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Wage is the number everybody quotes and the smallest part of the answer. This breaks out the rest, line by line, with a source against each one.
Your numbers
Only you can supply these
Your policy
Fully loaded cost per hour
$22.28
$18.00 wage × 1.2378 = $22.28. Burden is 23.8% of wages.
One full-time equivalent at 2,080 hours: $46,342.40 a year, before supervision, supplies, equipment, overhead or profit.
Where every dollar goes
| Component | Rate | $ / hour | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base wage | — | $18.00 | What you typed. |
| FICA — Social Security and MedicareFederal law | 7.65% | $1.38 | 6.2% Social Security plus 1.45% Medicare, employer share. Fixed in federal law. |
| FUTA — federal unemploymentFederal law | 0.60% | $0.11 | 6.0% on the first $7,000 less the 5.4% state credit, so 0.6% effective for an employer in good standing. |
| SUTA — state unemploymentYours | 3.00% | $0.54 | Set per state and experience-rated per employer. Your rate is on your state unemployment notice; nobody can look it up for you. Typical range 0.6–6.2%. New employers start near the top of their state's range and earn their way down. |
| Workers' compensationYours | 3.50% | $0.63 | NCCI class 9014 for janitorial. Swings from roughly 2% to over 15% of payroll with state, carrier and your own experience modification rate. Your broker has the number. Typical range 2.0–15.0%. The single widest-swinging line in the stack. A poor EMR can double it. |
| General liabilityYours | 1.50% | $0.27 | Quoted per company against payroll and revenue. From your certificate of insurance. Typical range 0.8–3.0%. Higher where the work is at height or around equipment. |
| Paid time offYour policy | 3.85% | $0.69 | Your policy. 10 days on 2,080 hours is 3.85%. |
| HolidaysYour policy | 2.70% | $0.49 | Your policy. 7 days on 2,080 hours is 2.7%. |
| Training and orientationYour policy | 1.00% | $0.18 | Paid onboarding and ongoing training, as a share of payroll. |
| Loaded hourly cost | 1.2378× | $22.28 | Wage plus every line above. |
Wage medians are BLS OEWS. Minimum wages are published state and federal minimum wage schedules. Union rates are public summaries of SEIU agreements, approximated and are approximate — a seeded rate looks exactly like a negotiated one, so treat it as the starting point for a call to the local, never as the rate. Nothing on this page is legal or tax advice. Archer uses this same calculation to price a bid.
FICA and FUTA are fixed in federal law and the same for every employer in the country. We can state those. SUTA, workers’ compensation and general liability are not: SUTA is experience-rated per employer within a state range, janitorial workers’ compensation runs from about 2% of payroll to over 15% depending on state, carrier and your own experience modification rate, and liability is quoted company by company.
There is no national table to look any of that up in. A calculator that shipped one would be handing you a guess dressed as data, and the guess would be wrong by more than the margin on most janitorial contracts. So those three are yours to enter, with the industry range shown beside each so you can tell whether what your broker quoted is normal.
Every percentage here applies to gross wages, not to each other. Stacking them — multiplying wage by 1.0765, then that by 1.006, and so on — overstates the hour by a few points, always in the direction that loses bids. On 60,000 hours a year that is real money going to a competitor who did the arithmetic correctly.
This is the cost of an hour of cleaner time and nothing else. A bid also carries supervision, consumables, equipment, mobilization, overhead and profit, and the hours themselves have to come from somewhere — square footage by area type, fixture counts, frequencies, production rates. Archer does that part.
By state
Drop a solicitation in and Archer reads it for what drives labor, prices the hours against production rates, and writes the proposal.