Employing a cleaner in the UK costs significantly more than their hourly wage. You must stack Employer National Insurance, pension contributions, statutory holiday accrual (12.07%), paid travel time, and consumables to find your true breakeven cost.
Opso does this for your whole team and every client, showing you exactly which jobs are profitable and which are losing money.
See Your Margins in OpsoAt MyCleanTeam, we pay our staff £11.44 per hour (the National Living Wage). If a cleaner works 16 hours a week, and spends 2 hours travelling between jobs (paid at the same rate), their gross pay is £205.92.
Because £205.92 is above the £175 Employer NI threshold, we pay £4.27 in Employer NI. Because it's above the £120 pension threshold, we pay £2.58 in employer pension contributions. We also accrue £24.85 in holiday pay (12.07% of gross).
Adding £5 for consumables, our true cost for that cleaner is £242.62 per week. To break even on their 16 hours of actual cleaning, we must charge the client at least £15.16 per hour. To hit a 30% gross margin, we need to charge £21.66 per hour.
By Fahim, operator of MyCleanTeam
In the UK, if a cleaner travels between jobs during a shift, that travel time counts as working time. Their average hourly pay across the whole shift, including travel, must not fall below the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage.
The statutory minimum holiday in the UK is 5.6 weeks per year. For variable-hours workers, 5.6 weeks is exactly 12.07% of the 46.4 weeks they actually work (52 - 5.6). Every time you pay them £100, you are accruing a liability of £12.07 for their holiday.
