How to land commercial cleaning contracts and keep every building

A house cleaning customer hires you after a phone call. A commercial client hires you after a walkthrough, a written bid, a stack of paperwork and, often, a side-by-side comparison with other companies' bids. The work is steadier once you have it: the same buildings, the same nights, a monthly invoice. Getting it takes a different sales process, and keeping it takes a different kind of proof.

This guide covers who buys commercial cleaning, what they ask for, how to find them without buying leads, how to bid and write the scope, how to prove the work, and how federal janitorial contracts work. If you're still deciding between residential and commercial, start with how to start a cleaning business; the cleaning industry page covers the websites, phone setups and CRM features we build for cleaners. It's general guidance only. Contract, insurance and procurement rules differ by state and by agency; confirm the local ones before you sign anything.

Who buys commercial cleaning?

"Commercial cleaning" covers several different buyers. Each one decides differently, so know which one you're talking to before you write a word of the bid.

Small offices are a natural first target for an owner-operator, because one person makes the decision and the building fits a small crew. Property managers come next, because one good relationship can lead to several buildings. Formal requests for proposal and public bids reward companies that already have references and a staffing plan they can show on paper. For the manager relationship itself, see how to work with property managers.

What paperwork will a commercial client ask for?

Expect a vendor packet before you start, and sometimes before you're allowed to bid. Have these ready as PDFs you can send the same day:

• Certificate of insurance. Your agent issues it. Many clients ask to be listed as certificate holder, and many want additional insured status on your policy. That status usually requires an endorsement, which the NAIC defines as an amendment or rider to a policy. Send the client's insurance requirements to your agent before you sign anything. Our contractor insurance guide covers the coverage types.
• Form W-9. Per the IRS, the form hands your taxpayer ID to whoever must file an information return on what they pay you. Use your legal business name exactly as the IRS has it.
• Background check policy. Offices, medical suites and schools want to know who has their keys. If you use a background check company to screen workers, the FTC says you must tell the applicant in writing and in a stand-alone format, get written permission, and follow the pre-adverse action steps before rejecting someone based on the report. State and local rules can add more.
• Key and alarm code policy. Who holds keys, where they're stored, how codes are assigned per person, and what happens when someone leaves your company.
• Safety data sheets. Under OSHA's hazard communication standard, any employer whose workplace holds hazardous chemicals needs labels, safety data sheets and training for the workers exposed to them. When your chemicals could expose the client's own employees, the standard's multi-employer rule (29 CFR 1910.1200(e)(2)) expects your program to explain how the other employer gets access to those sheets. A binder in the janitor's closet, plus a shared folder link, answers the question before it's asked.
• Product list. Some buildings ask for greener products. EPA's Safer Choice program says it reviews all chemical ingredients before a product can carry the label, and that certified products are available for offices and schools. Ask which standard the client follows before you switch anything.
• Payment setup. Banking details for ACH, your remittance address, and the client's invoicing rules (purchase order numbers, portal uploads, due dates).

Ask about payment terms early. Many commercial buyers pay on net terms, meaning a set number of days after they receive a correct invoice. Commercial cleaning is almost all labor, and your cleaners get paid every week or two no matter what the client's terms say, so price the wait into your bid and make sure your cash can carry the first two months of payroll on a new account. If you'll need a bond for a contract or for employee theft coverage, read surety bonds explained first.

Where do you find commercial cleaning accounts?

The best commercial accounts rarely come from a lead marketplace. They come from people who already know your name and from buildings you can see from your existing routes. Start with channels you own.

1. A commercial cleaning page on your website. List the building types you clean, your service hours, the towns you cover, how a walkthrough works, and that a certificate of insurance is available on request. Add a short walkthrough request form. A buyer who searches "office cleaning" plus your town should land on this page, not your home page. Our website service builds these pages, and cleaning company SEO covers how they rank.
2. Your residential customers. Some own businesses, manage offices or sit on a building committee. A short note asking whether their workplace needs a cleaner costs nothing and arrives from someone they already trust.
3. Buildings near your current route. Night routes make money when the buildings are close together. Make a list of offices, medical suites and small plazas within a few minutes of the accounts you already clean, then call or stop in during business hours and ask who handles cleaning.
4. Property management companies. Ask for the person who approves vendors and what their packet requires. Send it complete, then ask to bid the next building that opens up.
5. General contractors. Post-construction cleans pay for detail work under deadline. Call the office of builders working in your area and ask for the superintendent who schedules final cleans.
6. Local building owner groups. BOMA International calls itself a commercial real estate trade association, and its site has a finder for local BOMA associations. Building owners, property managers and facility managers are the audience. Find your local and ask whether it admits cleaning contractors as members or guests.

