When you're deciding between two contract opportunities — or deciding which existing contract is actually worth keeping — price per visit alone can be misleading. A higher price doesn't automatically mean a better contract once you account for frequency, cost and how efficiently that price converts labour time into revenue.
This is a different question from converting a single price into a monthly or annual figure, which How to Calculate Monthly and Annual Commercial Cleaning Contract Value already covers. This article is about comparing two or more contracts side by side.
Three factors, not one
Compare contracts on three figures together, not price per visit in isolation:
A worked comparison
Two contract opportunities for the same type of site, illustrative figures only:
Contract B looks bigger — a $380 price per visit against Contract A's $220. But Contract A runs weekly instead of fortnightly, so its annual value is actually higher ($11,440 versus $9,880), and its margin and revenue per labour hour are both stronger too. On every factor that matters, Contract A is the better contract, despite the lower headline price.
Why margin and revenue per labour hour matter here
Annual value tells you how much revenue a contract brings in. Margin tells you how much of that revenue is actually profit. Revenue per labour hour tells you how efficiently that contract uses your limited resource — staff time. A contract can win on one of these and still lose on the other two, which is exactly what makes comparing on price alone unreliable. For more on what these figures mean and how to calculate them, see Understanding Profit Margin on Commercial Cleaning Jobs.
Using this when you can only take one job
When labour capacity is the real constraint — you can only take on one more regular contract — the comparison matters even more, because you're not choosing between "yes" and "no," you're choosing which opportunity uses your available hours better. Running both options through the same three figures turns that decision into a side-by-side comparison instead of a guess.
Use the Free Contract Value Calculator to work out the annual value of each contract you're comparing, and the Quote & Profit Calculator to check margin and revenue per labour hour for each.