that number from your real crew cost, not a guess:
Knowing general cleans run less than deep cleans, as the original question already did, is the right instinct -- condition, cleaning type, square footage, and bedroom/bathroom count are the real scope drivers the flat price should scale with. How to build that full estimate formula -- the actual math behind turning scope into a number -- is worth working through once, so every future quote comes from the same consistent formula instead of being re-guessed job by job. This is the same scope-based model Clean Estimator's own calculator uses -- price by home size, bedrooms, bathrooms, and condition, not by how many cleaners are on the job -- so plugging a job's details in gives a consistent, defensible number to quote from on day one, before you've built your own pricing table from scratch.
Pricing the client flat is one question; paying the two of you is a separate one. If you split a flat job price evenly after the fact, double-check the math still clears minimum wage for the actual hours each of you worked -- a job priced and timed well should clear that easily, but it's worth confirming rather than assuming, especially if you're also counting yourselves as employees for compliance purposes.
Quote the job, not the headcount -- one flat price based on scope, built from your real crew cost and production rate, not doubled just because two people are doing the work. The two-person speed advantage is real, but it shows up as more jobs fitting into your week, not as a reason to charge per person.
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