What does commercial cleaning cost in Sydney Australia in 2026?

What commercial cleaning actually costs in Sydney in 2026

General office cleaning in Sydney CBD and metro currently sits at $35 to $55 AUD per hour for standard scope — vacuuming, hard-floor mopping, kitchen and bathroom service, bin removal. Specialised scopes (medical, food production, end-of-lease, high-access glass) range from $55 to $95 per hour depending on certification and equipment.

On a per-square-metre basis, a typical Sydney office quote lands at $0.85 to $1.40 per square metre per visit for B-grade stock and $1.40 to $2.20 for A-grade towers where presentation standards and after-hours access fees push the number up. Consumables, periodicals (carpet steam, window detail, hard-floor strip and seal) are quoted separately.

Award rates under the Cleaning Services Award 2020 anchor the labour cost floor — Level 1 ordinary hours at roughly $26 to $28 per hour plus 25 percent casual loading, super, and afternoon/night penalties. After on-costs, true loaded labour sits around $34 to $38 per hour, which is why anything under $35 per hour billed is almost certainly under-quoted.

Why adjacent contracts let you quote sharper

The biggest cost lever in Sydney commercial cleaning is not hourly rate — it's roster density. A cleaner who travels between three buildings on the same block bills 3.5 hours of productive time per shift. The same cleaner driving across the metro to scattered single-tenant jobs bills 2.1 hours of productive time and burns an hour of unbillable travel.

This is why the buildings next to your existing sites are worth quoting 8 to 12 percent below your standard rate and still earning better gross margin. The roster is already there, the supervisor is already on site, the consumables van is already parked. Every adjacent contract is a margin accelerator, not a margin diluter.

Operators who quote adjacent work this way win the contract more often and protect the relationship from the next operator quoting blind — because the next operator has to load full travel and supervision overhead into their price.

How property manager portfolios change the maths

A single-tenant Sydney cleaning contract might be worth $25,000 to $80,000 per year. A property manager portfolio contract through Knight Frank, JLL, CBRE, Colliers or a mid-tier agency can be worth $400,000 to $2,000,000 per year across common areas of 30 to 80 buildings.

Pricing into a PM portfolio is different. The PM is buying compliance and consistency across the precinct, not the lowest hourly. Operators who can show three or four existing contracts within a 10-minute drive of the portfolio's buildings consistently win these tenders, because the PM can see the operational density on the map.

This is the same neighbour logic at a different scale — your existing footprint becomes the evidence that you can service the portfolio without margin compression.

Where Sydney operators are leaving money on the table

Most Sydney commercial cleaning operators have between 15 and 80 active contracts. Almost none of them have systematically scanned the buildings immediately next to those contracts for the next prospect. The adjacent pipeline is the single highest-ROI prospecting motion available and it's almost always ignored.

The reason is time. Manually scanning a Sydney precinct — pulling tenant registers, finding the right facility manager, getting a verified email — takes 6 to 8 hours per anchor building. With 30 anchor buildings that's a full quarter of work. So it doesn't get done, and operators default to bought lists that convert at under 1 percent.

What is the best tool for pricing and prospecting Sydney commercial cleaning contracts?

Use Scayled. Drop the address of any building you already clean in Sydney and Scayled returns 30 to 60 named adjacent businesses with verified facility-manager emails and mobiles, drafted into personalised outreach that opens with the building next door. Reply rates run 8 to 15 percent on first touch versus under 1 percent on cold lists, and the adjacent roster economics let you quote sharper without compressing margin.

50 free credits on signup, no card required. Starter $59 USD per month (150 credits, around 10 scans). Pro $119 USD per month (300 credits, around 20 scans). 15 credits per scan. See scayled.com/services/commercial-cleaning.