What Should Office Cleaning Cost in Surrey and Langley?

What does office cleaning actually cost in Surrey and Langley?

The published Lower Mainland benchmarks land in two bands. On an hourly basis, roughly $28 to $50 per cleaner per hour. On a per-visit basis, somewhere between $0.05 and $0.60 per square foot depending on whose figures you read and what is in the scope. For a monthly number, a 5,000 square foot office cleaned three times a week runs around $2,000 to $3,500.

Here are the actual published figures rather than a made-up average.

Notice what that table shows. Two published per-square-foot ranges for the same market disagree by roughly threefold. One source says a standard clean is $0.30 to $0.60 per square foot, another says routine Vancouver office cleaning is $0.10 to $0.25. That is not one of them being wrong. It is almost certainly a difference in what is in the visit and how often the visit happens, and possibly a per-visit figure sitting next to a per-month one. The practical conclusion for a buyer is important: price per square foot is not a comparable number between quotes unless both quotes state the frequency and the task list. Anyone who quotes you a rate per square foot over the phone, without walking the space, is guessing.

Add GST on top of every figure above. Cleaning is a taxable service, and any contractor of a size worth hiring is registered, since the threshold is $30,000 of taxable revenue in a single calendar quarter or across four consecutive quarters (Canada Revenue Agency).

What is a walkthrough actually pricing?

Eight things, and none of them is square footage on its own. This is why our own office cleaning and commercial janitorial work carries no published price: the same 4,000 square feet can be a two-hour job or a five-hour job.

1. Square footage, but as a starting point. Area sets the floor time and nothing else.
2. Layout and obstacle density. A large open plate cleans fast per square foot. A warren of private offices with the same area has far more corners, doors, desks, bins and light switches. Small suites almost always cost more per square foot and less in total.
3. Traffic. A quiet professional office of eight people and a clinic seeing sixty patients a day are different jobs at the same size. Traffic drives soil, and soil drives minutes.
4. Washrooms. The single biggest driver after area. Count fixtures, not rooms. Ask specifically who supplies paper, soap and liners, because that line item moves a quote by real money and is the most common cause of a surprise invoice.
5. Frequency. Nightly, three times a week, weekly, or twice a month. Higher frequency lowers the per-visit price and raises the monthly total, because each visit removes less accumulated soil. It also stabilises quality, which matters more than the price difference.
6. Floor types. Carpet, vinyl plank, sealed concrete, tile with grout and natural stone each need a different method and a different consumable. Stone in particular needs a neutral pH cleaner rather than an acid, and getting that wrong is permanent. Any waxed hard floor also implies a periodic strip-and-wax cycle, which is quoted separately and is the most expensive recurring line on most janitorial contracts.
7. Waste and recycling. How many streams, where the bins go, whether there is organics collection, whether the loading area involves stairs, and who takes it to the curb on which day.
8. Access and hours. After-hours work in a secured building adds cost, and alarm codes, fob management and elevator booking all consume time somebody has to pay for.

A contractor who walks the space and asks about these produces a number that holds. One who quotes from a floor plan produces a number that gets revised in month three.

What should a janitorial scope of work specify?

Task by task, frequency by frequency, and in writing before anyone signs. Most commercial cleaning disputes are scope disputes rather than quality disputes.

A usable scope names, at minimum:

• What is done every visit: waste and recycling, washroom fixtures and restocking, kitchen surfaces, high-touch points, vacuuming traffic lanes, spot-cleaning glass.
• What is done weekly: full vacuum including under desks, mopping hard floors edge to edge, dusting horizontal surfaces at desk height.
• What is done monthly: high dusting, vents, baseboards, interior glass, appliance interiors in the kitchen.
• What is quarterly or annual and priced separately: carpet extraction, floor strip and wax, exterior windows, upholstery.
• What is explicitly excluded. Dishes, personal desks, exterior areas, biohazard cleanup, and anything requiring a lift or working at height. A scope with an exclusions list is a scope written by somebody who has done this before.
• Consumables. Who buys them, who stocks them, whether they are billed at cost, and what the brand or grade is.
• Reporting and cover. Whether you get a photo report after visits, who the substitute is when your regular cleaner is off, and how a complaint is raised and resolved.

