Average Cleaning Cost for a 3-Bedroom House in Metro Vancouver

Start with the mid-range home: 1,400 to 1,800 square feet, three bedrooms, two to two and a half bathrooms, lived in and reasonably tidy. A standard maintenance clean on that house is 3.5 to 4.5 cleaner-hours. At the $50 to $55 per cleaner-hour that insured Metro Vancouver companies charge, that lands at $180 to $240, and that is the flat rate most house cleaning quotes will come back with.

The two larger numbers are the same math with more hours in it. A deep clean is 6 to 8 cleaner-hours because baseboards, door frames, window tracks, light fixtures, and the inside of the oven all get added. A move-out clean is 7 to 9 cleaner-hours because the house is empty, every cabinet interior is in scope, and the standard is an inspection rather than a family's tolerance.

Check any quote against that structure. If a company offers a 3-bedroom deep clean at $200, they are budgeting under four hours for a job that needs six, and the difference will show up as skipped scope rather than a refund.

Hourly pricing puts the estimating risk on you. At $50 to $55 per cleaner-hour, a three-hour minimum booking reads as $150 to $165, comfortably under the $180 flat rate, which is why hourly quotes win on first impression. Then the house turns out to be a 4.5-hour job and the invoice is $225 to $248, above the flat rate's ceiling.

Flat rate puts that risk on the company. We price a 3-bedroom by walking through square footage, bathroom count, and current condition, and if the estimate is wrong the overrun is ours. That only works honestly if the scope is written down, which is the thing to insist on either way.

There is one case where hourly genuinely wins. If your home is small for its bedroom count, already well maintained, and you want a specific list handled rather than the whole house, buying two hours of labour is the cheaper and more honest purchase.

Recurring service earns a discount because the house gets easier every visit. Off the $180 to $240 baseline, a weekly schedule typically prices 20 percent lower at $145 to $190 a visit, biweekly about 10 percent lower at $160 to $215, and monthly at full rate plus a bit, roughly $205 to $270, because four weeks of buildup adds time back.

Run those over a year and the ranking flips. Weekly is about $8,700, biweekly about $4,900, and monthly about $2,900. Biweekly is the most-booked schedule in Metro Vancouver for a reason: it is the point where the house never fully falls behind but you are not paying for 52 visits.

If none of those fit, a one-time clean before guests arrive or after a busy season is a legitimate purchase on its own. It prices at the standard band with no recurring discount, and there is no obligation attached to it.

Bathrooms outweigh bedrooms. A bedroom is largely floors and flat surfaces; a bathroom is grout, glass, fixtures, and a toilet, and each additional one adds 30 to 45 minutes to a proper clean. A 3-bed, 1.5-bath townhouse and a 3-bed, 3-bath house are not the same job and should not be the same price.

Square footage is the second lever, and it varies enormously by neighbourhood. A 3-bedroom townhouse in Burnaby often sits near 1,100 square feet, while a 3-bedroom detached home in North Vancouver can pass 1,900 with a finished lower level. That gap alone is worth an hour and a half.

The rest are the ones people forget to mention when they call. Shedding pets add 30 to 60 minutes of vacuuming and edge work. Stairs break up the workflow and slow every trip. Downtown tower access, loading-bay bookings, and paid parking add time before anyone picks up a cloth.

A standard clean covers the surfaces a household touches: floors, counters, bathrooms, kitchen exteriors, mirrors, and general dusting at reachable height. It assumes the house was cleaned recently and is designed to hold a maintained home at its level, not to reset one that has drifted.

A deep clean adds the vertical and hidden work: baseboards, door frames and tops, light fixtures, vents, window tracks and sills, cabinet fronts, behind and under movable furniture, and the oven interior as an add-on. On a 3-bedroom that is two to four extra cleaner-hours, which is the whole gap between $240 and $440. We wrote up what separates a deep clean from a standard one in more detail if you are deciding between the two.

A move-out clean is a different standard again, because the audience is a landlord or a buyer rather than the person living there. Empty rooms are faster, but cabinet and drawer interiors, closet shelving, and appliance exteriors all come into scope, and the tolerance for a missed corner is zero. Renters carrying a damage deposit are working to that same standard, which is why the move-out band sits above the deep-clean band on an identical house.

Start with arithmetic. B.C.'s general minimum wage rose to $18.25 an hour on June 1, 2026. Add payroll costs, WorkSafeBC premiums, liability insurance, supplies, travel between jobs, and the unbilled time spent quoting, and a company charging $30 an hour is either paying below what it costs to employ someone properly or skipping one of those lines. Usually it is the insurance.

That matters more in British Columbia than most homeowners realise. WorkSafeBC treats a homeowner as an employer once someone doing ongoing housekeeping works 8 or more hours a week, or when a one-time job needs 24 or more working hours in total across everyone on it. Hire a registered company and that obligation sits with the company. Hire privately above those thresholds and it sits with you, along with responsibility for unpaid premiums if the contractor you engaged was never registered.

None of this makes an independent cleaner a bad choice. Plenty are excellent, registered, and worth every dollar. It does mean the honest comparison is not $30 against $55; it is $30 plus your own exposure against $55 with someone else carrying it. Ask any cleaner you are considering for their WorkSafeBC clearance letter, which is free to request and takes minutes.