I’m Ryan. My partner Emma and I run Withers Solutions out of Malvern East. Between us we quote every job that comes through the door and we clean most of them ourselves. So when someone asks me what cleaning should cost in Melbourne, I’m not repeating an industry survey. I’m telling you what I write on quotes.
This page replaces five older posts on this site that all talked about price. I’m not going to pretend they agreed with each other, because they didn’t. One said $40 to $85 an hour. Another said $35 to $80. A third said $35 to $65. Two of them quoted different minimum wages for the same award. If you’d read any two of them back to back, you’d have been entitled to wonder whether we knew what we were talking about.
So here is one set of numbers, with the reasoning underneath. Where the old posts disagreed, I’ve picked the figure I can stand behind and said why.
The short version
- Standard office work: $35 to $65 an hour. That’s the honest band for compliant commercial cleaning in Melbourne. Three of our five old posts landed here, and it’s the one I use.
- Small offices start from around $150 a visit. Roughly $600 to $700 a month for a weekly program.
- Medium offices, 150 to 500 m²: $800 to $2,500 a month for three to five visits a week.
- Large spaces, 500 m² and up: from $2,500 a month, past $6,000 for daily attendance.
- The award floor is $32.31 an hour for a casual cleaner on a weekday in 2026. Any quote landing significantly below $35 an hour should raise questions.
- Weekends cost more, and there’s no way around it. Saturday is 150% of the base rate and Sunday is 200%.
The award rate is the floor, and everything sits on top of it
The Cleaning Services Award 2020 sets the minimum a cleaner can legally be paid in Victoria. This is the number every honest price in the industry has to clear.
Two different figures used to appear on this site, $24.41 and $32.31, and both of them were real. They just weren’t alternatives. The lower figure is the base hourly rate for a permanent employee. The higher one is what a casual cleaner has to be paid on an ordinary weekday, once the 25% casual loading is added. Almost everyone doing commercial cleaning in Melbourne is engaged as a casual, so $32.31 an hour is the number that matters, and it’s the one published on our FAQs page. A third figure, $28.25, appeared in a couple of old posts. I can’t source it, so I’ve dropped it.
Then the loadings go on top:
| When the work happens | Loading | Award rate, casual |
|---|---|---|
| Weekday, ordinary hours | Base | $32.31/hr |
| Weekday after 6pm | +15% | about $37.16/hr |
| Saturday | 150% | about $48/hr |
| Sunday | 200% | about $65/hr |
Look at that Sunday figure again. $65 an hour is the wage, before super, before insurance, before equipment, chemicals, consumables, travel or the time it takes to quote the job and invoice it. That’s why a Sunday clean can’t be priced like a Tuesday one, and why any provider who tells you it can is either absorbing a loss they’ll claw back later or not paying properly.
Why $35 an hour is the line
Labour is 50 to 70 per cent of an honest price. That’s the single most useful thing to know when you’re reading a quote, because it means the number has to clear the wage floor with enough left over for super, public liability cover, machines, products and travel between sites.
At $35 an hour there is almost nothing left over. Below it, one of three things is happening: someone is being paid under the award, the job is being rushed in half the time it needs, or the scope quietly excludes half of what you assumed was included. Usually it’s a combination.
The honest exception is an owner operator. When the person quoting the job is also the person pushing the vacuum, there’s no supervisor layer, no head office margin and no franchise fee in the price. That’s genuinely cheaper, and it’s legitimate. It’s also exactly what we are, which I’ll come back to.
The $80 an hour figure is gone
One of the old posts pushed $80 an hour as “the professional standard” and repeated it about a dozen times. I’m dropping it. It isn’t a wrong number in every context, a specialist restoration or a compliance-grade clinical clean can reach there, but presenting it as what an ordinary Melbourne office should expect to pay was not accurate. That post also leaned on figures and quotes from other cleaning companies rather than on jobs I’ve actually priced. It shouldn’t have.
What you’ll actually pay, by size
Most of our clients are on a flat monthly or per visit price rather than an hourly one, so these are the numbers that tend to matter most.
| Space | Typical program | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Small office or studio, under 150 m² | Weekly or fortnightly | From about $150 a visit, roughly $600 to $700 a month weekly |
| Medium workspace, 150 to 500 m² | 3 to 5 visits a week | $800 to $2,500 a month |
| Large site, 500 m² and up | Daily or near daily | From $2,500 a month, past $6,000 for daily |
An older post on this site said a small office could be done twice a week for $400 to $800 a month. I’ve corrected that, and it’s worth explaining why, because the correction is the whole argument of this page. $400 a month for twice-weekly attendance works out under $50 a visit. A visit that size takes a couple of hours once you include the kitchen and the bathrooms. That’s roughly $25 an hour, which is below the legal wage floor before a single cost is covered. The number was never achievable. Publishing it just taught people to expect something nobody can deliver honestly.
