The honest answer first: there is no per-square-metre price for office cleaning that would be credible without looking at your premises. There is, however, a calculation logic you can follow, a tariff-based floor, and a set of guide values that let you place any offer you receive — and that is exactly what this article provides. If you would rather calculate straight away, our price calculator translates floor area, sector and cleaning frequency into a monthly range, non-binding and without asking for contact details. And what a professional office cleaning service includes in detail is set out transparently on the service page.
This article explains how a cleaning price in Berlin actually comes about in 2026: what the fully loaded hourly rate consists of, why the industry's collectively agreed wage puts a hard floor under every serious calculation, which characteristics of your office move the price up or down — and how to recognise that a suspiciously cheap offer will end up costing you more than a solid one.
The orientation: what you should expect
Office cleaning in Germany is usually offered as a monthly flat rate, derived from three quantities: the floor area, the cleaning frequency, and the time a cleaner needs per square metre. As a rough guide for an average Berlin office: with cleaning on two to three days per week, the monthly rate typically lands between €1.50 and €2.50 per square metre; with daily cleaning, between €3 and €4.50. A small office of 300 m² cleaned twice a week therefore sits in the region of €450 to €750 per month; the same floor cleaned daily costs two to three times as much.
These ranges are deliberately wide, because they cover very different buildings — from a tidy open-plan floor with smooth surfaces to a compartmentalised Altbau storey with three kitchenettes. A provider who quotes you an exact price without a site visit has either built in generous safety margins or will renegotiate later. Both cost you more than a price based on a proper survey.
How the price is built: the calculation behind the flat rate
Cleaning is a personnel service. Depending on the building, 75 to 85 percent of the cost is wages and payroll on-costs — materials, machines, travel, administration and profit share the rest. To understand what office cleaning costs, you only need to follow one calculation:
Monthly price = area ÷ productivity × fully loaded hourly rate × cleans per month
Productivity describes how many square metres one cleaner covers per hour. In open office space with little furniture, 250 to 300 m² per hour is realistic; in compartmentalised floors with many individual offices, meeting rooms and sanitary areas the figure drops considerably, sometimes below 200. This is where your price is decided — not at the cleaning agent shelf.
The fully loaded hourly rate is the price of one working hour including all on-costs. It consists of the tariff wage, employer social-security contributions, paid holiday and sick pay, supplements, materials and equipment, travel, supervision and administration, plus the company's margin. In commercial cleaning in 2026, this full-cost rate typically sits between €26 and €34 per hour depending on the operation and the service. Anyone offering clearly below that is saving on one of those positions — and none of them can be cut without you noticing it in the result or in the risk.
The 2026 tariff wage: the floor under every serious calculation
Commercial cleaning is one of the few German industries with a generally binding collective agreement: it applies to every business that provides cleaning services, whether or not it is a signatory. Since 1 January 2026, the collectively agreed hourly wage in wage group 1 (maintenance cleaning) is €15.00; in wage group 6 (glass and façade cleaning) it is €18.40. For comparison: the statutory minimum wage in 2026 is €13.90.
From the tariff wage you can derive the floor of an honest offer. On top of a €15.00 hourly wage come roughly 25 to 30 percent employer contributions and payroll on-costs — which means one hour of labour already costs the company over €19 before a single mop, a trip to site or a supervisor is paid. An offer with a charge-out rate around €20 therefore cannot be cleanly calculated: it only works with unpaid overtime, with subcontractor chains, or with a paper productivity figure no cleaner can sustain on site.
A cleaning price below the tariff wage cost is not a good deal. It is an announcement that the saving will be made on your quality or on the staff.
What that means for you as the client — legally too — is set out in detail in our article on client liability when buying cleaning services.
What moves your price up or down
Seven characteristics of your building determine the price more than anything else:
Cleaning frequency. The biggest lever. Between one clean per week and daily cleaning lies roughly a factor of five in the monthly rate. At the same time, the price per individual clean falls slightly as frequency rises, because travel and set-up time are spread and less accumulated soiling has to be dealt with per visit. Which rhythm suits your usage depends on occupancy and visitor traffic — see our guide to cleaning intervals.
