A commercial cleaning RFP is one of the most asked-for documents in commercial real estate and facility management, and one of the worst-written. We see hundreds of cleaning RFPs every year. 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 trial-and-error that produces the same outcome. What this guide assumes You're scoping recurring janitorial / commercial cleaning service for one or more facilities, office, medical, education, industrial, data center, hospitality, or mixed-use. You want to evaluate 3-7 vendors against a consistent framework. You have authority (or your boss has authority) to award a contract. The 9 sections every commercial cleaning RFP needs 1. Executive summary & timeline One paragraph: who you are, what you're solicing, 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 (typically 5-7 days after issue), proposals-due-by date (typically 2-3 weeks after issue), 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, K-12 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 per-sqft rate, and you'll spend hours normalizing them, incorrectly. 3. Scope of work (the actual cleaning tasks) Don't write this from scratch. Use the ISSA Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) task taxonomy or the BSCAI scope-of-work framework. Both are widely-recognized and 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: e.g., "5x/week," "7x/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 80% of customer complaints originate; 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 free of soils, water spots, and fingerprints; toilet bowls and urinals free of staining; mirrors streak-free." "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, edges and corners free of buildup." 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 List N disinfectants for healthcare-associated pathogen claims, 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 14644-1 cleanroom awareness, ASHRAE TC 9.9 protocols, anti-static equipment. All facilities: General liability insurance (set the minimum coverage you require), workers' comp, E-Verify compliance. 6. Staffing model expectations This is the single most-overlooked section, and the one that most affects the quality of who shows up. Specify: Are subcontracted cleaning crews acceptable, or do you require direct employees? Are franchise-network vendors acceptable, or do you require a single corporate operating company? 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 Number of W-2 employees vs subcontracted or franchised crews 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 certifications held (CIMS, CIMS-GB, ISSA membership, industry-specific certifications) 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; locks in 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 (we strongly recommend month-to-month with 30-day notice; multi-year auto-renewal contracts protect the vendor, not you), annual escalation cap (3% is industry-standard), and special-project rate (post-construction cleans, emergency response, floor restoration). 9. Evaluation criteria & weighting Disclose how you'll evaluate proposals. Example weighting: CriterionWeight Price (all-inclusive monthly)30% Staffing model (direct vs sub vs franchise)20% Quality control + documentation process15% References + industry-vertical experience15% Compliance + certifications10% Account management + escalation process10% Price typically gets 25-35%. If it's 60%+, 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 Diversey VirexII"), restricts vendor flexibility; better to specify the outcome (EPA List N 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: 3-4 weeks from issue to award decision. For a multi-facility portfolio RFP: 6-8 weeks. Don't rush this; the procurement decision will outlast 2-3 facility managers. A note on the "lowest-price wins" trap The lowest bidder on a commercial cleaning RFP is almost always one of three things: a vendor who plans to under-staff to make the margin work, a vendor who plans to use the cheapest possible labor (subcontracted, franchised, or staffing-agency), 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 model you trust." Often the second- or third-cheapest proposal is the right one. Next steps If you're scoping a commercial cleaning RFP and want a working session with someone who's seen the inside of hundreds of vendor responses, schedule a facility scoping call. 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.