The arithmetic that starts this conversation is always the same. An hourly rate for an employed cleaner, multiplied by the hours you think you need, comes out below a contracted quote. It looks obvious.
It is also incomplete, in ways that are entirely predictable. This is not an argument that one option always wins. Plenty of organizations employ cleaners very successfully. It is the list of things the hourly comparison leaves out, so you can do the comparison properly.
What the hourly rate does not include
An employed cleaner costs more than their wage, and the gap is not small. Before comparing anything, add these to the employment side.
- Employer payroll taxes and any benefits you offer
- Workers’ compensation coverage
- Equipment: vacuum, machine, caddy, and replacing them when they fail
- Consumables and cleaning products, bought at retail rather than trade
- Recruitment cost, and again each time the role turns over
- Training, supervision and someone’s time managing the person
The cover problem
This is the difference that actually decides it for most offices, and it never appears in the initial comparison.
An employed cleaner gets sick, takes vacation and eventually leaves. On each of those days the office does not get cleaned, unless you have arranged something, and arranging something at short notice, for a building nobody else knows, is genuinely hard. Most organizations discover this in the second week of an unplanned absence, with restrooms that needed doing four days ago.
A contracted company carries that risk instead of you. It is a large part of what the difference in price is actually buying.
Where employing someone genuinely wins
This is not one-sided, and pretending otherwise would be a sales pitch rather than an answer.
- You need someone present through the working day, not a visit — reception support, meeting-room turnarounds, spill response
- The role is genuinely broader than cleaning, and cleaning is part of a facilities job
- The premises are unusual enough that continuity outweighs everything else
- You are large enough that a cleaning team is a normal department rather than one person
- You have HR capacity already, so the management overhead is marginal rather than new
Where a company wins
The mirror image, and the more common case for a single-suite office.
- You want the office cleaned, not a person managed
- Cover for sickness and holiday matters to you
- You would rather not own, store, maintain and replace equipment
- Insurance, bonding and background checks are somebody else’s obligation to hold
- Your requirement will change as headcount changes, and you want to adjust a schedule rather than a contract of employment
The hybrid that often works best
A common and sensible arrangement in growing offices: an internal person handles the small daily things (dishwasher, obvious spills, keeping the kitchen civil) and a contracted team does the actual cleaning on a schedule.
This works because it separates two genuinely different jobs. Keeping a room presentable during the day and cleaning it properly are not the same task, and asking one person to do both usually means the second one loses.
