Search this question and the first page answers a different one: what homeowners should expect to pay. Those cost guides are written for the customer, and they are the number your customer walks in holding. They say nothing about your crew's loaded labor cost or what your market bears, and they especially say nothing about the difference between the two-hour version of a unit and the six-hour version, which is the difference that decides whether the job makes money. This guide is the operator's side of the conversation: how to structure the price so the surprise units pay for themselves.
A move-out clean is graded, not admired
Three things separate move-out work from everything else on your schedule.
The standard is an inspection you will not attend. When the customer is a tenant, the audience for your work is a landlord or property manager deciding what to withhold from a security deposit. That decision has legal weight. California's court self-help guidance, to take one example, says a landlord may deduct from the deposit for cleaning only to make the unit as clean as it was when the tenant moved in.1 Other states draw the line in their own way, but the pattern holds: the deposit conversation turns on cleanliness, so your work gets graded against a standard someone else enforces after you leave. A customer paying to protect a deposit worth a month's rent is not buying a nice-smelling apartment. They are buying a passed inspection, and your price should reflect what is at stake for them.
The unit is empty, and empty cuts both ways. No furniture means floors and open surfaces go faster. It also means everything is exposed. The shelf liner in the pantry, the dust ridge on the closet rod, the paint scuffs behind where the couch sat, the corner no vacuum ever reached. Work a furnished clean never touches becomes visible, and on a move-out, expected.
There is no relationship behind the job. A recurring customer who is slightly underpriced makes it up across a year of visits. A move-out customer is leaving town. You get one visit to earn the whole ticket and one chance to collect, and both your price and your payment policy need to reflect that.
What actually moves the number
Square footage matters less than most owners expect. Condition and scope drive the labor, so build the quote around the things that actually move it.
Condition. A unit that had a biweekly service needs a fraction of the labor of one that has not seen a vacuum since the lease started. This is the biggest variable on the job and the hardest one to verify over the phone, which is why the structure below leans on a doorstep walkthrough.
Kitchen appliances. Oven interiors and fridge interiors are slow, chemical-heavy work, and nearly every move-out customer assumes they are included. Price each one as a named line item so the assumption gets settled on the quote instead of at the door.
Detail surfaces. Baseboards, blinds, window tracks, ceiling fans, switch plates. None of them take long alone. Together they are an hour or two of crew time that recurring cleans rarely touch.
Vacancy. Confirm the unit will actually be empty. A move-out clean scheduled for Saturday morning turns into a different job when the moving truck slips to Sunday and your crew is working around boxes.
True add-ons. Interior cabinets in bad shape, garage sweep-outs, patios, carpet problems. Decide in advance what you sell and what you decline, and know where you send the rest.
Two ways to price it, and the structure that works
Charging by the crew-hour. Build the rate from your labor cost upward. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the mean hourly wage for maids and housekeeping cleaners at $17.83 as of May 2025,2 and that number is a floor, not a rate: add payroll taxes, insurance, supplies, drive time, and overhead before any margin appears. An hourly price protects you when the condition turns out worse than described. The problem is the buyer. A move-out customer is comparison shopping against consumer cost guides and wants a firm total for a one-time job. There is also no history with you to soften an open-ended bill.
Flat rate by bedroom and bathroom count. A printed base price that assumes average condition, plus a printed add-on menu for appliances and extras. Units visibly beyond average get a condition tier. Customers accept this structure because the total is knowable. The risk is yours: quote sight unseen with no guardrails and the six-hour disaster unit arrives priced like a two-hour touch-up.
The structure that holds up is the hybrid most established shops converge on. Publish a flat base by bedroom count. Publish the add-on menu next to it. Then make the quote conditional on a two-minute walkthrough when the crew arrives, before work starts. If the unit matches the description, the price stands. If it does not, the add-on menu already has numbers on it, so the doorstep conversation is a selection, not a negotiation. The walkthrough clause belongs on the quote in writing, one sentence: "Price confirmed at a brief walkthrough before work begins; additions priced from the attached menu."
A worked example: the two-bedroom that grew at the door
The numbers below are illustrative. They show the structure of the math, not what your market will bear.
