Almost every cleaning company in the northwest suburbs answers this question the same way: they will not answer it. You fill in a form, someone calls you back, and a price arrives after a visit to your house or at the end of a phone call you did not want to have. The number itself is not a secret. It is arithmetic, and the inputs are things you already know about your own home.
This is what those inputs are, in the order they matter.
The rooms, counted separately
Bedrooms and bathrooms are not the same unit of work and are not counted as one. A bedroom is floor, flat surfaces and a bed to make. A bathroom is a tub or a shower, a toilet, a vanity, a mirror and tile, all of it scrubbed rather than wiped, and it takes longer per room than any bedroom in the house. A four-bedroom, four-bathroom home is meaningfully more work than a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home, and any price that treats them the same is wrong on one of them.
This is why the calculator asks for both numbers instead of asking how many rooms you have.
The size of the house, in bands
Two houses with the same room count can differ by two thousand square feet, and the larger one has more floor to vacuum, more hallway, more trim and more stairs. Square footage is applied as a band rather than a rate per foot, because the difference between 2,100 and 2,300 square feet is not something anyone can feel and the difference between 2,100 and 4,100 is the whole job.
The band matters more here than it does in most suburbs. Housing in this area runs from compact village houses near the Barrington Metra station to homes on acreage a few minutes away, and a single flat rate for "a four-bedroom" would overcharge one of them and undercharge the other.
The type of clean
A standard cleaning maintains a home that is already in reasonable order. A deep cleaning is the reset: baseboards, door frames, inside the appliances if you ask, the parts of a house that get attention twice a year rather than twice a month. Move-in and move-out cleans are their own type again, because an empty house is cleaned differently from a lived-in one and the standard it is measured against is a landlord or a buyer rather than you.
Each type carries its own multiplier on the same base. Deep costs more than standard, and move-out costs more than deep, for the same house.
How often you book
Recurring work is cheaper per visit, and the more often it recurs the cheaper each visit gets. That is not a loyalty discount; a home cleaned every week is genuinely less work each time than the same home cleaned once a season, because nothing has had time to build up.
One thing to know before you compare a recurring rate against a one-time rate: the first visit of a recurring plan is priced as a deep clean. The recurring price assumes a home that starts from a clean baseline, and the first visit is what creates it. From the second visit on you pay the recurring rate.
Add-ons, priced per visit
Inside the refrigerator, inside the oven, interior windows, inside the kitchen cabinets, laundry: each is real work that not every home needs every time, so each is priced on its own and added to the visit you want it on rather than built into every visit forever.
The address
The last input is where the house is. Enter the ZIP code first and the calculator will tell you whether the address is inside the area we clean before it asks you anything else, which saves you the two minutes.
Get your own number
Answer the questions above about your own house and the price is on the screen, before you give a name, an email or a phone number. If it works, request the cleaning from the same screen: pick a date and an arrival window, and the request is confirmed by phone or email. Nothing is paid on the website.