In-house janitor or outsourced cleaning: which is actually cheaper?

For most Miami offices, outsourcing is cheaper — and it is usually not close. Commercial cleaning with JAS starts at $185 per weekly visit for spaces up to 1,000 sq ft; 52 of those visits cost $9,620 a year at a 6pm start — visits starting at 7pm or later carry the published +50% late-hours surcharge, which puts the same weekly schedule at $14,430. A full-time janitor at $15 an hour costs $31,200 a year in wages before a single payroll tax, mop, or vacation day is paid. In-house starts to win only when your building genuinely needs someone on the floor all day.

Let’s be clear about where those numbers come from, because this article isn’t going to invent any. The $185 is the commercial floor of our Miami-Dade rates — our janitorial page publishes the size bands and their durations. The $15 an hour is the step Florida’s minimum wage reaches on September 30, 2026 under the schedule voters approved in 2020 — general information, not HR advice — and a facilities hire you would trust with the keys rarely works for the minimum, so $31,200 (40 hours × 52 weeks × $15) is the cheapest possible version of the wage line. The real cost of an employee starts there and only goes up.

The wage is the smallest honest number

When a business weighs hiring against a contract, it almost always puts the wage next to the visit price — and that comparison is built wrong, because the visit price is a complete cost and the wage is not. Here are the lines the job posting never shows:

• Payroll taxes and workers’ comp. Employer-side payroll taxes and workers’ compensation ride on every hour you pay. On a contract, staffing costs are the vendor’s problem, priced into the visit.
• Supplies and equipment. A vacuum that gets repaired, a floor machine, chemicals, paper stock — with an employee, the purchasing, storage, and restocking column is yours. With a contract, who supplies what is a line in the written scope, settled before the first visit.
• Coverage. The restrooms do not take vacation. Sick days, holidays, turnover, and the two weeks it takes to replace someone are all yours to bridge; a contracted visit is the vendor’s to staff, whatever any one person’s calendar says.
• Supervision and proof. Somebody writes the task list, inspects the work, and answers “were the restrooms done Tuesday?” — usually an office manager doing it on top of a different job. A janitorial contract puts a frequency next to every task in writing, and on eligible completed visits a CleanCheck report answers that question with photos instead of a walk of the floor.

And there is one more line property managers know well: the vendor file. With an employee, any incident on your floor lands on your own policies. A serious contractor shows up with its own — JAS carries $2M general liability, every cleaner passes a background check, a COI naming your building as certificate holder goes out within 2 business hours, and a W-9 is available on request. With an employee, that paperwork is also yours to build.

“An employee costs the same in the week the building needed forty hours of cleaning and the week it needed eleven. A contract only ever bills the visits.”

What the contract side costs — with published numbers

The outsourced side of the scale doesn’t need estimating, because it is published. Commercial work with JAS starts at $185 per weekly visit up to 1,000 sq ft, and the full range by size sits on our office cleaning in Miami page: $185–$240 per visit at 1,000–1,500 sq ft, $240–$480 up to 3,000. Frequency moves the number in a known direction — nightly service keeps each visit light, while monthly visits carry more accumulated work — and we do not publish an instant online price for buildings because scope varies too much from one to the next: we walk the space, then send a written quote, usually within one business day.

What you buy for that price is also defined before anything starts: a written scope of work you approve before the first visit, with a frequency next to every task, covered by evening crews from 6pm to 10pm so nobody works around a vacuum. You are billed after each completed visit, with no long-term lock-in — we earn the contract every visit. And if you are wondering what that written contract should spell out before you sign with any vendor, that has its own article: what should be included in a commercial cleaning contract.

Where each one wins, by facility size

Up to ~1,500 sq ft: the contract, walking away

At this size there are not enough cleaning hours in the space to fill a shift — hiring in-house means paying someone to look for work. A weekly visit in the published $185–$240 band costs less than two days of a single full-time wage at $15 an hour, before any of the wage’s add-ons from the section above. The decision here isn’t financial; it’s arithmetic.

1,500 to 8,000 sq ft: usually still the contract

The contract’s advantage in this range isn’t just price — it’s that you buy exactly the hours the building needs, at the cadence it needs, and not one more. Said honestly: the bigger the space, the closer the race gets. At the top of the published ladder — $800–$1,120 per weekly visit at 5,000–8,000 sq ft — the annual comparison against a full-time hire becomes a real calculation, and it turns on your layout, your restroom count, and your cadence. That is what the walkthrough is for: the honest comparison at this size is a written quote next to your own payroll math, not a blog post’s arithmetic.

The building that needs someone all day: in-house wins

Some buildings aren’t buying cleaning hours at all — they are buying presence: the noon spill, the lobby presentable at 3pm, restrooms checked between meetings, a conference room flipped between events. That is day-porter territory — we’ve written about what a day porter is and whether your building needs one — and there an employee of your own (or an hourly porter) is the right buy, because no visit schedule replaces a person standing on the floor. We say it plainly: JAS does not staff day porters today and will not pretend otherwise. The hybrid we see work is your daytime person plus a contracted crew doing the heavy cleaning on the evening shift.

If you already outsource and it isn’t working

One last nuance, because this question is often asked by someone burned by their current vendor: a bad contract is not an argument for hiring. If visits keep skipping tasks and nobody answers the email, the problem is almost never outsourcing itself — it is that scope or that vendor, and fixing it costs far less than absorbing a full salary with all its hidden lines. We’ve written up how to compare commercial cleaning bids — worth reading before you post the job listing.

FAQ

This guide is part of the JAS operating playbook — written for the person who has to defend this decision to a budget, not to a blog.