The table that everybody quotes
You will see it on software vendors' blogs and in bid templates: "General office 3,500–5,000 sq ft/hr. Restrooms 800–1,200. Showroom 3,500–4,500. Warehouse 5,000–7,000." Attributed to "ISSA 612 production rates".
We tried to source it. The pages carrying it cite no edition, no page number and no ISSA document. They cite each other. It is a number that became true by repetition, and it is being used to price real contracts.
What ISSA actually publishes
ISSA's own worked example calculates cleaning time by task and by tool, and the room never enters the arithmetic. Their published mopping example runs:
"1,000 square feet / 5,355 square feet × 60 minutes = 11.2 minutes"
ISSA, "How to Calculate Cleaning Times"
That 5,355 square feet an hour is the rate for a 14-inch flat mop with a dual-chamber bucket. Change to a 24-ounce single bucket and the number changes. The space type is not a variable — the tool is. Every legitimate rate table in this industry is organised that way.
Two more things worth knowing. "ISSA 612" is a book — The Official ISSA 612 Cleaning Times & Tasks, published by Janitor University Press, last updated September 2014. It is not a live rate table maintained on a website. And the current edition of ISSA's Cleaning Times does organise some material by industry segment — transportation, retail, residential, educational, hospitality, correctional. Automotive is not one of them. There is no official ISSA dealership rate, and anybody who quotes you one is improvising.
Where the real tables come from
The detailed task-and-tool tables that estimators actually use circulate as distributor PDFs. We traced ours:
- A 17-page ISSA 540 Cleaning Times table hosted by a New York supply distributor, created February 2011.
- A second copy on another distributor's site that looks like corroboration but is not — its file metadata shows the same author and the identical creation timestamp. It is the same file re-hosted.
- An older and genuinely independent table from a different distributor, dated 30 July 2000, whose rows match the 540 file exactly on damp mopping, burnishing and the restroom fixtures.
Two independent documents eleven years apart agreeing to two decimal places is real corroboration. The same PDF on two websites is not, and we checked rather than assumed.
The rates we estimate from
| Task and tool | Sq ft/hour |
|---|---|
| Dust mop, 48 inch | 25,000 |
| Dust mop, 36 inch | 12,500 |
| Autoscrub, 24 inch walk-behind | 10,000 |
| Backpack vacuum, 20 inch path | 8,000 |
| Damp mop, 32 oz double bucket | 7,143 |
| Push broom, 36 inch | 5,556 |
| Upright vacuum, 22 inch | 4,348 |
| Rotary scrub, 20 inch at 175 rpm | 2,222 |
| Restroom, per fixture | Minutes |
|---|---|
| Commode | 3.83 |
| Urinal | 3.00 |
| Wash basin with dispenser | 3.00 |
| Door, spot wash both sides | 0.83 |
| Mirror | 0.66 |
Theoretical versus practical — and why one de-rating factor is wrong
The published tables carry two columns: a theoretical rate and a practical one. Everybody knows to use the practical column. Fewer people notice that the gap between them is not a constant.
| Equipment | Theoretical to practical |
|---|---|
| Walk-behind autoscrubber, 17–24 inch | about 2.1× |
| Floor strip machine, 30 inch dual counter-rotating | 1.40× |
| Riding sweeper, 36–56 inch | about 1.27× |
A contractor applying one blanket factor across a scope will overprice the sweeping and underprice the scrubbing on the same job — and in a dealership, where both happen in the same building on the same night, those errors do not cancel out. They just move money between line items until one of them becomes the reason the contract fails.
How to audit a production rate in thirty seconds
Take any rate you are given and ask three things:
- Which tool? A rate without a tool is not a rate. "Showroom: 4,000 sq ft/hr" means nothing until you know whether that is a dust mop or a rotary scrubber.
- Theoretical or practical? If nobody can tell you, assume theoretical and de-rate it, or you have just bought an estimate that cannot be delivered.
- Where is it published? Edition, page, or a document you can open. "It's the ISSA rate" is not a citation.
Because the alternative is asking you to trust a number. Every hour in our proposals traces to a task, a tool and a table we can show you, and where the table's provenance is thin we say so on the page rather than dressing it up. If you find an error in any of it, tell us — we will correct it here and say what changed.