Priced per fixture, never per square foot
The published task times are itemised by fixture, because that is what drives the work: a commode at 3.83 minutes, a urinal at 3.00, a wash basin with dispenser at 3.00, a mirror at 0.66, a door spot-washed both sides at 0.83.
Add those up and you get less than half the real time, because fixtures are not the whole room — the floor, walls, partitions, restocking and waste are not in that list. We load fixture time by 1.9 to cover it, and the result is the number that decides whether a dealership quote is sound.
Which means two stores of identical square footage with different restroom counts are different jobs. Anyone who quoted you without walking the restrooms has guessed at a third of the contract.
Customer restrooms and technician restrooms are not the same job
| Customer | Technician | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is judged on | Appearance, smell, stock | Function and hygiene |
| Main soil | Light, frequent | Grease, hand cleaner residue, heavy |
| Chemistry | Neutral, low odour | Degreasing, and it will damage some finishes |
| Frequency | Nightly plus porter rounds | Nightly, sometimes less |
Pricing them at the same rate is a mistake in both directions. The technicians' restroom takes longer than its fixture count suggests, and hand-cleaner residue on a floor is its own problem.
What a real restroom spec says
- Fixture-by-fixture count, by restroom, agreed at the walk-through
- Disinfectant named, with its required dwell time — a product that needs ten minutes and gets thirty seconds is not disinfecting anything
- Partitions and the walls behind urinals on a stated interval, not "as needed"
- Restocking: whose consumables, and who reorders when they run out
- Floor: machine-scrubbed on a cycle, not mopped forever — a mop moves soil into the grout and eventually the smell comes from the floor, not the fixtures
- Drains treated on a cycle if there are floor drains
If a restroom smells and the fixtures are clean, the problem is almost always the floor or the drain, and no amount of extra fixture cleaning will fix it. A contractor who responds to a smell complaint by cleaning harder rather than by scrubbing the floor has not diagnosed it.