Restaurant / QSR Cleaning Prices in Seattle (2025)

Seattle's $20.76 City Minimum Wage Changes the Whole Bid

Start a Seattle cleaning bid with the city minimum wage, not the rate card, because the $20.76 city minimum (one of the highest in the country), sets a floor that most other metros in this survey do not have to contend with at all. Restaurant and QSR cleaning here runs $0.33 to $0.61 per square foot per month, midpoint $0.45, about 15 percent above the $0.39 national average. That premium tracks the wage floor almost directly.

Washington's statewide minimum wage of $16.66 an hour is already high by national standards, but Seattle's city ordinance pushes the effective floor for most employers up to $20.76. Add SEIU 6's organizing reach in the local commercial cleaning trade and the Secure Scheduling Ordinance, covering employers with a 500-plus worldwide headcount in retail and food service, and Seattle turns into one of the most heavily regulated markets this survey covers.

Pricing a 6,500 Sq Ft Unit in Capitol Hill

Picture a 6,500 sq ft unit in Capitol Hill with a 48-seat dining room. This space divides out cleanly against ISSA 447's restaurant benchmark of 1,800 square feet to the labor hour, landing nightly detail work at 3.6 hours; figured at Seattle's $0.45 per sq ft monthly rate, that comes to $2,925 a month, $35,100 annualized.

Capitol Hill's dense nightlife scene means a unit like this one often runs later closing hours than a comparable suburban location, and a genuinely thorough overnight clean has to work around a tighter turnaround window before morning prep starts, sometimes with less than six hours between last call and the opening shift arriving. Contractors quoting Capitol Hill accounts specifically factor that compressed overnight window into their crew-sizing decision, since a two-person crew that would comfortably handle a suburban unit's overnight clean may need a third set of hands here just to finish on time.

If this unit belongs to a chain with 500 or more employees worldwide, the Secure Scheduling Ordinance requires the employer to post schedules 14 days in advance and pay predictability premiums for last-minute changes, a rule that flows through to how the cleaning contractor coordinates crew scheduling with the client's own shift patterns, since both parties' shifts often overlap during closing procedures. Factor in quarterly hood degreasing billed at Seattle's premium labor rate, $950 to $1,150 each visit, and the full-year number comes out near $39,400.

What the Wage Data Actually Shows

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue's BLS OEWS survey for May 2025 puts the janitor and building cleaner median at $22.35 an hour, $1.59 clear of the city's own $20.76 minimum wage. That gap has widened from the narrower spread earlier survey vintages showed, suggesting SEIU 6's bargaining reach and the tight regional labor market are now pulling the median up faster than the statutory floor climbs on its own. The city minimum wage is still doing real work here, just not as much of the work as it once appeared to.

Once the standard 35 to 45 percent burden is applied, true labor cost per crew member reaches $30.17 to $32.41 an hour, the highest burdened cost in this survey, edging out New York. A contractor who prices a Seattle bid from a national average template rather than building it bottom-up from the local wage floor will consistently undercharge, since the gap between Seattle and the national mid-rate is driven substantially by wage economics that a generic template will not capture.

SEIU 6 represents a meaningful share of Seattle's commercial janitorial workforce, and while not every standalone QSR account is directly covered by a master agreement, the union's presence sets wage expectations across the broader labor market that non-union contractors compete against for staffing.

Health Permits and Registration

Seattle-King County Public Health carries out restaurant inspections under Washington's food code, itself built on FDA Food Code sanitizer-strength and cleaning-frequency provisions. Registration is covered in the Seattle cleaning business license guide; how the state taxes this work is covered in the Washington sales tax guide.

Seattle's wet season, roughly October through April, is long enough and consistent enough that it stops functioning as a seasonal exception and starts functioning as the baseline condition a contractor prices around. Entryway mats and floor mopping frequency for a Capitol Hill or downtown unit run at winter intensity for a solid half of the calendar year, not just during isolated storm events the way it would in a drier market, so several Seattle contractors simply build the wet-weather service level into their year-round base rate rather than treating it as an add-on, with a modest reduction during the drier summer stretch instead of the reverse pattern most other cities in this survey follow.

Washington allows no tip credit, so restaurant operators here already pay the full city rate to their own staff and their cleaning vendor pays it too. The Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance put the rate at $21.30 per hour from January 1, 2026, and SMC 14.16 adds accrued paid sick and safe time for every covered employee. An overnight kitchen deep clean in this city cannot be benchmarked against a Sunbelt rate sheet, because roughly the entire difference between the two numbers is the statutory hourly base.