A lot of solo commercial cleaners price a job on supplies and gas but never put a real wage on their own hours — which quietly hides which accounts are actually profitable and which ones are just unpaid work with liability attached.
When you're the one doing the cleaning, it's easy to price a commercial account on what's visible and out-of-pocket — supplies, gas, maybe insurance — and treat your own hours as "free" since no check is being cut for them. That instinct makes sense (you're not literally paying yourself a paycheck), but it quietly removes the single biggest cost on the job from the math entirely. An account can look profitable on paper and still be, in practice, work you're doing for less than minimum wage once your own time is actually counted.
A solo residential cleaner usually has a rough gut sense of "my time is worth $X" because they're comparing their rate to what they'd earn as an employee elsewhere. Commercial accounts distort that instinct — a contract that pays a flat monthly amount for recurring service can feel like steady, "found" revenue, especially once a relationship is established, making it easy to keep an account on autopilot for years without ever recalculating what it's actually paying per hour you put into it.
The method several solo operators describe using is straightforward: pick a real hourly rate for your own time — the same rate you'd need to pay a solid cleaner to do the work, not a token number — and build a job's price the same way you would if you were staffing it with an employee: your hourly rate for the time on-site, plus gas, plus supplies, plus insurance, plus a buffer for the unexpected. Whatever is left after all of that is the only number that's actually profit. If an account only "works" when your own time is treated as free, it isn't a profitable account — it's unpaid labor with liability attached.
Don't estimate this from memory — write down actual hours spent on each account for a couple of weeks, including the parts that are easy to forget (drive time, restocking supplies, handling a client call or walkthrough). Most owners who do this for the first time are surprised by which accounts come out ahead and which ones don't, because the accounts that *feel* easy and low-maintenance are often exactly the ones quietly running thin once the real hours are counted.
Once you know which accounts are genuinely profitable at a real hourly rate and which aren't, you have three options, not just one: raise the price on the ones running thin (see how to raise cleaning prices without losing clients for how to do that without a client fallout), renegotiate scope or frequency so the work matches what's actually being paid, or let the account go if neither of those is realistic. Letting go of a bad account is uncomfortable, but keeping one that pays you less than you'd pay a cleaner to do the same work isn't actually safer — it's just a loss you haven't measured yet.
Knowing your real overall business margin — supplies, insurance, software, admin time, and the rest — matters too, but it's a business-wide number. This is narrower and more immediately actionable for a solo operator: a real hourly rate applied per account, so you can see which specific contracts are carrying the business and which ones are quietly dragging on it. If you're actively bidding new commercial work, pricing the bid itself around your real time cost from the start avoids ever landing an account that needs this fix later.
If your own labor isn't in the price, you don't actually know whether an account is profitable — you only know whether it covers your out-of-pocket costs. Pick a real hourly rate for your own time, track actual hours per account for a couple of weeks, and use that number to decide which accounts to raise, renegotiate, or walk away from. An account that only works when your time is free isn't a good account; it's a hobby with liability.
How do I pick an hourly rate to pay myself as a solo cleaner?
Use the same rate you'd realistically need to pay a solid cleaner to do the work — not a token or symbolic number. That's the number that actually reflects what your time is worth if you weren't the one doing it.
Is a commercial account still profitable if it just covers supplies and gas?
Not really — that only means it isn't losing you cash out of pocket. It says nothing about whether you're being paid a reasonable wage for the hours you're putting into it, which is the number that actually determines whether an account is worth keeping.
How long should I track my hours before deciding an account isn't profitable?
A couple of weeks of real, logged hours (not estimated from memory) per account is usually enough to see a representative pattern, including the time outside actual cleaning — drive time, supply runs, and client communication.
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