Hosts ask us this constantly, and most of them are guessing. They picked a number off what the last cleaner charged, or what a listing down the street shows, and they never checked whether it actually covers the work. In Orlando that gap bites harder than it does in a lot of markets, because the housing stock and the pool cages hide costs that a flat "cleaning fee" line doesn't hint at.
So here's how we'd build the number from the ground up, not down from a competitor's listing.
Start with the house, not the average
There's no single Orlando turnover. A 1960s concrete-block ranch off the Conway chain of lakes is a different job than a newer whole-home rental with six sleeping spots. The ranches around Conway, Belle Isle, and Azalea Park tend to run 2-3 bedrooms with a single screened pool cage out back and mature oaks dropping stuff on everything. Smaller footprint inside, real work outside.
Price the interior on bed-and-bath count plus square footage, the way everyone does. Then stop, because that's where most fees end and where Orlando costs actually begin.
The lines guests never see
A guest looks at a screened lanai and sees a nice patio. You're looking at a labor line. Break it out honestly:
- Pool cage and lanai. The furniture gets wiped, the deck gets swept, leaves and the odd frog get cleared from the waterline. On a screened cage this is 20-40 minutes that has nothing to do with the inside of the house. Nearly every Central Florida STR has one.
- Lovebug season. May and again in September, the screens and the front of the house get plastered. If you don't budget the extra screen-and-entry pass for those two windows, you're eating it. We build it in as a seasonal add, not a surprise.
- Linen par levels. Same-day 11am-out, 4pm-in turns don't leave time to wash and dry a full set on-site, especially in summer when the afternoon storms roll in and volume is already up. That means owning two or three pars per bed so the crew swaps and launders off-site. Someone pays for that inventory. It belongs in the fee.
- Restock. Coffee, paper, soap, trash liners, the dishwasher pods. Small per item, real per month.
- The 12% on top. This one gets forgotten and it's the sneaky one. Cleaning fees charged to the guest are part of the taxable rental total in Orange County. That's 6% state sales tax plus the county's 6% Tourist Development Tax, remitted monthly to the Orange County Comptroller, due the 1st and delinquent after the 20th. So a $150 fee shown to a guest isn't $150 of cost coverage. The tax rides on it.
Drive time is a cost line too
If your crew is running Altamonte to Belle Isle on a turn day, they're crossing I-4 and probably the 408, and the same-day checkout-to-checkin window drops them into it at the worst hour. A route that looks like 25 minutes on a map is 45 with a wreck on I-4. We price a wider service radius accordingly rather than pretending a Altamonte Springs job costs the same as one two streets from our route. It doesn't.
Now set the fee so it doesn't scare the booking
Orlando is price-sensitive. It has the smallest peak-to-trough rate swing in Florida, roughly 15-25%, so you can't lean on huge seasonal premiums to bury a fat cleaning fee. Guests here comparison-shop hard. A cleaning fee that reads high next to the nightly rate kills conversion, full stop.
The move most owners miss: your fee doesn't have to recover 100% of turnover cost by itself. On longer stays it shouldn't. A guest booking five nights over the EPCOT Flower & Garden run in March will pay a modest fee without blinking, and the nightly rate carries the rest. It's the one- and two-night bookings where a full-cost fee looks ugly. So a lot of well-run Orlando listings set the fee to cover most of a turn, quietly fold the remainder into the nightly rate, and set a minimum-night floor so they're never doing a full turnover for a single-night guest at a loss.
Run your own math before you copy a neighbor's number. Add the interior labor, the cage and lanai, a seasonal lovebug allowance, linen amortization, restock, and drive time. That's your cost floor. Then remember the 12% comes off the top of whatever you show the guest. If the number that clears all of it looks too high to book against a comparable listing, the answer is usually to shift some into the rate, not to cut the pool cage from the scope and hope the next guest doesn't notice the frog.
If you want a second set of eyes on what your specific house should run, send us the details or start on the homepage and tell us the neighborhood. The cage size and the bed count tell us most of what we need.