If you send cold email to businesses, follow the CAN-SPAM rules. The FTC is clear that the law doesn't exempt business-to-business email. Every message must show a valid postal address for your business and offer a way to opt out, and each opt-out request has to be acted on within 10 business days. Write each email to a named manager about a specific building, one at a time, instead of sending a blast to a list.

How do you bid a commercial cleaning job?

Walk the building, measure it, time it on paper, then price the hours. Per-square-foot numbers you hear from other cleaners hide the things that actually drive labor, like restroom count, clutter and how many trash cans sit under desks.

On the walkthrough, record:

• Square footage by floor type: carpet, hard floor, tile, entry mats.
• Restrooms and fixture counts: toilets, urinals, sinks, dispensers.
• Break rooms, kitchens, exam rooms, conference rooms and anything that needs disinfecting more often.
• Number of desks and trash and recycling containers.
• Interior glass, entry doors and high dusting.
• Access hours, alarm procedure, parking, the janitor's closet, water source and where trash goes.
• Who supplies paper towels, toilet paper, soap and liners.
• What the client says the last cleaner kept missing. That's often why they're calling.

Then build hours per visit from your own production rates: the minutes your crew actually takes per restroom fixture, per thousand square feet of vacuuming, per trash stop. Time a few buildings you already clean to get those numbers. Here is the arithmetic for a hypothetical small office, in hours only:

Multiply monthly hours by your fully loaded labor cost (wage, payroll taxes, workers' comp, drive time), add supplies and your share of overhead, then add profit. Our hourly rate calculator and job price calculator do that math with your own numbers. Price periodic work, like floor stripping and refinishing, carpet extraction and high window cleaning, as separate line items on their own schedule. If you supply consumables, list them separately with a markup, or let the client buy them; burying paper costs in the base price is how monthly margins disappear.

Turn the bid around fast and match its format to how the client asked. A request for proposal with a required form gets that form, filled in exactly. For the full bidding process, see how to bid commercial jobs.

What should the scope and contract say?

Most commercial cleaning disputes are about frequency. "Clean restrooms" says nothing. "Restrooms: clean and disinfect toilets, urinals, sinks and counters; refill dispensers; empty trash; mop floors, five nights a week" settles it. Put the scope in a table the client can check against:

Then cover the business terms: start date and term, renewal, how either side can end the contract and with how much notice, holiday schedule, what happens when the building is closed, price changes when the scope or wages change, who supplies what, key custody, how damage gets reported, and how extra work is approved before it's done. Write down how complaints reach you and how fast you respond. Our service contract checklist covers the clauses that apply to every trade. Before your first signed account, pay a local attorney to read your commercial template.

What records prove a night of cleaning happened?

Your client goes home at five and comes back at eight. Everything that happens in between is invisible unless you record it. When a tenant complains that the trash wasn't emptied, the client will take your word for it once. After that, they want records.

A good commercial cleaning record shows, for every visit:

• Check-in and check-out times at that building, recorded by the phone that was on site.
• Which cleaner was there.
• The checklist for that visit, area by area, marked complete or flagged.
• Photos of the areas clients notice: restrooms, break room, entry.
• Issues found: a running toilet, a broken dispenser, a stained ceiling tile, low supplies.

Send the client a short monthly summary built from those records: visits completed, issues reported, supplies used, anything that needs their decision. It turns "are they even coming?" into "they told us about the leak before we saw it". Not every field service app handles this well for recurring night routes, so test yours against the list above. A CRM built around recurring commercial routes can attach photos, timestamps and checklists to every visit and produce the report automatically. That's the kind of work our custom CRM is built for; our own companies ran on it before any client did.

How do you keep a commercial cleaning account?

