Both pricing models are common in this industry, and both can quietly lose you money if you pick the wrong one for the job in front of you.
Per-square-foot pricing gives clients a predictable number up front and is easy to quote quickly. Hourly pricing ties your price directly to actual labor time, which protects your margin on jobs that run long for reasons a square-footage number can't anticipate — clutter, pet hair, a first-time deep clean versus routine maintenance. Neither is universally "better" — they protect against different risks.
It works best for fairly standardized, recurring jobs where you already have a good sense of how long a space that size actually takes — a routine maintenance clean on a home you've serviced before, or a reasonably standardized commercial space. Predictability is the main selling point, for you and the client both.
It's the safer default for first-time cleans, deep cleans, move-out/move-in jobs, or any space with an unknown condition — exactly the jobs where a square-footage number is most likely to be wrong, because condition (not size) is actually driving the time required.
A common middle ground: quote per-square-foot (or a flat rate) for standard recurring maintenance once you know the client's space, but default to hourly — or at minimum, a stated cap on included time with excess billed hourly — for anything first-time, unseen, or explicitly "deep." This captures the quoting speed of flat pricing without eating the downside risk on the jobs most likely to run over.
A flat per-sqft rate assumes a roughly consistent condition-to-size ratio across jobs — which breaks down fast with heavy clutter, pets, or a client who hasn't had the space professionally cleaned in a long time. If you're not tracking actual time against quoted time per job, you can be bleeding margin on a whole category of job without noticing for months. The actual formula is worth revisiting with real data from your own jobs periodically, not just set once.
Some clients are uncomfortable with an open-ended number and prefer knowing the total before they commit — purely hourly pricing with no estimate or cap can cost you the booking even when it would have protected your margin better.
Match the pricing model to the actual risk in the job, not just habit or what's easiest to quote on the phone — predictable, known jobs can run flat-rate; anything unknown or first-time is safer priced (or capped) by the hour.
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