Short answer: most Denver businesses pay somewhere between $0.10 and $0.20 per square foot per visit for routine commercial cleaning, or $35 to $60 an hour when a job is billed by time. A 5,000 square foot office cleaned three nights a week usually lands between $1,200 and $2,800 a month. Medical offices, restaurants and buildings with a lot of restrooms run higher. Warehouses run lower.
That is the range. The rest of this guide covers what puts a building at the top or bottom of it, which costs are specific to Denver, and how to get a quote you can actually compare against another one.
A note on where these numbers come from. We pulled the published rate sheets of several Denver cleaning companies, ProMatcher’s Colorado cost index and Thumbtack’s national job data, then checked them against what we see on walkthroughs. We’ve left our own price list out on purpose. Every building we clean is quoted after a walkthrough, and a number on a web page is not a quote. Read these as the market, not as an offer.
Denver commercial cleaning rates at a glance
| How it’s priced | Typical Denver range (2026) | Usually used for |
|---|---|---|
| Per square foot, per visit | $0.10 to $0.20 for offices ($0.07 to $0.35 across all building types) | Recurring janitorial on a set schedule |
| Per hour, per cleaner | $35 to $60 | Small spaces, one-time cleans, day porters |
| Flat monthly | $600 to $15,000 and up | Contracts, built from the two rates above |
Almost every recurring contract in Denver is really a per-square-foot rate multiplied by visits per month, then rounded into a monthly figure. When you compare bids, ask for the per-visit number. Monthly totals hide a lot.
Rates by type of building
Square footage matters less than what’s in it. Two 6,000 square foot spaces can be an hour apart in cleaning time if one is open-plan and the other is a dental practice with six operatories and four restrooms. Per visit, per square foot:
| Facility | Per sq ft, per visit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| General office | $0.10 to $0.18 | The baseline. Desks, restrooms, break room, floors. |
| Medical and dental | $0.20 to $0.35 | Disinfection protocols, exam rooms, more time per square foot. |
| Retail and showrooms | $0.10 to $0.18 | Glass, floors and entrances take the time. |
| Warehouse and industrial | $0.07 to $0.15 | Big open floors, few fixtures. Restrooms and offices priced separately. |
| Schools and daycare | $0.10 to $0.18 | High-touch surfaces, restrooms sized for crowds. |
| Restaurants and food service | $0.20 to $0.30 | Grease, health code, late-night access. |
What a monthly bill looks like
These are the brackets we see most often in the Denver market for standard office space with normal restroom counts:
- Up to 2,000 sq ft, twice a week: $600 to $900 a month
- 3,000 to 5,000 sq ft, three times a week: $1,200 to $2,800 a month
- 10,000 sq ft, five nights a week: $3,000 to $6,000 a month
- 25,000 sq ft and up, nightly, multi-tenant: $7,000 a month and up, often into five figures
Notice what happens to the per-visit rate as frequency goes up. A once-a-week clean is a recovery job; the crew is undoing a week of traffic. A nightly clean is maintenance. The per-visit price on a nightly account can be a third of the once-a-week price for the same floor plan, which is why the monthly total doesn’t climb anywhere near five times when you move from one visit to five.
The Denver factors that move the price
1. Labor, and Denver labor costs more
Labor is roughly 90 percent of a cleaning bill. Denver’s minimum wage is $19.29 an hour in 2026, up from $18.81, and it’s already set to rise to $19.84 on January 1, 2027. That’s well above the statewide rate, and it’s why a Denver quote runs higher than one for the same building in Colorado Springs or Pueblo. Add payroll taxes, workers’ compensation and liability insurance, and a cleaner on the job costs an employer in the mid-twenties per hour before anyone pays for a supervisor, supplies, equipment or a van. That’s the math behind the $35 to $60 hourly range. A bid built on $25 an hour has to be cutting one of those things.
2. Restrooms
After square footage, nothing changes a quote more than the fixture count. A rule of thumb from the trade: one restroom takes about as long as 1,000 to 1,500 square feet of open office. A 4,000 square foot suite with two restrooms and a 4,000 square foot suite with six are not the same job, and the price will say so.
3. Access, hours and parking
Cleaning a suite in a downtown tower means security badging, a freight elevator window, and somewhere to park a vehicle full of equipment after 6 p.m. near Union Station. All of that is time, and time is the bill. A single-tenant building in the DTC or along I-25 in Centennial with a back door and a lot is simpler, and usually cheaper for the same square footage. Daytime cleaning, where staff have to work around people, tends to cost a little more per hour than after-hours work because it’s slower.
