Research
What house cleaning actually costs in the Seattle metro
Almost every price range published for house cleaning is assembled from surveys, directory listings and competitors' own rate cards. This one is measured from 823 completed cleanings: what people actually paid, not what anyone estimates they might.
Covers the 120 days ending August 2026 · Updated quarterly
Median price by home size
Recurring biweekly cleaning, the most common arrangement. Prices are the full amount billed for a visit, including tax and any recurring discount already applied.
| Home size | Lower quartile | Median | Upper quartile | Cleanings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1,000 sq ft | $160.65 | $170.65 | $210.02 | 256 |
| 1,000 to 1,599 sq ft | $203.15 | $241.40 | $271.15 | 320 |
| 1,600 to 2,799 sq ft | $305.15 | $339.15 | $381.65 | 247 |
The quartiles matter more than the median. Half of all homes in each size band fall between the lower and upper figure, so that span is the range a household should expect to be quoted. A number well outside it is worth asking about in either direction.
How this was measured
Source. Completed, billed cleanings from the operating systems of an affiliated Puget Sound cleaning company, Rain City Maids. MaidWise does not yet operate its own routes in this region, and this index will move to MaidWise's own transaction data as that changes. It is stated here rather than buried because the provenance is the whole point.
What is counted. Every completed, non-cancelled biweekly cleaning in the 120 days to August 2026, where the home's square footage was recorded and the visit was actually billed. Not quotes. Not list prices. Not estimates.
What is excluded, and why.
- Cancelled and unbilled visits, which carry no price paid.
- Grandfathered discount rates. Long-standing customers sit on older recurring discounts that a new household cannot be offered. Including them would advertise a price nobody can actually get.
- One-time and deep cleans, which are a different service at a different price and would inflate a recurring-cleaning figure.
- Homes above 2,800 sq ft, on sample size.
Size bands. Bands above 1,600 sq ft are reported together. Split further, the medians land within about $9 of each other, which implies a precision the data does not support.
Refresh. Quarterly, on a rolling 120-day window. The "as of" date at the top of this page moves with the figures. If it looks stale, the numbers are stale.
It does not cover Pierce County. The operating company behind this data serves King and Snohomish counties and has no customers in Tacoma, Lakewood, Puyallup or the wider South Sound. Prices there may differ and this index should not be read as measuring them.
Limitations. This is a census of one operator's completed work, not a random sample of the regional market. It reflects the prices of a professional, insured, employee-based service. Households buying from individual cleaners or informal arrangements will see lower figures, and this index does not attempt to measure that segment.
Why measured beats compiled
The cleaning price ranges that circulate online are mostly aggregations: a wage figure from public labour statistics, a spread of estimates from directory sites, and a competitor's published rate card, averaged into a range. Each input is itself an estimate, so the output inherits every one of their errors and adds its own.
A transaction record has none of that distance from reality. Somebody was quoted a price, agreed to it, had their home cleaned, and paid. The only judgement involved is which transactions to include, which is why the exclusions above are stated in full rather than summarised.
It is the same reason payroll-derived employment figures are taken more seriously than employment surveys. Measuring what happened beats asking people what they think happens.
Using these figures
This page is free to cite and quote, with attribution to MaidWise and a link back. If you are writing about cleaning costs and need a cut of the data that is not published here, the underlying aggregates exist and can be shared.