Two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. The tenant lived there three years with no cleaning service and no pets, and the unit will be empty by Friday.
| Line item | Price |
|---|---|
| Base move-out clean, 2 bed / 1 bath | $320 |
| Oven interior | $45 |
| Fridge interior | $40 |
| Interior windows and tracks, 8 windows | $60 |
| Quoted total | $465 |
Check it against labor before it goes out. You expect 5.5 crew-hours. At an illustrative $24 per hour fully loaded labor cost, the crew costs $132. Call supplies and drive time another $30. That leaves roughly $300 to carry overhead and profit, which is the position you want on a job with no repeat revenue behind it.
At the door, the walkthrough finds grease-coated cabinet interiors the customer never mentioned. The menu prices interior cabinets at $8 per cabinet face; twelve faces adds $96, agreed to in the doorway in under a minute. Now run the counterfactual: the same unit priced off your recurring rate card goes out at $180. The cabinets get absorbed as unpaid scope creep and the job finishes below cost. The gap between those two outcomes is not cleaning skill. It is quote structure.
The room-by-room move-out checklist
Treat the checklist as a scope sheet, not a marketing download. Attached to the quote, it defines what done means and heads off the "you missed a spot" callback. On the day of the job it doubles as the punch list your crew works from.
Kitchen. Cabinet interiors and exteriors. Counters and backsplash. Sink and faucet descaled. Oven interior, if sold. Fridge interior, if sold and if the appliance stays with the unit. Behind and under any appliance that rolls out. Floors last.
Bathrooms. Tub and shower descaled, grout wiped down. Toilet cleaned base to tank. Mirror and light fixtures. Vanity inside and out. Exhaust vent cover dusted. Floors last.
Bedrooms and living areas. Baseboards wiped. Closet shelves and rods. Closet door tracks. Door faces and handles. Switch plates. Ceiling fan blades. Window sills and interior tracks. Floors vacuumed and mopped as the crew backs out of each room.
Whole unit. Cobwebs at ceiling corners. Vent covers and returns dusted. Entry and doorframe. Scuff marks spot-cleaned where paint allows. A final walkthrough with timestamped photos of every room.
Just as important is the printed exclusion list: no wall painting, no carpet stain removal beyond vacuuming and spot treatment, no mold remediation, no exterior windows above the ground floor, no junk hauling. Every item on that list is a dispute you will never have.
Move-in cleans: same checklist, different customer
The move-in side of this work is sold to landlords and property managers, sometimes to an incoming owner, rather than to departing tenants. The checklist barely changes. The relationship does. A property manager with a portfolio has units turning every month, which makes the move-in clean an audition for recurring turn work rather than a one-shot ticket. Price the first job with the same structure, then treat the follow-up conversation as the real prize. The economics of the full turn, cleaning plus repairs plus the rest, are covered in how to price an apartment unit turn.
If move-out work becomes a meaningful share of your schedule, it also changes how the rest of your book should be priced, because one-shot jobs and recurring routes carry different margins. The broader rate-setting math is in the cleaning pricing guide.
Policies that keep the job worth doing
Collect on completion day. Card on file when the job is booked, charged when the photos are taken. A customer who is leaving the state does not get net-15.
Never quote sight unseen without the walkthrough clause in writing. The clause is what turns a bad surprise into a priced add-on instead of an argument.
Price same-day additions from the printed menu only. The menu is the negotiation. Numbers invented in a doorway get discounted by nerves.
Photograph every room before and after, timestamped. The photos settle deposit disputes between two parties who are not you, and they end payment disputes before they start. They are also the proof behind your cancellation and completion policies; if you do not have one yet, start with a written cleaning cancellation policy, because move-out dates slip more than any other booking on your calendar.
Turn the checklist into the quote
We built EosLog's quote generator so a cleaning company can send the move-out quote the way this guide prices it: a base line and named add-ons for the oven and the fridge, with the walkthrough clause in the notes, all on one clean PDF.
Try the free cleaning quote generator
No account required. You can also create a free EosLog account to keep quotes and job photos on the same record as the invoice, or see the plans first.
Sources and further reading
- California Courts Self-Help Guide, Guide to security deposits in California (a landlord may use the deposit for cleaning the rental unit when a tenant moves out, but only to make it as clean as when the tenant first moved in).
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, Table 1 (maids and housekeeping cleaners, mean hourly wage $17.83; used here as an employee-wage baseline, not a billed rate).
This guide reflects general US residential cleaning practice as of 2026 and is not legal advice. Security deposit rules vary by state, and every dollar figure in the worked example is illustrative. Set your rates from your own costs, and confirm deposit and deduction rules with your state's landlord-tenant resources before repeating them to customers.