How much to clean a 3 bedroom house? And every other size
A three-bedroom house in Metro Vancouver is normally five billable hours — $160 at $32 per hour, per cleaner. A two-bedroom condo is $128. A studio is $64. Below is the full table, and the three things that move those hours up or down.
- Billable hours are hours of one cleaner. Two people for two and a half hours is five billable hours — the same price as one person for five
- Square footage is the worst predictor of how long a home takes. Bathrooms are the best
- The first visit always runs longer. We say so before you book, not on the day
What each home size actually costs
Every total below is the same sum: rate × billable hours. Nothing else goes into it — no call-out fee, no travel surcharge, no minimum booking. The hours are what we actually book for a maintained home on a recurring plan.
| Home | Rooms | General clean $32/h |
First deep clean $36/h |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio kitchen and 1 bathroom |
2 | 2 h $64 |
3 h $108 |
| 1-bed condo 1 bathroom, kitchen, living |
4 | 3 h $96 |
4 h $144 |
| 2-bed condo 2 bathrooms, kitchen, living |
6 | 4 h $128 |
5 h $180 |
| 3-bed house 2 bathrooms, kitchen, dining, living |
8 | 5 h $160 |
6 h $216 |
| 4-bed house 3 bathrooms, kitchen, dining, living |
10 | 6 h $192 |
7 h $252 |
| 5-bed house 4 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, dining, living |
13 | 8 h $256 |
quoted on sight |
The rule behind the table, so you can run it yourself. Count the rooms — bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, dining and living. A general clean is rooms ÷ 2, plus one hour. A deep clean is that plus one. A move-out is that plus two, because the furniture has to move. Eight rooms, five hours, six and seven. That is the whole pricing model, and it is the same one we use to quote you.
What moves the hours, and what doesn’t
Most people brief a cleaning company on the wrong number. Here is what we are actually calculating when you tell us about your home.
What we ask about
- How many bathrooms. Each one is 40–50 minutes and the number does not go down with practice
- How long since the last professional clean. Over three months and it is a different service
- Pets. Hair in textiles and skirting adds roughly half an hour per visit in a house
- Clutter on surfaces. We clean around things or we move them; moving them is time
- Stairs. A three-storey townhouse takes longer than a flat home of the same area
What people over-weight
- Total square footage. An open-plan 1,500 sq ft is faster than a divided 1,100
- Bedroom count. A bedroom is dust, a floor and a bed. It is the quickest room in the house
- How “messy” you think it is. Tidying is minutes. Build-up is hours. They are not the same
- Age of the building. Changes what we use, rarely how long it takes
- Whether you are home. Makes no difference to us. Stay if you prefer
Why the floor plan tells you so little
Written for homes in Metro Vancouver. Rates and worked examples updated 14 October 2026.
Square footage is the worst predictor of all
It is the number every quote form asks for, and it is close to useless on its own. A 1,500 sq ft open-plan apartment with one bathroom and a single run of kitchen units is faster to clean than a 1,100 sq ft house carved into seven small rooms with two bathrooms and a staircase.
Area tells us about floors. Floors are the one thing that scales smoothly with space, and they are also the fastest part of the job. Everything slow in a home — bathrooms, kitchens, edges, corners, doorframes, the places two surfaces meet — scales with how many rooms you have cut the space into, not with how much space there is.
The two questions that actually settle it. How many bathrooms, and how long since the last professional clean. If a company quotes you without asking either, they are not estimating your home. They are estimating an average home and hoping yours is close to it.
Bathrooms are the clock
A bathroom done properly is 40 to 50 minutes: the shower screen and its tracks, the silicone seal, grout lines, the toilet including behind and underneath, taps and drains descaled, the mirror and the floor to the edges. That is true in a studio and it is true in a mansion. It does not get faster with repetition, because limescale comes back on its own schedule regardless of how recently someone cleaned.
This is why the jump from a two-bedroom condo to a three-bedroom house is bigger than it looks. You are not adding a bedroom. In most Vancouver houses you are adding a bedroom, half a bathroom of extra fixtures, and a staircase.
The first visit always takes longer, and that is not an upsell
Every home has a baseline. On a recurring plan, each visit only has to restore what changed since the last one, so the hours settle into a predictable number — the ones in the table above. On the very first visit there is no previous visit to restore to, so the team is correcting however long it has been.
For a home cleaned professionally within the last three months, the first visit runs perhaps an hour over and then settles. For a home that has not had one in a year, a general clean cannot finish the job at any length, and what it needs is a deep clean at $36 per hour, per cleaner. We say which one it is before you book. The most common complaint in this industry — and in our own critical reviews — is that conversation happening at the front door instead.
