Many cleaning professionals visit the International Custodial Advisors Network (ICAN) Ask the Experts (ATEX) page for insight. We deliver advice to help you perform your job.
Wednesday’s Question
I have a tile floor that needs to be stripped, sealed, and refinished. What is the proper rate to charge per square foot?
Wednesday’s Answer
Your pricing structure depends on the floor’s condition (layers of old finish, damaged tiles, or ground-in soils with little finish remaining), the equipment you have available (large rotary, auto scrubber, mop and bucket, or wet vacuum), how many coats you will place, furniture in the way, labor rates, and other variables. Obviously, a set price may work on one floor and be a total bust on another.
Allowing finish to properly dry takes close to an hour whether you are coating 10,000 square feet or 50 square feet.
You need to judge the time you will spend based on the above factors and set a price for your time and materials. What does a gallon of quality finish cost you? Stripper? Floor pads or brushes?
Use a 1,000 square foot project as an example:
| Sweep with 30-inch dust mop | 6 minutes |
| Strip with 17-inch, 175 rotations per minute (rpm) rotary | 80 minutes |
| Wet vacuum pickup | 25 minutes |
| Rinse and wet vacuum | 30 minutes |
| Mop touch-up | 12 minutes |
| Floor dry time | 20 minutes |
| Apply 5 coats finish (20 minutes per coat) | 100 minutes |
| Dry time between coats | 4 hours |
| Total time | 8.5 hours |
1,000 square feet at 30 cents per foot = $300/8.5 hours = $35.29/hour
1,000 square feet at 34 cents per foot = $340/8.5 hours = $40.00/ hour
You can run lesser square foot charges, but you get the picture. And remember, that calculation is not profit. We haven’t factored in the cost of the pads, stripper, finish, fuel to get there and back, insurance, office overhead contribution, or labor.
Obviously, the folks charging 10 cents per square foot for this service are not making very much. They can get all the work they want, but cannot afford to do it right. To make it work, they skip rinses, cut short the recoating wait time, eliminate coats, etc. The result is a poor job that will not look good or last.
I pulled the above numbers out of the ISSA 612 Cleaning Times & Tasks handbook. Note the numbers may or may not reflect your actual experience, and therefore, you need to start tracking your own times over the course of several projects so you can become a competent estimator for your own services.
– Lynn E. Krafft, ICAN/ATEX editor
View additional bidding & estimating questions and answers from ICAN/ATEX here.
