What cleaning subcontractors actually get paid in Adelaide
If you run a cleaning business and you have looked for commercial contracts in Adelaide, you have seen the ads: “subcontractors wanted, $50–60 per hour.” You have probably also learned what that number too often means once you start: the hours in the job were set lower than the work actually takes, so the real rate is whatever is left after you finish a three-and-a-half-hour site in the two hours it was priced at.
Here are the numbers nobody prints together. The Cleaning Services Award Level 1 base is $27.08 an hour from 1 July 2026 — $33.85 casual, and around $37.91 for a casual evening shift once the after-hours loading stacks. That is the legal floor for an employee, before workers compensation, superannuation and payroll costs land on the employer. Any advertised subcontract rate has to be read against that floor — and against the hours the job really takes, not the hours the ad assumed.
The uncomfortable arithmetic of the industry: the client commonly pays $45–70 an hour equivalent for commercial cleaning, and the person holding the mop commonly clears far less than half of it. The difference funds layers — a head contractor, sometimes a middle contractor, an account manager, a margin on each layer. Every layer between the client and you is paid out of the same job you are doing.
How Adelaide cleaning businesses actually get commercial work
1. Subcontracting to a head contractor. The most common route and the most layered one. Read the agreement before you sign it: who carries the cost when the client does not pay, what gets deducted from your invoice, how many days you wait for money, and whether the hours in the work orders match the scope. The paperwork tells you exactly how the relationship will feel in month six.
2. Buying a franchise. You pay an upfront fee and ongoing royalties for the brand and the leads. For some operators that trade is worth it. But run the numbers over three years — fee, royalties, mandated purchases — against what the same three years of marketing would have cost your own brand. Your business name is an asset; renting somebody else’s is a cost.
3. Winning your own clients. The best margin and the slowest build — quoting, selling and chasing invoices are unpaid second jobs. Most owner-operators do a mix: some direct clients, some contract work to keep the week full.
What we built instead
Sarto is an Adelaide platform where businesses book commercial cleaning at a fixed, published price — and independent cleaning businesses deliver it. The deal, in the order that matters:
The price is on the offer before you accept. A fixed job price per visit — not an hourly rate, not a timesheet. If you work efficiently, the gain is yours; nobody re-prices your site because you got faster. Worked examples are published on the contractor page, in dollars, before you give us anything.
Paid every Tuesday for everything verified to the Sunday before — not 30 days end-of-month, not “when the client pays us.” The client’s money is collected before the work starts, so your payment does not depend on their invoice.
No fees, no lock-in, no scores. Joining costs nothing, there is no acceptance rate or ranking, declining a job has no consequence, and you keep your own brand, your own clients and your own uniform. You are a business we verified — not staff in our polo.
The verification is real: ABN against the register, $20M public liability sighted, police checks per person, referees contacted. It is the same checklist we publish to clients, and it is why the work pays properly — the client is buying the vetting, and the vetting is you.
If that reads like a different planet from the $50-an-hour ad with the invisible hours: register your business. It takes two minutes, and the onboarding is online — documents sighted and recorded, never retained.