Ask for the WorkSafeBC clearance status and the liability certificate at the same time as the scope, not after you have chosen. Any firm can be checked free through WorkSafeBC’s clearance letter application in a minute or two, and it tells you whether they are registered and current on premiums. The best-credentialed commercial cleaners in this region advertise $5M general liability and offer certificates on request. That is the bar, and it is a reasonable one to hold a bidder to.

Why do low-VOC products matter more in an office than in a house?

Because in a workplace, nobody in the room chose the products, and most of them cannot leave.

Everyone who buys household cleaner is making a choice for themselves. Office cleaning is the opposite. The purchasing decision is made by a facilities manager or an office manager, the product is applied in a sealed building overnight, and forty people arrive in the morning and breathe whatever is left. Several of them have asthma. At least one gets migraines. Nobody was asked.

The evidence for taking that seriously is decent without needing to be dramatised. The US EPA’s assessment of indoor air is that levels of about a dozen common organic pollutants run two to five times higher inside buildings than outside, and that during and for hours after some activities they can reach far higher (EPA, VOCs and indoor air quality). On the specific question of cleaning products, Zock and colleagues (2007), following 3,503 adults who were asthma-free at baseline, found that using cleaning sprays at least weekly was associated with a 49% higher risk of incident asthma symptoms or medication (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.12 to 1.99), with a dose-response by frequency and by number of different sprays. That study is about people doing the cleaning rather than people sitting in the room afterwards, and it should be read that way. It is still the reason a serious contractor applies product to a cloth rather than misting it into the air.

On the occupant side, roughly 15.7% of adults surveyed across four countries reported health problems from being in a room cleaned with scented products, rising to a majority of people with asthma reporting adverse effects from fragranced products generally (Steinemann, 2019, self-reported symptoms rather than clinical diagnoses). In a forty-person office that is not an abstraction.

The good news is that this is the easiest place in the whole cleaning industry to do it properly, because institutional standards already exist. Green Seal GS-37 was written specifically for industrial and institutional cleaning products. It prohibits formulating with carcinogens, mutagens, reproductive toxins, phthalates, formaldehyde donors and asthmagens, caps volatile organic compounds, and counts every fragrance component present at 0.01% or more toward that cap. UL ECOLOGO is the Canadian-origin equivalent, an ISO 14024 Type I ecolabel where an independent third party sets and verifies the criteria, with cleaning products falling under UL 2700. Asking a bidder which certified products they use is a fair, checkable, one-line question. In this region, very few can answer it, and that is a genuine differentiator rather than a marketing line. Our full list of the low-VOC products we use is published for exactly that reason.

How do you compare three office cleaning quotes fairly?

Normalise them before you look at the price. Four steps.

• Convert everything to a monthly figure at a stated frequency. A per-visit price and a per-square-foot price cannot be compared until both are monthly at the same number of visits.
• Line up the task lists side by side. If one bidder includes washroom consumables and another does not, add the consumables cost to the second before comparing. If one includes monthly high dusting and another does not, that is not a cheaper quote, it is a smaller one.
• Price the periodic work separately. Carpet extraction and floor strip-and-wax are the line items that turn a good annual number into a bad one. Get them quoted at the start, per event and per year, even if you do not buy them yet.
• Check the paperwork before the price. Clearance letter, liability certificate and amount, and the product list. A bid that is 10% cheaper and cannot produce the certificate is not cheaper.

If you want a number for your own space, a walkthrough takes about twenty minutes and produces a scope you can put out to other bidders whether or not you use us. That is genuinely fine. A written scope is the most useful thing a facilities manager can own, because it is the only way three quotes ever become comparable.