Apartment, condo or house: what really changes
In Vancouver these three words mostly describe the building, not the work. A two-bedroom rental apartment in an older low-rise and a two-bedroom condo in a glass tower take the same time if they have the same number of bathrooms. What genuinely differs is narrower:
Towers have small galley kitchens and floor-to-ceiling glass. The kitchen is quick; the interior glass and the sliding door tracks are not, and they collect condensation here in a way they do not in a dry climate. Older low-rises have separate rooms, more doorframes and more baseboard per square foot. Houses add stairs, more entry dirt, and usually a basement or a laundry room that people forget to mention and then expect included.
If you live in a tower, booking the carpet and upholstery service on the same visit is worth asking about: at $42 per hour, per technician, one trip instead of two is the whole saving.
Pets, and the honest number
A dog or a cat adds roughly thirty minutes to a house-sized visit. The hair is not the hard part — the hard part is that it migrates into fabric, under furniture and along baseboards, and it comes back between visits faster than dust does.
We would rather you tell us at the quote stage. A visit priced without it either runs over, which is awkward for everyone, or finishes on time having skipped something. Neither is what you paid for.
Above 3,000 sq ft the arithmetic changes shape
Past a certain size, adding hours stops working and you add people instead. A home that needs ten hours of labour is better served by three cleaners for a little over three hours than by one cleaner for a ten-hour day: the team keeps a consistent standard, and your home is yours again by the afternoon.
That is why the bottom row of the table is three cleaners and not one. The rate per hour per cleaner does not change — $32 is $32 whether we send one person or four. Only the shape of the visit changes.
And if you are moving out, none of this applies
A move-out clean is priced at $40 per hour, per cleaner, and it is not quoted from the size of the home in the same way. It follows the landlord’s inspection list: inside every cabinet and closet, all appliances, interior windows and their tracks, floors to the edges, and a dated invoice for your file. An empty home actually takes longer than a furnished one, because nothing is hidden and everything is reachable.
In one line. Count your bathrooms, not your square feet. Tell us when the home was last cleaned professionally and whether there is a pet. With those three answers we can quote you in writing without setting foot inside, and that quote does not change on the day.
Now that you know the hours
Tell us the size, get the real number
Four steps, a real time slot and a written total — usually the same day.
Cost by home size: your questions
How much does it cost to clean a 3 bedroom house in Vancouver?
A three-bedroom house with two bathrooms, a kitchen, a dining room and a living room is eight rooms, which is five billable hours: $160 at $32 per hour, per cleaner. The first visit usually runs about an hour longer, and if the home has not been cleaned professionally in over three months it needs a deep clean instead, at $36 per hour, per cleaner. There is no call-out fee, no travel surcharge and no minimum booking anywhere in Metro Vancouver.
How long does it take to clean a 2 bedroom apartment or condo?
Four billable hours, which is $128. A two-bedroom with one bathroom is faster than one with two, because a bathroom is 40 to 50 minutes regardless of the size of the home. A one-bedroom condo is normally three hours, or $96, and a studio is two hours, or $64.
How much to clean a 5 bedroom house?
A five-bedroom house with four bathrooms and two kitchens is thirteen rooms, which is eight billable hours, or $256. On a home that size we send two or three cleaners so it finishes in an afternoon rather than running a ten-hour day, but that does not change the price: eight billable hours cost the same whether they are delivered by one person or by three.
Why do you quote by the hour instead of a flat price?
Because a flat price has to cover the worst case, and most homes are not the worst case. A company quoting a single figure sight unseen either pads it or finds reasons to add to it later. We publish the rate, tell you the hours we expect, and confirm the total in writing before we start. If we finish early you pay for the time used; if we misjudged, that is our error, not a surcharge.
Does the price change if I have pets?
Not the rate, but usually the hours. A dog or a cat adds roughly half an hour to a house-sized visit, because hair works into fabric, under furniture and along baseboards and returns faster than dust. Tell us at the quote stage and it is in the written total. A visit priced without it either runs over or quietly skips something.
Is a bigger home always more expensive to clean?
Not reliably. Square footage mostly predicts floor area, and floors are the fastest part of the job. What predicts time is how many bathrooms there are, how many separate rooms the space is divided into, whether there are stairs, and how long since the last professional clean. An open-plan 1,500 sq ft apartment with one bathroom is quicker than a divided 1,100 sq ft house with two.
Can you quote without visiting my home?
Yes, for general and recurring cleaning. We need the number of bedrooms, the number of bathrooms, when the home was last cleaned professionally and whether there are pets. With those four answers the written quote holds. A first deep clean is the exception: what has built up is not visible from a floor plan, so we ask for a photo of the oven and a bathroom before putting a number on it.
Send us four numbers, get a real quote
Bedrooms, bathrooms, months since the last professional clean, and whether there is a pet. That is enough for a written total that does not move.
Or call (604) 754-8039 — we answer the same day.