How to Quote a Cleaning Job (Without a Site Visit)

By DZ, founder of QuoteX — from a family that has run a cleaning business for 20+ years. Updated 19 July 2026.

Why the site visit is usually a bad deal

A quote inspection for a residential clean takes 1 to 1.5 hours once you count driving both ways and walking through. If your working hour is worth $50–120, every inspection costs you that much in lost capacity — whether or not you win the job. Win one job in three and you've spent three to four hours of unpaid time per paying customer, before you've cleaned anything.

The inspection exists to answer one question: what condition is this property really in? Photos answer the same question. The rest of this guide is how to make photo-based quoting rigorous enough to trust.

What information do you need to quote a clean?

Five questions cover almost every residential job:

1. Property size and type — bedrooms, bathrooms, levels, house or unit.
2. Clean type — general, deep, or end of lease. This changes scope more than size does.
3. When it was last professionally cleaned — the best single predictor of effort.
4. Problem areas the client already knows about — ovens, mould, pet hair, balconies.
5. Access — keys, tenant present, lockbox, or agent. Affects scheduling, not price, but ask now.

The photo checklist

Ask for one wide photo per room, plus close-ups of the known effort drivers:

• Every bedroom and living area (wide shot from the doorway)
• Kitchen: one wide, one inside the oven, one of the rangehood
• Every bathroom: one wide, one of the shower screen and grout
• Carpets: one close-up per carpeted room if steam cleaning is requested
• Balconies, garages, or external areas if they're in scope

Make photos a condition of quoting, not an optional extra. A client who won't send photos is asking you to price blind — that's how you end up doing a bond-clean's work at a general clean's price.

How to price it: rate table plus condition adjustment

Start from a base rate per room type for each clean type, then adjust for what the photos show. A simplified example structure (build your own numbers from your costs and market):

Then apply a condition multiplier from the photos: well-maintained (×1.0), average (×1.1–1.2), heavy soiling or long-vacant (×1.3–1.5). The multiplier is where the photos earn their keep — it's the judgement a site visit used to provide.

What to put in writing

A quote that prevents disputes contains six things:

1. Your business name, phone, email and ABN
2. Itemised scope — what's included, room by room, and what's explicitly excluded
3. The price, with GST treatment shown clearly
4. A validity period (7 days general, 14–21 days end of lease is common)
5. A variation clause: conditions materially worse than the supplied photos may incur additional agreed charges before work proceeds
6. Payment terms

See our cleaning quote template for a complete worked example you can copy.

Handling "it was dirtier than the photos"

This is the moment most cleaners lose money or lose the relationship. The fix is procedural, not personal: on arrival, compare the property to the original photos. Photograph anything materially worse. Send the client a priced variation — in writing — and get approval before you start the extra work. If they decline, clean to the original scope. No free upgrades, no doorstep argument, and a written record either way.

Common questions