Why Do Two Quotes for the Same Office Differ by 40 per Cent?

You send the same floor plan and the same scope to three cleaning companies. One comes back at $2,400 a month, one at $3,100, one at $3,900. The scopes look nearly identical. Something is obviously wrong with this picture, and it is usually not dishonesty.

What Is the Quotes Actually Differ On?

Time. Commercial cleaning is a labour business with a thin materials cost, so a price is mostly a statement about how many people are in your office for how long. The scope document you sent says what happens. It does not say how long any of it takes, and that is where a forty per cent spread comes from.

"Clean and sanitise restrooms" is a real instruction. In a two-fixture restroom it can honestly be done in eight minutes or in twenty-five, and both are recognisable as cleaning. One of them includes the partition tops, the door edges and the base of the fixture; the other does not. Both vendors wrote the same sentence in the proposal.

How Much Time Should It Actually Take?

Useful rules of thumb for general commercial office space, cleaned nightly:

Roughly one cleaner-hour per 2,500 to 3,500 square feet per visit. Push toward the faster end for open-plan space with hard floors and few restrooms; toward the slower end for cellular offices, heavy carpet, a kitchen, or a lot of glass.

Now do the arithmetic on the cheap quote. If a 10,000 square foot office is quoted at a price that only supports ninety minutes of labour a night, the vendor is not planning to do what the scope says. They are planning to do trash, restrooms, vacuum the main routes, and leave. That is a real service and some offices are fine with it — but you should be choosing it, not discovering it in March.

What One Question Should I Ask Every Bidder?

"How many cleaner-hours per visit is this priced at, and how many people?"

Ask it of all three. The answers will differ, sometimes dramatically, and the differences will map almost exactly onto the price differences. That single question turns three incomparable proposals into one comparison.

Watch how it is answered as much as what the answer is. A vendor who runs a real operation knows this number instantly, because it is how they build their own labour schedule. A vendor who becomes vague, redirects to "we work until the job is done," or offers to "make sure it looks great" is telling you that the labour figure is whatever is left after the price.

Is the Cheapest Quote Ever the Right One?

Sometimes, and it is worth saying plainly. If your office is 3,000 square feet of open plan with sealed concrete, twelve people, one restroom and no kitchen, the lean quote may be perfectly matched to the space and the expensive one is padding. Cheap is not automatically wrong.

What is always wrong is not knowing which one you bought. The failure mode is not overpaying — it is buying ninety minutes and expecting three hours, then spending a year in a slow argument about standards with a vendor who is doing exactly what they priced.

How Do I Make the Hours Stick After Signing?

Write them in. A single line in the agreement — service is provided at 2.0 cleaner-hours per visit, five visits per week, by a named crew — changes the nature of every future conversation. A night where one person is in and out in forty minutes stops being a disappointment you have to argue about subjectively and becomes a documented shortfall against a stated term.

Pair it with two things and the contract largely runs itself: a named crew roster with notice before substitutions, and a monthly scored inspection with a floor. Hours say what you bought, the roster says who does it, the score says whether it happened.