Cleaning a Multi-Tenant Office Building: What Property Managers Should Specify

Most articles about commercial cleaning are written for the person who occupies the building. This one is written for the person who has to account for it.

If you manage a multi-tenant office building, your janitorial contract is not really a cleaning document. It is a CAM document — and most janitorial contracts are not written to function as one. That single mismatch creates more work, more exposure and more awkward conversations in February than any amount of poor cleaning.

Here is the problem, and then the specification that fixes it.

Why the invoice matters more than the cleaning

In a multi-tenant building, cleaning costs split across at least three buckets that behave completely differently.

Common-area cleaning is an operating expense recovered through CAM, allocated pro-rata — each tenant’s rentable square footage divided by the building’s gross leasable area, multiplied by the total. It is also a variable expense, which means it is normally subject to gross-up: as industry guidance puts it, “janitorial, common area utilities, trash removal, and elevator use all scale with how many tenants are in the building,” and a 95% occupancy standard is common. So in a building running at 72% occupancy, your common-area janitorial has to be grossed up to what it would cost at 95% before it can be allocated.

Tenant-suite cleaning is a different animal entirely, and CAM “generally exclude[s] tenant-specific costs, such as repairs inside an individual tenant’s suite.” Whether suite cleaning sits in base rent, is billed to the tenant, or is handled by the tenant’s own vendor depends on the lease.

Tenant-requested extras and periodic work are a third bucket, and the most dangerous one. One of the most commonly disputed CAM items is “one-time expenditures like roof replacements or major renovations appearing as recurring CAM line items.” A full floor restoration or a complete carpet replacement, invoiced inside your recurring monthly janitorial line, is precisely that problem in miniature.

Now add the two facts that make this urgent. Annual reconciliation is, in the words of one industry guide, where “most CAM disputes originate.” And tenants are routinely advised to request “itemized invoices, not just a summary total” — while audit rights are “not automatic” and get negotiated into leases by any tenant with decent representation.

So: your cleaning provider’s invoice is going to be read by someone other than you, with an incentive to find a problem in it.

And if that invoice says “Janitorial Services — $8,400,” you have nothing. You cannot allocate it between CAM and non-CAM. You cannot gross up the right portion. You cannot show a tenant’s auditor which dollars were common-area and which were suite-specific. You end up either over-allocating to CAM and carrying the audit exposure, or absorbing tenant-specific work into CAM and quietly subsidising one tenant with another tenant’s money.

None of that is a cleaning problem. It is a line-item problem, and your provider can solve it by invoicing differently — if you specify it.

The benchmark you want does not exist any more

Before the specification, a word about numbers, because this is where property managers usually get misled.

BOMA International’s Office Experience Exchange Report was the standard reference for operating expense benchmarks, and cleaning was one of its seven office expense categories, alongside utilities, fixed expenses, parking, roads and grounds, repairs and maintenance, and real estate taxes. Its last published cleaning figure was $1.68 per rentable square foot, in 2018.

BOMA International suspended the Office EER in 2021.

Which means there is no current national cleaning benchmark, and anyone who quotes you one is making it up or quoting something eight years old without saying so. For scale, BOMA’s Seattle/King County chapter reported total office operating expenses of $12.20 per square foot excluding management fees on 2020 data — Class A $12.52, Class B $11.54, across 75 buildings and 17.4 million rentable square feet. That is a regional dataset from a different market and a different year, useful only as an order of magnitude.

So we build the number instead, from ISSA 612 production rates and current regional labour costs. Here is the model, and it is the split that actually matters.

A 100,000 RSF building, modelled

Take a five-floor, 100,000 rentable square foot office building: a 3,000 sq ft lobby, 6,000 sq ft of corridors, 1,500 sq ft of elevator lobbies, 2,500 sq ft of common restrooms, 1,000 sq ft of stairwells and service areas, 400 sq ft of elevator cabs, and roughly 80,000 sq ft of tenant suites.

Two things fall out, and both are useful at a lease negotiation.

Common areas are about 14% of the cleanable area and 22–23% of the labour. If you allocate common-area cleaning as a flat percentage of total cleaning cost based on floor area, you are under-recovering by a third.

And the concentration is sharper than that. Common restrooms and elevator cabs together are 2.9% of the building and about 13% of the labour — a four-and-a-half-fold concentration, because ISSA rates restrooms at 800–1,200 sq ft/hr and elevator cabs at 500–700, against 5,000–6,000 for corridors. The elevator cab is the slowest space in the building per square foot, and almost nobody counts it as area at all.

Converted to annual cost at five nights a week and regional billing rates of $43–52 an hour:

Note that the total sits well above BOMA’s 2018 national figure of $1.68. That is what you would expect: California labour costs, eight years of wage inflation, and a model that assumes full nightly service of every suite. Treat these as modelled figures for a specific scope, not as a benchmark — the point of showing the build is so you can adjust it to your own building rather than trust a number.

