Car Dealership Cleaning

Why a price per square foot tells you nothing here

An office is one surface repeated. A dealership is six different buildings pretending to be one. The enclosed showroom is the fastest floor on the site — open, hard, and an autoscrubber covers it at roughly 10,000 square feet an hour — and it is a far smaller share of the building than people assume. Walk thirty feet to a restroom and the arithmetic inverts. A restroom is priced fixture by fixture, not by area, and works out closer to 550 square feet per labor hour.

That is an eighteen-fold spread inside one building. Run our model over a 13,000 square foot store laid out the way most single-point stores are and the restrooms take 36% of the crew hours while occupying 10% of the floor. Any single dollars-per-square-foot number is an average across that spread, and it stops being true the moment your store has one more restroom or two fewer bays than the last one somebody quoted.

So we do not quote per square foot. We count what is in the building, work-load it into hours at published production rates, and price the hours. The scope-of-work page shows the method on a real store, step by step.

What a nightly scope covers

Showroom floor and entry glass, the service drive, offices and the customer lounge, restrooms restocked and sanitized, trash from the service department, and the periodics that keep a floor from dulling out — extraction, scrub-and-recoat, high dusting and exterior glass on a stated interval rather than when somebody complains.

Service bays are quoted separately and always with a named spec, because "clean the shop" can mean swept, scrubbed or degreased and those are three different jobs at three different prices. Day porter cover is a separate line too. Those two items are where dealership contracts bleed: they get added verbally after signing, and then somebody is unhappy every month.

Two things most cleaning companies will not raise with you

Your service bay drains are regulated. The EPA's Underground Injection Control rules on motor vehicle waste disposal wells name car dealerships explicitly, and they constrain how — and whether — a contractor may wet-wash a bay floor. A crew that hoses a shop floor into the wrong drain creates a problem that lands on your license, not theirs. What the rule actually says.

Your inventory sits in your cleaner's care overnight. A standard commercial general liability policy contains a care, custody and control exclusion. A crew holding your keys and alarm codes, working among six-figure vehicles, is exactly the situation that exclusion was written for. Ask any bidder what happens if a buffer meets a fender. What to ask for, and why.

What it costs

We publish the method and the band, not a made-up number. Our own work-load of a typical 13,000 square foot single-building store at five nights a week comes to about 117 crew hours a month. At a 2026 billing rate of $33–$38 an hour that is roughly $3,863–$4,448 a month.

Your store is not that store, and no two are alike — there is no published industry average for how a dealership divides by use, which is exactly why we measure rather than assume. The number moves with restroom count, how many bays are in scope and at what spec, whether you want a porter, and what the local wage is. The costs page shows where the rate comes from — it is anchored on a published industry billing rate escalated on the federal producer price index for janitorial services, and we show that arithmetic rather than asking you to take it on faith.

Who cleans your store

Two delivery models, and you are told which one applies to your address before anything is signed. Where we staff a market the crew are our W-2 employees: screened, covered, and trained on your OEM's spec and your own alarm and key procedure before a first shift. Outside those markets the work goes to a contractor we have put through the same file — the certificate checked against the carrier rather than accepted at face value, comp coverage confirmed in force, and their screening process examined rather than described to us.

Neither route changes the paperwork on your desk: the contract is with us, and so is the liability when a crew is in your building overnight holding your keys. Ask for a reference in your own market and, if there is not one yet, you will be told that rather than handed a reference from three states away.