Why will nobody quote over the phone?

Because the things that move the number are the things you cannot see from a description. Two 5,000 square foot offices can differ by a factor of two once you count restrooms, pantry density, how much of the floor is carpet against hard surface, how much internal glass there is, and what condition the place is in. Anyone who quotes without walking the space is guessing, and the guess gets corrected later at your expense.

Is a bigger space always more expensive?

Per visit, usually. Per square foot, usually not. Large open floors clean faster per unit of area than small partitioned ones, because the crew is not constantly moving equipment around walls and furniture. A dense warren of small offices can cost more per square foot than an open plate twice its size.

What should a written quote contain?

The tasks, the frequency of each, the exclusions, and the labour-hours the figure is built on. If any of those four is missing, you do not have a quote, you have a number.

What Actually Drives the Cost of a Cleaning Contract

Key Takeaways

A cleaning quote is a fixed fee buying a variable quantity of labour. The fee is the output; the hours are the input.
Floor area sets a range. Restrooms, pantries, floor mix, glass and the condition of the space decide where in that range you land.
Ask what is excluded before you ask what it costs. Exclusions move a figure more than square footage does.
A lower figure is better efficiency, lower labour cost, or fewer hours. Only one of those three is a saving.
Get the hours in writing. A figure without stated hours cannot be compared with another figure.

You ask three companies to price the same office. The quotes come back and the spread between them is wider than you expected. Nothing in any of the three documents explains why. So you either pick the middle one and hope, or you pick the cheapest and find out in month four.

There is a better way to read them, and it starts with understanding what you are actually buying.

You Are Buying Hours, Not Cleanliness

A cleaning contract is a fixed monthly fee that purchases a variable quantity of labour. The fee is the output. The labour-hours are the input. Almost every quote you receive will state the output and say nothing about the input, which is exactly what makes them impossible to compare.

Everything below is a description of what adds or removes hours.

Area Sets the Range. Everything Else Sets the Position Within It

Floor area is the starting point and the least interesting number in the conversation. Once you have it, these are the things that actually move the figure:

Restrooms. The single heaviest item per square foot in most premises. Two restrooms instead of one is not a rounding error on a nightly schedule.
Pantries and kitchens. Surfaces, sinks, appliance exteriors, refuse. A staffed pantry generates work every single night.
Floor mix. Carpet vacuums fast. Hard floors need mopping and, periodically, restoration. A floor that is half and half needs two different processes on the same visit.
Internal glass. Glazed partitions look wonderful and mark constantly. Every metre of internal glass is recurring work.
Condition on day one. Premises that have been under a thin specification for two years need more hours at the start than they will need at steady state, and an honest quote says so rather than discovering it in week two.
Access. Freight-elevator windows, a required operator, alarm procedures and badge registration all consume time that never touches a surface.

Frequency Is Not Linear

Five nights a week does not cost five times what one night costs. A large part of every visit is fixed: getting in, moving equipment to the floor, the restrooms, the refuse, getting out. Increase frequency and you spread that fixed portion across more visits, so the marginal cost of each additional night is lower than the first.

This cuts the other way too. Dropping from five nights to three does not cut your bill by forty per cent, and a company that offers exactly that is quietly removing something else as well.

Exclusions Move the Number More Than Area Does

Ask what is excluded before you ask what it costs. The items that commonly sit outside a recurring scope, and that people assume are inside it:

Carpet extraction and hard-floor restoration, which are periodic work on a separate rotation
Interior glass above safe reach, and all exterior glazing
Interiors of refrigerators, microwaves and dishwashers
High-level dusting, which cannot fit inside a nightly time budget
Removal of waste from the premises, as opposed to taking it to the building's collection point
Anything requiring furniture to be moved

None of those are unreasonable exclusions. All of them are unreasonable surprises.

Why the Cheapest Quote Is Usually Cheapest

A lower figure is one of three things, and it is worth knowing which.

Better efficiency. Real, and worth having. A company that routes a floor well finishes sooner without missing anything.

Lower labour cost. Legitimate, with consequences. Cleaning is a high-turnover trade and the people who pay least replace staff most often. Turnover shows up as inconsistency: new faces every few weeks, each one learning your floor on your time.

Fewer hours. Not a saving. A smaller service wearing the same description. If your premises need five hours and the contract was priced at three and a half, the missing hour and a half comes out of the tasks nobody checks: the skirting, the floor edges, behind the furniture, the second restroom. None of it is visible in week one. All of it is visible in month four.

The Question That Makes Quotes Comparable

Ask every company, before you compare any figures:

How many labour-hours per visit is this quote built on?

There is no trade secret in how long it takes to clean a floor. A company that will not answer is not protecting anything; it is avoiding the comparison. Once you have the hours from each, the decision becomes arithmetic instead of instinct, and you can see immediately which of the three explanations above applies to the lowest bid.

What Good Looks Like in Writing

A proposal worth signing states the tasks, the frequency of each, what is explicitly excluded, and the labour-hours behind the figure. Four things. If any is missing, ask for it before you get to price, because price without them is not information.