4. Winter
From November through March, ice melt, sand and slush come in on every pair of shoes. Entry mats need changing, hard floors need more mopping, and the white haze that ice melt leaves on VCT doesn’t come off with a damp mop. Buildings with busy entrances often add a scrub-and-recoat on their floors in the spring for this reason. If a quote covers the whole year at one price, the winter months are built into it.
5. Who buys the supplies
Paper towels, toilet tissue, soap and can liners are either supplied by the building or by the cleaning company. When the cleaner supplies them it commonly adds 5 to 10 percent to a mid-size office bill. Neither way is wrong, but it needs to be stated in the proposal so you’re comparing like with like.
6. Insurance and paperwork
Property managers for Class A buildings ask for certificates of insurance with higher liability limits, background-checked staff and sometimes bonding. Cleaning under a City of Denver contract can fall under the city’s prevailing wage rules, which set a pay floor well above minimum wage. Those requirements are legitimate, and they cost money to meet, which is one more reason a quote for the same building varies between a company that meets them and one that doesn’t.
Project work is priced separately
Routine janitorial is one price. The one-time jobs below are quoted on their own, usually per square foot.
Post-construction cleaning. Commercial post-construction work in 2026 runs about $0.15 to $0.80 per square foot depending on the phase. A rough clean (debris, bulk dust, while trades are still finishing) is $0.10 to $0.30. The final clean, which is the top-to-bottom detail of every surface, fixture and window, is $0.30 to $0.75. A touch-up pass right before opening adds $0.10 to $0.20. Medical and lab buildouts sit at the top of those ranges or above them. General contractors usually buy all three phases as one scope. More detail on our post-construction cleaning page.
VCT floor stripping and waxing. A full strip and wax of vinyl composition tile is typically $0.50 to $1.50 per square foot. Open warehouse floors come in at the low end, around $0.30 to $0.55. Offices with furniture to move run $0.45 to $0.75. A neglected floor with years of yellowed buildup can reach $1.25 to $3.00 because the old finish has to be stripped in several passes. The cheaper habit is a scrub-and-recoat every few months, which costs a fraction of a strip and keeps you from ever needing the expensive version. See VCT floor stripping and waxing.
One-time deep cleans. Billed by the hour. Two cleaners for a half day, which covers most small offices before a move-in or after a tenant leaves, usually comes to $400 to $900.
How to get a quote you can compare
Most bad comparisons happen because two companies quoted two different jobs. Give every bidder the same information:
- Square footage by area, not just the total. Office, restrooms, break room, lobby, warehouse.
- Restroom count and fixture count.
- Visits per week and the hours the crew can be in the building.
- Who supplies paper, soap and liners.
- Floor types, and whether floor care is in scope or quoted separately.
- Anything unusual: a lab, a commercial kitchen, a gym, a server room, a loading dock.
- Your insurance and background-check requirements.
Then ask each company for the scope in writing, listed by area and frequency, with the per-visit price shown. Ask who supervises the crew and how a problem gets reported to you. If a bidder won’t walk the building before quoting, the number is a guess.
When the cheap quote costs more
We lose bids on price sometimes, and we get some of those buildings back six months later. The pattern is familiar: one crew spread across too many buildings, nobody checking the work, a restroom that ran out of paper on a Friday, and then a no-show. On a 5,000 square foot office the gap between a $1,400 and a $1,900 quote is usually the difference between a company paying its people legally, insuring them and supervising them, and one that is doing some of that. It’s worth asking which parts.
Common questions
Is there a minimum charge?
Most Denver companies have a per-visit minimum, commonly somewhere around $75 to $150. Very small suites are priced at the minimum rather than by square foot.
Do I need a long-term contract?
It varies. Some companies require twelve months. We quote month to month and adjust the scope when your building or headcount changes.
Are rates the same in Aurora, Lakewood and Englewood?
Mostly, yes. The metro is one labor market. Where you’ll see a difference is on very small jobs a long drive out, where travel time becomes a real share of the visit.
What’s the cheapest way to lower the bill?
Cut the scope, not the frequency. Dropping from three visits to two saves less than people expect, because each remaining visit takes longer. Taking desks and offices out of the nightly scope and keeping restrooms, break rooms and trash on the schedule saves more and keeps the building presentable.
Get a number for your building
We’ve cleaned everything from 2,000 square foot suites to a 30-story, 595,000 square foot office tower downtown, and every one of them started with a walkthrough. If you’d like a written proposal for your building, with the scope listed by area and the per-visit price shown, send us the details or call (720) 840-9277. For what’s included in a routine program, see our office cleaning and janitorial services pages.
