How to Write a Commercial Cleaning RFP That Gets Useful Responses

A commercial cleaning RFP is a common document in commercial real estate and facility management, and it is often poorly written. The good ones make vendor selection easy. The bad ones produce a stack of incomparable proposals at wildly different prices, and a procurement team that ends up back at square one.

This guide gives you the structure of an RFP that produces useful, comparable, decision ready vendor responses. You can use it as a template, modify it for your situation, and skip the months of guesswork that produces the same outcome.

The 9 sections every commercial cleaning RFP needs

1. Executive summary & timeline

One paragraph: who you are, what you're asking for, when you need responses by, when service starts. Vendors who can't meet the timeline will self select out, which is exactly what you want. If you don't include a timeline, you'll get proposals from vendors who can't actually serve you on the date you need.

Include: RFP issue date, questions due by date (give vendors about a week), proposals due by date (give vendors two to three weeks), award decision date, service start date.

2. Facility inventory (the most skipped, most important section)

For each facility in scope, list: street address, total square footage (cleanable area, not gross), facility type (office Class A, medical clinic, school, warehouse, etc.), hours of operation, restroom count, exterior glass count, special surfaces (terrazzo, VCT, carpet zones by square footage), elevator count, parking deck inclusion.

This sounds tedious. It is the difference between proposals you can compare and proposals you can't. Without this section, every vendor will give you a different square footage and a different rate, and you'll spend hours normalizing them, incorrectly.

3. Scope of work (the actual cleaning tasks)

Don't write this from scratch. Start from a written task list by area, with how often each task is done. Any qualified commercial cleaning vendor will recognize the structure immediately.

For each area type (general office, restrooms, breakrooms, conference rooms, lobby, elevators, stairwells), list:

• Daily tasks (with frequency, for example five or seven nights a week)
• Weekly tasks
• Monthly tasks
• Quarterly tasks
• Annual tasks

For restrooms specifically: be explicit about toilet count, fixture cleaning frequency, supply restocking expectations (whose supplies, yours or theirs), and bag replacement frequency. Restrooms are where occupants notice problems first; getting the scope wrong here cascades into everything else.

4. Performance standards & quality control

Specify what "clean" means. "The facility will be cleaned" is not a standard, it's a wish. Examples of real standards:

• "All restroom surfaces visibly clean, with no soils, water spots, or fingerprints; toilet bowls and urinals with no staining; mirrors with no streaks."
• "Carpeted areas vacuumed in walking patterns with no visible dust, lint, or debris; entry mats clean and dry."
• "Hard surface floors damp mopped with no streaks, no standing water, no buildup in edges and corners."

Then specify the inspection methodology: who inspects, how often, what tool (paper checklist, app based QA, photo documentation), and what happens when standards aren't met. Vendors who don't have a documented QA process will struggle here, which is useful information.

5. Compliance & certification requirements

List what your facility's industry requires. Examples:

• Medical: OSHA Bloodborne Pathogen training (29 CFR 1910.1030), EPA registered disinfectants with the label claims your site needs, terminal cleaning protocols.
• Education: Background checks for all on site staff, low VOC chemistries, CDC school cleaning protocols.
• Industrial: OSHA 10/30 trained technicians, EHS coordination, SDS submission, lockout/tagout awareness.
• Data Center: Background checks + drug screening + SOC 2 vendor attestation, ISO cleanroom standards awareness, ASHRAE TC 9.9 protocols, antistatic equipment.
• All facilities: General liability insurance (set the minimum coverage you require), workers' comp, E-Verify compliance.

6. Staffing expectations

This is the single most overlooked section, and the one that most affects the quality of who shows up. Specify:

• Who supervises the crews at your building, and who is your single point of contact?
• What's the supervisor to technician ratio you expect?
• What's the minimum frequency of supervisor on site visits?
• Background check requirements (state level? federal? drug screen?)
• Language requirements (English only? bilingual capability? specific languages?)

7. Vendor qualifications & references

Ask vendors to provide:

• Years in business under current ownership
• Three references in your industry vertical (preferably with same facility size range), with permission to contact
• Sample QA reports from a real current account (redacted)
• Sample monthly invoice + service report
• List of industry certifications and memberships held
• Insurance certificates (general liability, workers' comp, auto liability)
• MBE/WBE/DBE status if relevant to your procurement

8. Pricing structure

Specify the pricing format you want. The two common options:

• All inclusive monthly rate, vendor provides one number per facility, all inclusive (labor, supervision, supplies, equipment, insurance). Easiest to compare; gives you cost certainty.
• Hourly labor + materials, vendor provides hourly rates by labor category + materials pass through. More transparent but harder to compare and can produce cost surprises.

For RFP comparison purposes, all inclusive monthly is almost always better. You can ask for the underlying labor hour assumption as a separate line item if you want pricing transparency.

Also specify: contract term (multiyear automatic renewal contracts protect the vendor, not you), annual escalation cap (a written cap you can budget around), and special project rate (post construction cleans, emergency response, floor restoration).

9. Evaluation criteria & weighting

Disclose how you'll evaluate proposals. Example weighting:

Criterion	Weight
Price (all inclusive monthly)	High, but not most of the score
Staffing and supervision	High
Quality control + documentation process	Medium
References + industry vertical experience	Medium
Compliance + certifications	Lower (raise it for medical, school, or data center sites)
Account management + escalation process	Lower

Give price real weight, but not most of the score. If price outweighs everything else combined, you're running a price shopping exercise, not a vendor selection, and you'll get the result that exercise produces.

What NOT to include

• Specific brand name product requirements (e.g., "must use one named disinfectant"), restricts vendor flexibility; better to specify the outcome (an EPA registered hospital grade disinfectant, etc.)
• Required staffing agency partnerships, handcuffs the vendor's labor model
• Boilerplate legal language from another industry's RFP, confuses cleaning vendors and produces worse proposals
• Vague aspirational language ("vendor will provide white glove service"), unmeasurable

How long the RFP process should take

For a single facility RFP: plan on three to four weeks from issue to award decision.

For a multifacility portfolio RFP: plan on six to eight weeks. Don't rush this; the procurement decision may outlast more than one facility manager.

A note on the "lowest price wins" trap

The lowest bidder on a commercial cleaning RFP is often one of three things: a vendor who plans to understaff to make the margin work, a vendor who plans to use the cheapest possible labor, or a vendor who plans to win the contract and then renegotiate up after you've signed.

The right benchmark isn't "lowest price." It's "fair market price from a vendor whose staffing you trust." Often the second or third lowest proposal is the right one.

Next steps

Writing a commercial cleaning RFP? Schedule a Walkthrough. We'll walk through your facility inventory, talk through where typical RFPs go wrong, and help you frame the procurement decision, regardless of whether Greater Clean ends up in the final round.