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.