Contracts are usually lost slowly. A missed trash can, then a dirty restroom before a client meeting, then a manager who quietly asks for other bids. Habits that prevent that:

• Same crew, same building. Rotating strangers through an office is what makes tenants nervous about keys and what makes quality drift.
• Walk the building with the manager. Every quarter, or monthly at first. Ask what they'd change. Write it down and do it.
• Fix misses the next night, and say so. A short message ("Fixed the second-floor restroom tonight, photo attached") does more than an apology.
• Raise problems before they become complaints. Report broken fixtures, leaks and pest signs with photos.
• Ask for the next building. Once the account is steady, ask the property manager which other properties they manage and when those contracts come up.

Put renewal dates in your CRM with a reminder 90 days ahead, and talk about scope and price changes before the client starts their budget, not after.

Can a small cleaning company win government cleaning contracts?

Yes, and the federal process is public and documented. It is also slower and more paperwork-heavy than private work. Here's how the pieces fit, from the agencies' own pages as read in October 2026.

Register in SAM. The SBA's basic requirements page says federal contracting starts with registering in SAM, the System for Award Management, and that you receive a Unique Entity ID (a 12-character identifier) when you register at SAM.gov. Don't pay a third party to register you. GSA's SAM.gov checklist says the ID, the registration and its upkeep are all free. Registration asks for your legal name and physical address, taxpayer ID, banking details for electronic payment and your NAICS codes. SAM.gov says you must renew every 365 days to stay active.

Know your code and size standard. The Census Bureau defines NAICS 561720, Janitorial Services, as establishments primarily engaged in cleaning building interiors, interiors of transportation equipment and windows. In SBA's size standards table (13 CFR 121.201, the eCFR text dated October 5, 2026), the standard for 561720 is $22.0 million in average annual receipts, which for most firms means total receipts over the last five completed fiscal years divided by five (13 CFR 121.104), counting affiliates. Apart from some multiple-award contracts, each solicitation carries one NAICS code and one size standard, and the contracting officer chooses them (13 CFR 121.402). Check the code on every notice.

Find the opportunities. The SBA says agencies must use SAM to advertise all contracts over $25,000, and that the details you enter in SAM feed Small Business Search, which agencies browse when they want small contractors. SBA guidance for contracting officials says contracts from $15,000 to $350,000 are set aside for small businesses, and larger ones are set aside when two or more small businesses could do the work.

Check the SBA programs. If your company qualifies, SBA certifications open set-aside contracts:

• 8(a) Business Development: for firms whose majority owners (51% or more) are socially and economically disadvantaged U.S. citizens who also control the company; SBA also looks for potential for success, such as two years in business, and participation lasts up to nine years.
• HUBZone: your main office has to sit inside a HUBZone, 35% or more of your staff must live in one, and you recertify every three years.
• Women-Owned Small Business: women who are U.S. citizens own and control 51% or more and run the business day to day; SBA describes its certification process as free.
• Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned: majority ownership and control (51% or more) by veterans the VA has rated as service-disabled, certified through SBA's VetCert program.

Read the wage determination. Under the Service Contract Act, DOL says, a contractor on a federal service contract above $2,500 owes its service employees at least the pay and fringe benefits that prevail locally, as the contract's wage determination spells out. DOL's regulations list custodial, janitorial and housekeeping services among covered contract types (29 CFR 4.130). Price from the wage determination, not from your normal pay scale.

Get paid on schedule. Under the Prompt Payment rules, if the contract sets no other date, the government generally owes payment 30 days after a proper invoice reaches the agency, and the Treasury says agencies that pay late must pay interest in most cases.

For free, local help with registration and bids, APEX Accelerators say they offer no-cost guidance on federal, state and local government contracting. State, county, city and school district purchasing runs on its own rules, portals and forms, which vary widely; read each solicitation and register with each agency's vendor system. Our government contracts guide goes further.

Where to start this month

1. Build the vendor packet: certificate of insurance, W-9, background check policy, safety data sheets and a sample scope.
2. Time three buildings you already clean so your bids rest on real production rates.
3. Publish a commercial cleaning page with a walkthrough request form, then list twenty buildings near your current routes and start calling.

Not sure your website and phones are ready for commercial buyers? Our free system quote checks how a property or facility manager would find you and what happens when they call.

Frequently asked questions