Cleaning Tips · Original Data
How long does a commercial clean actually take? We do not have to guess: our crews clock in and out at the building. We measured 6,897 fully clocked commercial cleans across 58 Polk County buildings between 2024 and 2026, and broke the results out by the kind of building. Our median dealership visit runs about 3.7 times as long as our median apartment or HOA visit, and both get an invoice that just says “cleaning”.
By Joey Maher, Owner, Orchid Cleaning Service.
Key findings at a glance
Based on 6,897 fully clocked commercial cleans at 58 Polk County buildings, 2024–2026.
A car dealership runs a median of 3 hr 34 min on site and an apartment or HOA property 58 min, with construction sites, warehouses, medical suites, churches and offices spread between them. “Median” is the middle: half the visits were quicker, half slower. The “typical range” is where the middle half of visits landed. The counts below are visits with a complete clock-in and clock-out; a small number of visits each year are missing one end of the clock and are excluded.
| Type of building | Median time on site | Typical range | Cleans clocked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car dealers & auto 4 buildings · 2,233 clocked visits |
3 hr 34 min | 2 hr 33 min – 4 hr 49 min | 2,233 |
| Construction sites 9 buildings · 432 clocked visits |
2 hr 37 min | 1 hr 56 min – 4 hr 12 min | 432 |
| Industrial & warehouse 14 buildings · 1,418 clocked visits |
2 hr 1 min | 1 hr 18 min – 2 hr 55 min | 1,418 |
| Medical & dental 3 buildings · 274 clocked visits |
2 hr | 1 hr 18 min – 2 hr 42 min | 274 |
| Churches 5 buildings · 534 clocked visits |
1 hr 44 min | 1 hr 13 min – 2 hr 21 min | 534 |
| Offices & professional 5 buildings · 687 clocked visits |
1 hr 11 min | 53 min – 1 hr 31 min | 687 |
| Apartments & HOA 18 buildings · 1,319 clocked visits |
58 min | 37 min – 1 hr 42 min | 1,319 |
Source: Orchid Cleaning Service clocked commercial job times, Polk County, FL, 2024–2026. 6,897 fully clocked visits (out of 7,393 completed commercial cleans) at 58 buildings, drawn from the active commercial account list (65 of 71 accounts matched to job records; the rest are invoiced entirely through our accounting system and carry no job-ticket history). Categories with fewer than 30 clocked cleans are not shown. Times are total on-site duration for the visit and do not account for crew size.
The spread between the top and the bottom of that table is the whole point. Our median visit to a car dealership ran 3 hr 34 min. Our median visit to an apartment or HOA property ran 58 min. That row covers 18 buildings of mixed type, so read it as our apartment and HOA work overall rather than as a clubhouse figure. Both of those get an invoice that says “cleaning” on it.
The buildings at the top are the ones with a lot of public-facing surface. A dealership is glass, showroom floor, customer restrooms and service bays, and all of it is on display to somebody deciding whether to spend thirty thousand dollars. A construction site is the other kind of long job: dust that has to come off every surface twice before a punch-list walk. The buildings at the bottom are smaller, more repeatable, and the crew has usually done that exact room a hundred times.
One caveat we would rather state than have pointed out: our car-dealer figure is dominated by two accounts, which between them account for about 93% of the cleans in that row. It is an accurate description of the dealership work we do. It is not a survey of dealerships in general. The same caution applies to any row resting on a handful of buildings: medical sits on three, and churches and offices on five each. Repeat visits to the same building do not make it a bigger sample of buildings.
Square footage matters less than people assume. What moves the clock is how many separate rooms have to be entered, how many restrooms there are, and how much of the space the public sees. A 6,000 sq ft warehouse with two restrooms and an office can be quicker than a 2,500 sq ft medical suite with eight exam rooms, because the medical suite has a protocol for every room and the warehouse mostly has floor.
Frequency matters too, in the opposite direction from what people expect. A building cleaned five nights a week is faster per visit than the same building cleaned every other week, because nothing has had time to accumulate. If you are comparing a weekly quote against a monthly one, you are not comparing the same job.
We publish residential prices because residential cleans carry a flat service price we can report honestly. Commercial work does not behave that way. Every commercial building is quoted after a walkthrough, and most commercial work is invoiced through our accounting system rather than carrying a price on the job ticket at all. Publishing a price-per-building-type table would mean inventing a unit that does not exist in our records.
Time is what we can measure without guessing. Crews clock in and out at the building, so the durations above are timestamps rather than recollections.
Read time on site as elapsed time, not labour. Crew size varies by building and by night, and we are not reporting it here, because our scheduling records are not a reliable source for how many cleaners were physically on a site. A two-person 90-minute visit and a one-person 90-minute visit are very different amounts of work, and this table cannot tell those apart.
If you are weighing cleaning quotes for your own building, the useful question is not the price. It is how long the crew intends to be inside, and how many of them there will be. Ask that, then check it against the row above that looks most like your building.
A bid that implies forty minutes for a building we would spend two hours in is not a better deal. It is a different scope, and the difference will show up in the rooms nobody looked at.
Every figure on this page comes from Orchid Cleaning Service’s own clocked job records. Our crews clock in and out at the building, so these are measured on-site durations, not estimates. We included 6,897 fully clocked visits, drawn from 7,393 completed commercial cleans, across 58 buildings in Polk County, Florida, between 2024 and 2026, matched from our active commercial account list (65 of 71 active accounts matched to job records; the remainder are billed entirely through QuickBooks and carry no Housecall Pro job history). Buildings were grouped by type from the account, and any category with fewer than 30 clocked cleans is not reported, which is why restaurants do not appear. “Median” is the middle value and “typical range” is the 25th-to-75th-percentile span. These are times, not prices. Commercial work is quoted per building after a walkthrough and most of it is invoiced through QuickBooks rather than carrying a price on the job ticket, so a price comparison across building types would not be meaningful. Time on site is the honest comparison. Times are total on-site duration for the visit; crew size varies by building and is not reported here. You are welcome to cite this data with attribution to Orchid Cleaning Service (orchidcleaningservice.com). Published August 2026.
You're welcome to cite or reference this data with attribution to Orchid Cleaning Service (orchidcleaningservice.com). Published August 2026.
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