Why proper cleaning costs what it does
Almost every new customer asks some version of the same question. Sometimes politely, sometimes not: why does this cost what it costs, when the ad on Facebook says 180 kroner an hour?
It is a fair question and we would rather answer it properly than dodge it. So here is the arithmetic, with the actual numbers, including the parts that are uncomfortable for us.
What one hour of cleaning costs before anyone makes a krone
Start with the wage, because that is where most of the money goes.
Under the Serviceoverenskomst, the collective agreement between DI and 3F that covers most professional cleaning in Denmark, a cleaner with some seniority sits somewhere around 170 kroner an hour in base pay in 2026. That is the number on the payslip. It is not the number the company pays.
On top of the base rate come the obligations that come with employing someone properly in Denmark:
- Holiday pay at 12.5 percent, required by the Ferielov
- Fritvalg contributions, which rose to 10 percent in 2026 and go to 11 percent in 2027
- Public holidays and extra days off at roughly 5.25 percent
- Employer pension contributions of 11.15 percent
- ATP, where the employer covers around 190 kroner a month per full-time employee in 2026
- The quarterly statutory contributions, AES, AUB and Barsel.dk, which vary by industry
- Mandatory occupational injury insurance, which every Danish employer must carry from the first employee
Add those to a 170 kroner base rate and you land at roughly 240 kroner per paid hour.
We did not have to trust our own spreadsheet on that. Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening publishes the total hourly cost of cleaning work across the country. The median is 242.12 kroner per hour worked, the average is 245.61, and the top quarter of the market is above 259.89. Two completely different ways of getting to the number, and they land within a couple of kroner of each other.
So before anyone has bought a cloth, driven to your address, or answered a phone, an hour of properly employed cleaning labour costs about 240 kroner.
Paid hours are not billable hours
A cleaner on a contract is paid for their working day. They are not cleaning your home for all of it. They are on a bike or in a car between addresses. They are on holiday, which you are paying for. They are sick sometimes, and under the agreement they keep getting paid for up to 84 days. They are in training. They are at the occupational health assessment that the Arbejdstilsyn requires.
In Copenhagen, with tight route planning, you can get maybe 80 to 85 percent of paid hours converted into hours actually spent cleaning. It is a genuinely good ratio and it takes real scheduling work to hit it.
Run 240 kroner through that and the cost per billable hour becomes something like 285 to 300 kroner. Still nothing for equipment, cleaning products, vehicle costs, liability insurance, payroll administration, or the person who answers when you write to say you need to move Thursday.
The number that should worry you
Danish VAT is 25 percent. If a company charges you 300 kroner an hour including VAT, it keeps 240 kroner. That is the entire median labour cost, with exactly nothing left for anything else, including profit.
So when you see 200 kroner an hour advertised, the business is working with 160 kroner ex VAT against a 240 kroner cost base. That gap has to be closed somehow, and there are only a few ways to do it:
The wage is below the collective agreement. The hours are not fully declared. The work is being done by someone registered as self-employed who is carrying the pension, holiday pay and insurance themselves, usually without realising how much of it they are simply going without. Or the person is being paid cash and is not covered by anything at all.
Skattestyrelsen, Arbejdstilsynet and the police have run a joint enforcement effort against social dumping since 2012, and cleaning is one of the industries they specifically target because the risk is known to be high. Between 2015 and 2024 they carried out 31,718 inspections, and 15,122 of them resulted in a correction to tax, VAT or payroll declarations. That is close to half.
We are not suggesting every cheap provider is breaking the law. Some are running at a loss and do not know it yet. Plenty of small operators genuinely have not done this calculation. But the arithmetic does not have a fourth option where everyone gets paid properly and the price is 200 kroner.
What the cheap hour actually costs you
If the cleaner in your home is undeclared, the risk does not disappear. It moves to you.
Say they are injured in your flat. There is no occupational injury insurance behind them, so the claim lands on you personally. Say they knock over something expensive. No liability cover, which means your own indboforsikring and your own deductible. And when they are ill, nobody comes, because one undeclared worker has no colleague to send in their place.
And you cannot claim servicefradrag on it, because that requires a specified invoice and electronic payment. Which brings us to the part that changes the maths in your favour.
Servicefradrag makes the honest price look different
The service deduction is the most underused thing in Danish household economics, and it exists precisely to make declared domestic work competitive with undeclared work.
For 2026 you can deduct up to 18,300 kroner per adult in the household. A couple therefore has 36,600 kroner between them. The deduction is worth roughly 26 percent, so the real saving is around 4,758 kroner per person, or about 9,516 kroner for two adults.
It applies to labour only, never to products or equipment, which is one reason we itemise the two separately on every invoice.
Put that against an hourly rate and the picture shifts. A rate of 375 kroner including VAT becomes an effective 278 kroner after the deduction. The difference between the honest price and the suspicious one narrows to something much smaller than the headline numbers suggest, and on one side of that gap the person cleaning your home has a pension.
What you are actually paying for
An hour of cleaning gets sold like a commodity. It is not one.
You are paying for someone who knows which surfaces tolerate which chemistry, so your matte kitchen fronts do not come out fogged and your parquet keeps its oil. You are paying for a worked-out sequence, which is why dust hits the floor before the floor gets done rather than after. Mostly, though, you are paying for the same person coming back. A cleaner who knows your home is faster on their fifth visit than their first, and that compounding is the single biggest thing separating a good arrangement from a mediocre one.
The rest is unglamorous. Insurance that actually pays out, someone to send when a colleague is ill, an invoice SKAT will accept, a number where a human answers.
We would rather show you this calculation than let you assume our price is arbitrary. If you are holding a cheaper quote and want to understand the gap, ask that company two things: what their cleaners earn per hour, and whether they are on the Serviceoverenskomst. The answer will tell you most of it. So will the absence of one.