What your cleaning fee actually pays for
CMA Fest brought about 95,000 fans to Nashville in June, from all fifty states and 33 countries (CMA Fest, June 2025).
Ninety-five thousand people from thirty-three countries have ninety-five thousand different ideas of what a clean house looks like. Which is a good frame for the least-understood line item in this business.
The cleaning fee is the thing guests grumble about publicly and owners misunderstand privately. So here is the whole thing.
First: it is not your money
This is the misunderstanding that causes the most damage to an owner's math.
The cleaning fee the guest pays goes to the person who cleans the house. It passes through. It is not revenue, it is not margin, and it is not part of what your home "earns." When an owner tells me their home grossed $62,000 last year and that number includes cleaning fees, they are overstating their actual return by several thousand dollars, and they will make decisions based on the wrong figure. Four separate deductions sit between gross bookings and your deposit, and this is the one owners fold back in most often.
At Boost, cleaning is a pass-through at what the cleaner charges. It does not appear as profit anywhere on our side, and our management fee is calculated on nightly revenue — which is what remains after the cleaning fee and the platform's service fee come out. There is no linen program or separate supply charge layered on top of it either; the whole fee, with the base it is taken on, is one page.
What a turnover actually is
People imagine a turnover as vacuuming. Here is the real list for a three-bedroom between a 10 a.m. checkout and a 4 p.m. check-in.
Strip and remake. Every bed, every time, with fresh linens — sheets, protectors, pillowcases, and duvet covers when needed. Beds get made to a standard, not thrown together, because a badly made bed is the first thing in every photo a disappointed guest posts.
Bathrooms, fully. Not wiped. Cleaned. Shower, grout line, glass, toilet including the base and behind it, mirror, floor, and every fixture. Fresh towels folded and stacked.
Kitchen. Dishwasher run and emptied, counters and backsplash, sink and drain, inside the microwave, the stovetop, the coffee maker's basket, and the refrigerator — which means removing whatever the last guest left in it.
Floors, in order. Vacuum then mop, every room, including under and behind furniture on a rotation.
Restock. Paper goods, soap, dish and laundry soap, trash bags, coffee, sponges. To a set count, not to a guess.
The reset. Furniture back to its positions, remotes where they belong, thermostat to the standard setting, blinds set, lights checked, everything the last guest moved returned to where the photos show it.
The inspection pass. Damage, missing items, anything broken, anything that needs maintenance. Photographed and reported the same day.
The final look. The cleaner stands in the doorway of each room and looks at it the way an arriving guest will.
That is three to five hours for a three-bedroom, done properly, by someone who does it professionally. It is not a fee for vacuuming. In a festival week, when several of those turns are same-day back-to-backs, the constraint on your calendar stops being the rate and becomes the laundry.
The Boost part: supplies and inventory, at cost
Here is this month's operating detail, and it is the part nobody talks about.
Cleaners do not automatically restock a house. Somebody has to own the inventory, and in a lot of self-managed homes nobody does, which is how a guest arrives to two rolls of toilet paper and a dead coffee filter box.
For homes we manage:
Each home has a par level for every consumable — how many rolls, how many pods, how many bags — and the turnover restocks to that level.
Shortfalls get reported at the turn and reordered, not discovered by the next guest.
Linens are counted at each turn. Guests take towels. It is a permanent, low-level leak that only shows up if somebody counts.
The cleaning closet is locked, stocked, and organized the same way in every home, so any of our cleaners can work in any of our houses.
Supplies pass through at cost. What we paid is what appears on your statement. There is no markup on paper goods here, and the invoices are available if you want them. It shows as its own pass-through line, which is one of the five figures worth being able to find on any statement.
The reason this matters financially is small and constant. Supply costs on a busy home run into real money over a year, and a manager quietly adding twenty percent to every restock is earning that on your statement in an invisible line rather than in the fee you agreed to.
Should you charge a lower cleaning fee?
Sometimes, yes. Guests compare total trip cost, and a high cleaning fee on a one- or two-night stay looks punitive and does show up in reviews.
The two levers that actually work:
Set minimum stays so the fee is amortized. A $175 cleaning fee on a one-night stay is a complaint. On a three-night stay it is invisible.
Consider folding part of it into the nightly rate on short stays. Same total to the guest, better optics, fewer review comments about "hidden fees." Whether this makes sense depends on your comp set, and it is exactly the kind of thing that should be tested and measured rather than guessed.
What does not work is paying your cleaner less. A cheap clean is the most expensive decision in this business.
If you are not sure whether your cleaning fee is helping or hurting your bookings — or whether your supply costs are what they should be — talk to Boost Rentals. Send me your listing and a statement and I will show you both numbers against what I see across the homes we manage.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals