How much should carpet cleaners charge?
Carpet cleaning is almost always quoted as a flat per-room or per-job price to the client, not a visible hourly rate — but you should still know your real effective hourly rate so a big house, heavy staining, or a slow-drying job doesn't quietly become an underpaid one. Set your target hourly rate here and use the default visit length as a starting point for a typical whole-home job.
Estimate your rate
A starting point for carpet cleaning — adjust to your own numbers.
~$126.40 / visit
Based on a 120-minute visit at an effective rate of ~$63.20/hour. Formula: (target income + expenses) ÷ (billable hours/week × 50 working weeks), converted to a per-visit price. This is a starting estimate, not a guarantee — adjust for local market rates.
What moves the rate
- Room count and size — most cleaners price per room ($25-75) or per square foot ($0.20-0.50), with one "room" usually counted as 200-250 sq ft
- Cleaning method — hot water extraction (steam) runs $40-90+/room, shampooing $80-150/room, bonnet cleaning $30-90/room, and dry cleaning $70-200/room; each has a different labor and equipment cost behind it
- Stains and odor — pet stains, wine, ink, and similar add $40-300 depending on severity, and odor/deodorizing treatment adds $20-40/room on top of a standard clean
- Carpet protector application — a common $10-40/room upsell after cleaning
- Minimum job fee — most solo cleaners set a $100-150+ minimum so a single small room still covers travel and setup time
- Furniture moving and stairs — heavier prep work (moving furniture, cleaning stairs) adds time beyond a standard flat-floor room
- Local cost of living and competitor rates
baseHourly of $85 combined with a 120-minute (2-hour) default visit models a typical small-to-mid whole-home job (roughly 3-4 rooms with a portable hot-water-extraction unit), producing a default calculator output (~$170) that lands near the low-to-mid end of the researched national average whole-home cost ($182-201, national range $149-270) — actual jobs should be quoted per-room or per-square-foot using the factors above, with this calculator mainly protecting against underpricing large, heavily-stained, or furniture-heavy jobs. This page deliberately scopes to a solo operator running a portable extractor ($1,500-5,000), not a dealer-financed truck-mounted rig ($15,000-40,000) — truck-mount setups deliver stronger results and are standard for established multi-crew companies, but that startup cost is out of scope for someone testing this as a solo side business, the same exclusion pattern applied to licensed moving companies on the moving-hauling-help page. The $3,200/yr expense default sums a portable extractor amortized over about 3 years (~$1,000/yr), general liability insurance (~$360-600/yr, commonly cited around $30-50/mo for a solo cleaning operator), chemicals and pad/bonnet supply replenishment (~$650/yr), personal-vehicle fuel and wear (~$800/yr, no dedicated commercial vehicle needed at this scale), and scheduling/invoicing software (~$350/yr).