What it actually costs to clean a hotel room.
The wage line is easy. The hours you pay against the hours the rooms needed are where the money goes.
Ask a hotel what it costs to clean a room and you’ll usually get the hourly wage. That’s the smallest part of the answer. A room’s cost is the wage, plus what it costs to employ someone on top of it, multiplied by the minutes the room takes, plus the paid time that isn’t spent in any room at all.
This page works that out in full for one modelled 31-room property, at the UK and Irish legal minimums in force today. Every figure is shown with its method, so you can check it, and the housekeeping cost calculator runs the same maths on your own numbers.
The model
Three lines, the same ones the calculator uses, so the two can never disagree:
- Loaded rate = hourly wage × (1 + employer on-costs)
- Allowance hours = (departures × departure minutes + stay-overs × stay-over minutes + housekeepers × paid break minutes) ÷ 60
- Cost per room = allowance hours × loaded rate ÷ rooms cleaned
The property: 31 rooms, 20 departures and 11 stay-overs on the day, a standard of 30 minutes a departure and 15 a stay-over, six housekeepers with a 30-minute paid break each. That’s an allowance of 15.75 hours.
The wage is the UK National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over: £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026. In Ireland the National Minimum Wage is €14.15 from 1 January 2026. Both change every year. If the date above is more than a year old, so is the rate.
What a room costs, at three levels of on-cost
On-costs are the part most people guess. Employer National Insurance and pension for a part-time housekeeper in the UK typically land around 12–15%. US sources commonly put the figure nearer 30%. So the table shows all three.
| On-costs | Loaded rate | The day | Per room | Per room in Ireland |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12% | £14.24 | £224.20 | £7.23 | €8.05 |
| 20% | £15.25 | £240.22 | £7.75 | €8.63 |
| 30% | £16.52 | £260.24 | £8.39 | €9.35 |
The spread between 12% and 30% is £1.16 a room. Across 31 rooms a day, that’s over £13,000 a year. If you’ve never worked out your own on-cost figure, 20% is a reasonable middle, but it’s worth the half hour with your payroll to know.
Strip the breaks out and look at a single room in isolation. A departure costs £7.12 / £7.63 / £8.26 at the three levels, and a stay-over costs £3.56 / £3.81 / £4.13. Those figures are lower than the per-room average because breaks are paid whether or not a room is being cleaned.
How that compares with a measured benchmark
The model gives 24.7 minutes of room-attendant time per room: (20 × 30 + 11 × 15) ÷ 31. HotelData.com and Actabl’s 2025 figures for US hotels, as collated by Rapid Eye Inspections, put measured room-attendant time at 24.67 minutes per occupied room. A standard built from first principles in a British hotel and an average measured across thousands of American ones land on the same number to the nearest tenth of a minute.
The money does not read across. The same source puts US room-attendant labour at $7.32 per occupied room, and the model above gives £7.23. That’s a coincidence of two different currencies, wage floors and employment-cost regimes, not a match. The minutes are comparable; the pounds and dollars aren’t.
The cost nobody budgets for
The allowance is what the rooms needed. Payroll is what you paid. The gap between them is usually the largest number on this page, and the one nobody looks at.
At 12% on-costs, against the 15.75-hour allowance:
| Hours paid | Over allowance | A day | A year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16.50 | 0.75 h | £10.68 | £3,897 |
| 17.50 | 1.75 h | £24.91 | £9,093 |
| 18.50 | 2.75 h | £39.15 | £14,289 |
None of that is a wage problem. It’s people waiting for a room to become free, walking the building for linen, or a rota written for a busier day than the one you got.
Three minutes a departure
Take three minutes off each of the 20 departures and, at £14.24 an hour, that’s £5,196 a year, or €5,785 at the Irish rate. It’s not achieved by working faster. It comes from cutting the walking, the hunting for linen and the guessing about which room is free.
What this page deliberately does not claim
This is a labour floor, not the full cost of a clean room. Laundry, linen, chemicals, amenities and supervision all sit on top. One industry estimate, from Mews via the same collation, puts room-attendant labour at around 40% of the all-in cost of cleaning a room.
The figures are modelled, not measured. BedsReady’s own timing data doesn’t yet hold enough completed hotel-room cleans to publish an average. When there’s a clean quarter of it, this section gets replaced with what was actually measured, and the page will say so.
Wider bands exist and aren’t used here. Some published all-in cost-per-occupied-room ranges run from $25 to over $100. They include costs well beyond housekeeping, so quoting them here would flatter the point.
Run it on your own numbers
Your rooms, your standard minutes, your wage and on-costs, and the hours you actually paid.
The calculator does it in a minute and keeps your figures in your own browser.