Floor-plan structure. An open loft cleans faster than the same area spread over twelve individual offices, two kitchenettes and three sanitary rooms. Doors, corners, furniture density and changes of flooring all cost time.
Sanitary and kitchen share. Sanitary rooms and kitchenettes need a multiple of the time per square metre, plus their own materials and hygiene procedures. Two offices with the same total area can differ by 20 percent in price for this reason alone.
Floor coverings. Carpet demands different equipment and intervals than vinyl or parquet; delicate floors slow the work down.
Visitor traffic and occupancy. An office with a client reception and full attendance soils faster than a hybrid floor at 40 percent occupancy. Serious providers ask about this — flat-rate prices do not.
Cleaning times. Cleaning during office hours is cheaper than night work with supplements, but requires coordinated routines. Early-morning or evening slots are the usual compromise.
Additional services. Window cleaning, deep cleaning once or twice a year, winter services or consumables management are calculated separately. A comparison is only meaningful if all offers contain the same scope — how to define that scope cleanly is the subject of our guide to the cleaning specification.
Flat rate, hourly rate or price per square metre?
Offers come in three pricing models. The monthly flat rate is the standard for recurring maintenance cleaning: predictable for both sides, comparable, and it sets the incentive correctly — you pay for the result, not for attendance. The hourly rate suits special services and hard-to-plan call-outs; as a permanent model it shifts the efficiency risk entirely onto you. The bare price per square metre, finally, works as a comparison figure but invites apples-and-oranges comparisons whenever frequency and scope are not identical.
A robust offer states all three figures if asked: the flat rate, the calculated hours behind it, and the resulting per-square-metre value. That lets you see immediately whether the calculation fits your building — or whether it assumes a productivity figure no cleaner can sustain.
A worked example: a 500 m² office in Berlin
Take a typical Berlin office: 500 m², a mix of open-plan and individual offices, two kitchenettes, two sanitary areas, cleaning on three evenings per week. A realistic productivity for this structure is around 230 m² per hour — so roughly 2.2 hours per clean. With 13 cleans a month, that makes about 28 working hours. At a full-cost rate of €29 per hour, the calculation lands at a monthly flat rate of about €820, or roughly €1.65 per square metre.
The same office cleaned daily: around 48 hours a month, about €1,400, €2.80 per square metre. And with only one weekly clean: around 10 hours, about €290 — with visibly accumulated soiling between visits. These figures are a worked example, not a price list; but they show the order of magnitude an honest offer for such a building has to move in. If an offer undercuts that by 40 percent, nobody calculated better — something was left out.
Why the cheapest provider is rarely the least expensive
The price difference between a solid offer and an aggressively cheap one is often €150 to €300 a month for a mid-sized office. Against that stand the typical follow-on costs of the cheap offer: constantly changing staff who do not know your building; complaint loops that cost your own people working time; services billed but not delivered, which nobody checks; and in the worst case a provider working through subcontractors whose employment arrangements you cannot see. Add the cost of switching when it fails — notice period, re-tendering, onboarding. What an orderly switch involves is described in our checklist for changing cleaning providers.
Once you count those items, the mid-priced offer with a clean calculation, directly employed staff and a reachable supervisor is almost always the most economical. The price per square metre is an important number — but it is not the bill that counts at the end of the year.
How to get a price you can rely on
The shortest route to a real price takes three steps. First: use the price calculator to get a range for your key figures — area, sector, frequency. Second: have the premises surveyed; a serious walk-through rarely takes more than half an hour and is the basis of any flat rate that holds. Third: request a written quote with the hour calculation stated and a clearly defined specification — then you are comparing offers that deserve the name.
Distrust any price that comes about without these steps. Your office is not an average building, and a price calculated for the average ends up fitting nobody — except the person who wrote it.