A quick sanity check on any flat price
Regular programs across Melbourne land between $3.50 and $8.00 per square metre per month. Divide the monthly price by your floor area and see where you sit. The smallest spaces sit at or above the top of that range, because a minimum visit still has to cover travel and set-up no matter how small the room is. Very large sites sit at the bottom, because scale works in your favour.
Three worked examples
These aren’t named clients, they’re the shape of programs at three common sizes:
- 250 m² CBD office, three cleans a week, after hours. Vacuuming, mopping, restroom sanitising, kitchen tidy, bins. $1,200 to $1,800 a month, or $4.80 to $7.20 per m².
- 400 m² retail space, daily, 26 visits a month. Floors, spot window work, fitting rooms. $2,200 to $2,800 a month, which is $85 to $108 a visit. Note how the per visit price falls well below $150 once frequency is high. That’s normal, and it’s the main lever you have.
- 325 m² medical clinic, five days a week, NHMRC-compliant. Hospital-grade disinfectants, clinical waste handling. $3,200 to $4,000 a month.
Hourly rates by sector
| Sector | Hourly range | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Office and workspace | $35 to $65 | The baseline. Open plan is quicker per square metre than a warren of small rooms. |
| Melbourne CBD offices | $50 to $65 | Parking, loading dock access, lift waits, security sign-in and after-hours scheduling. Expect 10 to 15% above a comparable suburban site. |
| Medical, dental and allied health | $50 to $85 | NHMRC protocols, hospital-grade products, clinical waste handling, WorkSafe chemical rules. Runs 20 to 40% above a comparable office. |
| Warehouse and industrial | $35 to $50 | Large open floors are efficient, but the machinery and the dust are not. |
| Retail and hospitality | $35 to $65 | Standard band. Add 10 to 15% for after-hours attendance, which most retail needs. |
An earlier post quoted retail at $30 to $45 an hour, which sat below our own red-flag line on the same page. That’s been fixed. Retail sits in the standard band like everything else.
Flat rate or hourly, from your side of the table
Both models are fine. They just transfer risk in opposite directions, and nobody ever explains that part.
| Flat rate | Hourly | |
|---|---|---|
| Your bill | The same every visit | Moves with the time on site |
| Who carries the risk | We do. If it takes longer, that’s our problem | You do. If it takes longer, you pay for it |
| Best for | Routine programs where the task list is settled | One-off jobs where nobody can predict the hours |
| The catch | Only as good as the scope document behind it | Needs a cap, or the final number is a surprise |
My honest advice: take a flat rate for anything recurring. It’s predictable, it rewards us for getting faster rather than slower, and you can budget it. Use hourly for a deep clean, a post-construction tidy or a one-off job where the state of the place is genuinely unknown. If you go hourly, ask for a cap. Any reasonable operator will give you one.
Two things worth knowing before the first invoice lands. The first clean is usually 1.5 to 2 times a regular visit, because bringing a space up to a maintainable standard is a different job from maintaining it. And a weekly program is around 20% cheaper per visit than calling someone in occasionally, because a space that’s never allowed to slide takes less time to reset.
Periodic work and extras
| Job | Typical price | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Deep clean, around 100 m² | $200 to $250 a visit | As needed, or quarterly |
| Carpet extraction | $50 to $200 a session | At least twice a year |
| Pressure washing, exteriors and car parks | $150 to $300 a session | Annually |
| Window cleaning | $30 to $140 a session | Quarterly is common |
The low ends of those ranges apply when the work is added onto a scheduled visit we’re already attending. A separate trip across town for one job carries its own travel and set-up, and the price reflects that. Bundling the periodic work into your regular program is almost always cheaper than booking it piecemeal, which is the single easiest saving available to most businesses.
You can see what carpet extraction actually achieves in our carpet restoration at the D.W. Lucas Oval clubrooms, where years of tracked-in soil came out of a function room floor that everyone had assumed was brown carpet. It wasn’t. It was grey.
How to sanity check a quote you’ve been given
You don’t need a costing spreadsheet. You need five questions.
- Work out the implied hourly rate. Divide the visit price by the hours they’ve quoted. If they won’t tell you the hours, that’s an answer in itself.
- Check the hours are realistic. A cleaner covers roughly 250 to 300 m² an hour across open-plan floor. Kitchens and bathrooms are far slower per square metre, so a small office with two bathrooms takes longer than the floor area suggests. Most operators have a two to three hour minimum visit, which covers travel and set-up.
- Compare the implied rate to $35. Below that, ask directly how the wage floor is being met. A straight answer is easy to give if there is one.
