The short version
Price equals work-loaded crew hours × billing rate. The hours come from counting your building — that method is set out in full here. The rate is $33–$38 an hour for 2026, and the rest of this page is where that band came from.
Why nobody can honestly publish a dealership price per square foot
We looked hard for one. Here is what actually exists in the public record.
The only real dealership cleaning contract we could find published anywhere is a March 2015 bidding advice column in Cleaning & Maintenance Management: a 27,000 square foot two-building store, cleaned six nights a week, at $6,300 a month. The contractor states the bid was accepted and that they had been cleaning it for a year. That is roughly 23 cents per square foot per month — in 2015, on that building, at that frequency.
One contract. One unnamed market. Eleven years ago. We have seen that figure quoted since as though it were a market rate, and it is not one — it is a single data point, and the same column records the dealer later rejecting the same contractor's revised number as too high.
There is no APPA for dealerships. Schools have published service levels and staffing guidelines that let anyone check a bid. This industry has nothing equivalent, and the honest response is to publish the method rather than dress an estimate up as a standard.
Where our hourly rate comes from
Rather than invent one, we anchored on the only published national janitorial billing rate we could find and escalated it properly.
| Step | Value |
|---|---|
| National average janitorial billing rate published by CMM/ICAN, 2015 | $26.24/hr |
| BLS producer price index, janitorial services, nonresidential — March 2015 | 115.6 |
| Same index, August 2026 | 158.315 |
| Escalation factor | ×1.3695 |
| Escalated rate | $35.94/hr |
| Band we quote within | $33–$38/hr |
The index is BLS series PCU56172056172051, which
you can pull yourself. We use the producer price index for the service
itself, not general inflation and not a wage index, because the anchor was a selling price
and that is what this index measures.
The uncomfortable part, which we will tell you anyway
Over the same period that janitorial prices rose 37.0% on that index, the wages behind them rose far faster. Median pay for janitors and cleaners working inside the services-to-buildings industry — BLS occupation 37-2011 within NAICS 5617, in the OEWS tables — is up 67.9% across the same span. The employment cost index for service occupations is up 61.0%, and CPI-U is up 41.9%. Prices in this industry have risen slower than general inflation while its single largest input rose close to twice as fast.
That has two consequences you should know about. First, margins here are genuinely thin and getting thinner, which is why a quote that undercuts everyone else is a warning rather than a win. Second, anyone escalating that 2015 figure by a wage index instead of a price index lands well above the market and loses the bid — which is a useful test of whether the person quoting you knows their own industry.
A worked example, end to end
A single-building store, 13,000 square feet in scope, four restrooms, five nights a week.
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| Night route, all zones | 109.4 hrs/month |
| Periodics, amortized | 7.7 hrs/month |
| Total crew hours | 117.1 hrs/month |
| At $33/hr | $3,863/month |
| At $38/hr | $4,448/month |
| Back-calculated, as a check only | $0.297–$0.342/sq ft/month |
Note the order. We arrive at dollars per square foot at the end, as a test of our own arithmetic against our history. Start from it and you have assumed the answer.
What moves your number
| Factor | Effect |
|---|---|
| Restroom count | The largest single driver. Restrooms are about a third of the labor |
| Service bays in scope, and the spec | Swept, scrubbed and degreased are three prices |
| Frequency | Six nights is not 20% more than five once fixed time per visit is counted |
| Day porter | Priced on its own hours, at a slightly lower effective rate than a night crew |
| Number of buildings | Each one carries its own travel, setup and lock-up |
| Local wage market | State median pay for occupation 37-2011 runs from under $14 to near $22 (BLS OEWS state tables) |
| Term | An autoscrubber has to amortize. On a bigger store, a two or three year term earns a better rate |
Two tests to run on every quote you receive, including ours
Divide the price by the hours. If the proposal does not state hours, ask; if the answer is below roughly $22 an hour of revenue, the contractor cannot pay a legal loaded wage plus supplies, supervision, insurance and profit. Something in that bid is not going to happen.
Check the square feet per labor hour. A dealership build should land around 2,000–4,500. Far above it and somebody has priced your restrooms by area.
The index is public and linked above; pull the series and the escalation factor falls out of it. The wage comparisons come from the BLS OEWS and ECI tables and the CPI-U, all named by series so you can run them yourself. The 2015 anchor and the 2015 contract are from Cleaning & Maintenance Management. Where a figure here is our own estimator's judgement rather than a published number, the page says so at the point it is used.
We are not telling you what your store will cost, because we have not seen it. We are not publishing a price band per building type, because the only defensible source for one does not exist. When we quote you it will be off a walk-through, with the hours shown, and you will be able to run both tests above on it yourself.