What a legal hour of commercial cleaning actually costs

Every number in this article is public. The award rates are on the Fair Work website, the super rate is statutory, and the insurance costs are what any broker will quote. Which means anyone — including the person reading a suspiciously cheap cleaning quote — can do the maths. Almost nobody does. So here it is, done.

A compliant evening hour, added up

Commercial cleaning happens after your office closes. Under the Cleaning Services Award, a casual cleaner on a weeknight evening shift earns $37.91 an hour — that is the legal minimum, not a generous one. On top of that wage, an employer who is doing it properly pays, per hour:

Superannuation, 12% — $4.55, statutory. Workers compensation — cleaning is a physical industry with real claim rates; call it roughly $1.50 an hour in SA. That is about $44 an hour in employment costs alone, before the person has picked up a mop.

Now add what the work needs: chemicals and equipment, public liability insurance, travel between sites, someone supervising quality, someone doing payroll and rosters — conservatively another 10–15%. A compliantly delivered evening cleaning hour costs its provider roughly $48–50 before a single dollar of profit.

So what is a $35-an-hour quote made of?

Published Adelaide guides put commercial cleaning at $35–70 an hour, and quotes at the bottom of that range win work every week. But the maths above does not have a $35 setting. If an hour is being sold below what a legal hour costs, the difference is coming from somewhere, and there are only a few candidates: the hours are quietly shorter than quoted; the work is daytime-rated but delivered at night; the cleaner is engaged in a way that moves the employment costs off the books; or the cleaner is simply not receiving what the law says the hour is worth.

None of those shows up in the quote. All of them show up later — in the standard of the work, in the turnover of the people doing it, or in whose name the liability lands when it goes wrong. Cheap cleaning is not a discount. It is a deferral.

Why we publish this

Sarto sells commercial cleaning in Adelaide, so this maths is obviously in our interest — we publish job prices, not hourly rates, and our independent contractors earn above what the industry pays. But the numbers are not ours; they are the award’s. Check them yourself: the rates are public, the super rate is law, and the question — what is the cheap quote made of? — belongs to anyone holding one. A companion piece, the Adelaide transparency study, covers what the industry’s 106 websites will and will not tell you; and the quote translation guide covers the words that fill the gap where these numbers should be.