How much is a house cleaning business worth?

Short answer: most house cleaning businesses sell for roughly 2× to 2.25× seller's discretionary earnings (SDE) — the profit left for one working owner. On $180,000 of SDE, that is about $360,000 to $405,000. The asset being bought is not mops and vacuums. It is the recurring client list, and how much of it is still there the month after you leave. Run your own numbers in the valuation calculator, and see the full picture on our house cleaners industry page.

The number

House cleaning has no trade-specific realized multiple of its own, so be honest about the data: BizBuySell's trailing-five-year closed sales (Q3 2021 through Q2 2026) put its broader Cleaning Businesses category at an average of 2.25× SDE and 0.72× revenue, with a median sale price of $281,500. The IBBA Market Pulse size ladder (Q2 2026) frames it by deal size: 2.0× SDE under a $500K price, 2.8× at $500K–$1M, 3.1× at $1M–$2M. Most cleaning deals land in the first rung.

A worked example (margins are assumptions, not promises):

• Revenue: $600,000
• SDE margin, assumed: 30% → SDE = $600,000 × 0.30 = $180,000
• IBBA ladder at this size: 2.0× → $180,000 × 2.0 = $360,000
• BizBuySell cleaning-category average: 2.25× → $180,000 × 2.25 = $405,000

Two independent sources, one neighborhood: roughly $360,000–$405,000. For contrast, large public Business & Consumer Services companies trade at 14.26× EV/EBITDA (Damodaran Online, January 2026) — a proxy ceiling for diversified, liquid companies with management teams, not a price for a local cleaning route. Buyers price risk and opportunity cost; a business that depends on one owner's phone number carries both.

How buyers actually value a house cleaning business

Buyers in this trade do not buy revenue. They buy recurring cleans that survive the handoff, and they underwrite three things. First, the recurring book: what share of revenue is weekly and biweekly clients on a standing schedule versus one-time deep cleans and move-outs that never repeat. A book that is 70% recurring is a different asset from one that re-sells every job. Second, who holds the relationships — if clients know the owner by name and the cleaners rotate monthly, buyers assume churn the day the sale is announced; if clients book through an office, get confirmations by text, and barely know who shows up, the book transfers. Third, labor structure: W-2 teams with training and checklists price higher than 1099 crews a buyer may have to reclassify. Route density gets checked too — 200 clients inside one zip cluster are worth more than 200 scattered across a county, because drive time is margin nobody invoices.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it:

• Recurring share above ~70% of revenue, with clients prepaying or on card-on-file
• Documented churn under ~3% a month and a waitlist in peak season
• Tight routes: more cleans per crew per day without overtime
• A team lead who quotes, quality-checks, and handles complaints — the owner off the tools
• Move-in/move-out and Airbnb turnover contracts with realtors and property managers as a second channel

Kills it:

• The owner still cleans houses four days a week — the buyer is purchasing a job
• Cash-heavy books with no records to verify revenue
• Cleaner turnover so high that clients see a stranger every visit and cancel
• One-time deep cleans making up most of a "big" revenue number
• Prices never raised in five years — the buyer inherits the increase fight

Move your number

Three levers move a cleaning company's price, and none of them is "clean more houses." Protect the margin you already have: card-on-file billing for every recurring client and sane processing costs turn late payments and fee drag into SDE — the Finix payments team is who we route that work to. Make revenue recur without you: automated booking reminders, rebooking prompts, and quote follow-up that run while you are off the tools are an operations build — that is the ClaroPro team's lane. Replace your memory with a system: client notes, key codes, pet warnings, and route logic living in software instead of your head is what makes the book transferable; a Nova engineering team builds that kind of system when off-the-shelf tools stop fitting. Start by seeing where your number sits today: run the calculator with your figures.

None of this is an appraisal, and no page on the internet can price your specific client list. It is an educational framework with the math shown, so you can check every step yourself. We publish the assumptions and the caveats out in the open for one reason: they protect you — the owner — from overpaying for someone else's route, underselling the one you built, or signing a deal priced on numbers nobody verified. A real price is set by a real buyer, on a specific day, after they have walked your routes and read your books.