Winning a cleaning contract is easy. Making it profitable is much harder. Here are seven pricing mistakes that cause many cleaning companies to lose money on contracts without realising it.

Learn how to price a commercial cleaning contract in the UK using a structured, step-by-step approach. This guide explains how to calculate labour, overheads, consumables and profit properly — so you can submit confident, profitable tenders instead of underpriced contracts.

Pricing commercial cleaning contracts correctly is one of the biggest challenges facing cleaning businesses. After more than 40 years working across the cleaning industry—from running my own contract cleaning business to managing large distribution centre contracts—I have seen first-hand how many contracts become unprofitable simply because they were priced incorrectly at the tender stage. In this article, I share some of the most common pricing mistakes cleaning companies make and the key factors every contractor should consider when quoting commercial cleaning work.

Most commercial cleaning contracts don’t fail because of poor service — they fail because hidden costs were never properly priced. In this guide, we break down the three most overlooked areas that quietly destroy profit and show you how to build cleaning contract pricing on real operational costs, not guesswork. If you want to protect your margins and price with confidence, this is essential reading.

Profit margins in UK commercial cleaning are tighter than most realise. This guide breaks down gross vs net margin, explains why 10% can still leave you exposed, and reveals how contract size and pricing errors quietly destroy profitability — plus practical ways to protect your bottom line.