The responsibility matrix

How cleaning allocates depends on the lease, and we are going to be careful here: we are not your attorney, and we cannot tell you what your lease says. Modified gross leases in particular have no standard definition — as one broker puts it, “every modified gross lease is its own animal,” and janitorial can land on either party in any combination. What follows is the common pattern, not legal advice, and the right next step is to read your own document.

That last row is worth a sentence on its own. Make-ready cleaning between tenancies is a cost of leasing the space. It is not a common-area operating expense, and a provider who bundles it into your monthly recurring janitorial invoice has put a non-CAM cost inside a CAM line.

Six things to specify

This is the actual deliverable. Put these in the scope, and your janitorial contract starts producing a document you can reconcile.

1. Separate line items by CAM category. Common area. Tenant suites included in base service. Tenant-requested extras. Periodic and project work. Four lines, every month, every building.
2. Require itemised invoicing, not a summary total. Your tenants’ auditors will ask for itemisation; your invoice should already be in that form before they do.
3. State the common-area square footage in the contract, and reconcile it to the rentable area on your rent roll. If the cleaning contract and the rent roll disagree about how big the common area is, you have a problem that will surface at exactly the worst moment.
4. Quote and invoice periodic work separately from recurring service, with its own scope and date. This is what keeps a floor restoration out of a recurring CAM line.
5. Build a tenant-request workflow with a published rate card. Who authorises, who gets billed, at what rate. Without it, tenant extras drift into the common-area line by default, and one tenant’s extra vacuuming becomes everybody’s CAM.
6. Put turnover and make-ready on a separate schedule of rates, invoiced per suite, so it never touches recurring service.

And two things we would tell you not to buy

A single-vendor portfolio contract is not automatically cheaper. Portfolio economics come from concentration, not from count. Six buildings within a few miles of each other share supervision, cover absence between sites and reduce travel. Six buildings scattered from Natomas to Folsom to Elk Grove share almost nothing, and the savings you were promised get eaten by windshield time. If your portfolio is dispersed, consolidating vendors may still be worth it for consistency and one point of contact — but price it honestly rather than expecting a discount that the geography will not produce.

And a day porter charged to CAM has to be genuinely common-area only. A porter who also handles tenant suite requests is doing non-CAM work on a CAM line. Either scope them strictly to common areas, or split their hours explicitly.

Sacramento specifics

Three market notes. The downtown Class A stock around Capitol Mall and the R Street corridor carries significant state-agency tenancy, and government leases often specify janitorial standards explicitly — worth reading before you write a scope that conflicts with one. The suburban submarkets — Roseville, Folsom, Rancho Cordova, Natomas — are where the portfolio-concentration argument above actually bites, because a portfolio assembled across them is not a cluster. And locally, 82% of annual rainfall arrives November through March, which concentrates common-area floor wear into the five months when your lobby is doing the most work; that belongs in the common-area scope as a seasonal variation rather than a surprise.

Frequently asked questions

Is janitorial a CAM expense?

Common-area janitorial is normally recovered through CAM, allocated pro-rata by each tenant’s rentable square footage over the building’s gross leasable area. Cleaning is one of BOMA’s standard office expense categories. Tenant-specific costs are generally excluded from CAM, so suite cleaning is treated separately — in base rent, billed direct, or handled by the tenant, depending on the lease.

How should a janitorial invoice be structured for a multi-tenant building?

In at least four separate lines: common-area service, tenant-suite service included in the base contract, tenant-requested extras billed to the requesting tenant, and periodic or project work quoted separately. A single-line invoice cannot be allocated between CAM and non-CAM, cannot be grossed up correctly for vacancy, and cannot be defended in an annual reconciliation if a tenant exercises audit rights.

Does janitorial get grossed up for vacancy?

Janitorial is generally treated as a variable expense, so yes — it scales with occupancy and is normally subject to gross-up, commonly to a 95% occupancy standard. That calculation requires the common-area portion of the cleaning cost to be isolated from tenant-suite work, which is only possible if the invoice separates them.

What does cleaning cost per square foot in an office building?

BOMA International’s last published national figure was $1.68 per rentable square foot in 2018, and BOMA suspended the Office Experience Exchange Report in 2021, so no current national benchmark exists. Modelled from ISSA 612 production rates and current regional labour rates, common-area-only cleaning for a 100,000 RSF building works out at roughly 0.54–0.89 per rentable square foot per year, with tenant suites at 1.79–3.10 on a full nightly scope.

Is make-ready or turnover cleaning a CAM expense?

Generally no. Cleaning a suite between tenancies is a cost of leasing that space rather than a common-area operating expense, and leasing costs are typically excluded from CAM. It should be quoted and invoiced on a separate schedule of rates, per suite, so it never appears inside a recurring janitorial line.

Get your scope restructured

JAN-PRO Commercial Cleaning in Sacramento will walk your building, measure the common areas against your rent roll, and give you a scope and an invoice format built to reconcile — four lines, itemised, with periodic work priced separately. If your lease allocates differently from the common pattern, we will bill in whatever structure it requires.

Call (916) 376-8977 or request a facility visit online.