- Ask who is actually doing the work. Employee, subcontractor, or the owner. Subcontracted labour is where award compliance most often disappears, and it’s also why the cleaner changes every fortnight and never learns your alarm code.
- Read what’s excluded. Under-scoped contracts are the most common nasty surprise: consumables and restocking left out, light fittings and high dusting left out, bathroom floors mopped weekly instead of every visit. Ask for the task list per visit, in writing, and check the frequency column, not just the task column.
One more: ask for the certificate of currency on their public liability policy. Cleaning businesses in Victoria are required to carry at least $10 million in cover. It takes a provider thirty seconds to send it. If it takes longer than that, you’ve learned something.
We’re two people, and that’s the point
I’d rather say this plainly than let you find out later. Withers Solutions is Emma and me. We started in 2025, we’re based in Malvern East, we’re not a franchise and we don’t subcontract your clean to someone we’ve never met.
That shapes the price in both directions, and you should know both. We have no head office margin, no area manager and no franchise fee sitting inside your quote, so on the jobs that suit us we’re competitive against companies several times our size. We also can’t take on a 5,000 m² site with three shifts a day, and I’ll tell you that on the phone rather than quote for it and hope.
What you get instead is that the person who quoted the job is the person who turns up, holds the keys and locks up. When something isn’t right, you tell me, and I’m the one who fixes it. There’s no ticket number. You can see what that looks like week to week in our fortnightly office routine at Pulp Digital in Richmond.
Pricing questions I get asked
How much does commercial cleaning cost in Melbourne?
For a small office, from around $150 a visit, which is roughly $600 to $700 a month on a weekly program. Medium spaces of 150 to 500 m² generally run $800 to $2,500 a month for three to five visits a week. Large sites of 500 m² and up start from $2,500 a month. On an hourly basis, standard office work is $35 to $65 an hour.
What is the cleaning award minimum in 2026?
$32.31 an hour for a casual cleaner on an ordinary weekday, under the Cleaning Services Award 2020. That’s the permanent base rate plus the 25% casual loading. After 6pm on a weekday it’s about $37.16, Saturday is 150% of base at about $48, and Sunday is 200% at about $65.
Why should a quote below $35 an hour worry me?
Because wages are 50 to 70 per cent of an honest price, and the casual weekday minimum is $32.31 before super, insurance, equipment or travel. A rate below $35 means someone is being underpaid, the job is being rushed, or the scope is thinner than you think. The one legitimate exception is an owner operator with no overhead layers to fund.
Do you charge flat rate or hourly?
Both, and I’ll recommend whichever suits your situation. Flat rate for recurring programs, because it’s predictable and we carry the risk on the time. Hourly for deep cleans and one-off jobs where the hours genuinely can’t be known in advance, ideally with a cap.
Do weekends and after hours cost more?
Yes, and it’s not a surcharge we invented. Saturday attracts a 150% award loading and Sunday 200%, so weekend work is meaningfully dearer to deliver. Weekday evenings after 6pm add about 15%. If your budget is tight, an early morning or a weekday evening slot will always beat a Sunday.
Is the first clean more expensive?
Usually 1.5 to 2 times a regular visit. Getting a space up to standard is a bigger job than holding it there. After that you’re on the regular rate.
Why does the CBD cost more than the suburbs?
Parking, loading dock access, waiting on lifts, security sign-in and the fact that most CBD buildings can only be cleaned after hours. Expect 10 to 15% above an equivalent suburban site. We service the Melbourne CBD along with Richmond, Hawthorn, Malvern, Toorak and the rest of the inner south-east.
Is there a minimum booking?
Two to three hours is standard across the industry, ours included. It covers travel, unloading equipment and setting up. Anyone offering single-hour visits has folded that cost into a higher hourly rate instead.
Are you cheaper because you’re a small family business?
On the right jobs, yes, because there’s no franchise fee or management layer inside the quote. But we won’t be the cheapest number you receive, and we’re not trying to be. If someone quotes you well under $35 an hour, we can’t match it without doing something I’m not willing to do.
Get a real number for your space
Every figure on this page is a guide. The only price that means anything is the one written against your floor plan, your task list and your frequency. Quotes are free, we respond the same day, and there are no lock-in contracts.
Call Ryan on 0409 385 707 or request a quote online. If your space is larger than a small office we’ll come and walk through it first, because a quote given over the phone for a site nobody has seen is a guess, and guesses are how the surprises start.
Withers Solutions, 3/24 Durward Road, Malvern East VIC 3145. Family run, fully insured, police checked. See our full range of cleaning services, our office and workspace cleaning, or read the rest of our frequently asked questions. Looking to trim the bill without dropping the standard? Start with smarter scheduling.
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