Carpet Cleaning Cost Calculator

"Three rooms for $99" is not a price

Almost the whole trade advertises by the room, and it is the least comparable unit there is.

• A room is capped. Most companies define one as 200 to 250 square feet. A 20 by 15 living room is 300, so it is one room plus an overage, or two rooms, depending on who is quoting.
• Halls, stairs and closets are not rooms. They are priced separately, stairs usually at $2 to $5 a step, and a staircase is 13 to 16 steps.
• The headline is the basic clean. Pre-spray is sometimes extra. Protector is extra. Pet treatment is extra. Moving furniture beyond the light pieces is often extra.
• Minimums apply underneath it all. Nearly every company has a $100 to $150 minimum, so "3 rooms for $99" is usually a door-opener that does not survive contact with the house.

Ask for the price per square foot and the total square footage they are quoting. That number compares across companies and it is what the calculator above uses. If a company will not give you one, that is itself informative.

The chemistry does the cleaning. The machine only removes it

This is the single most useful thing to know while standing in your own hallway watching somebody work.

A proper hot water extraction job goes: pre-spray, dwell, agitate, extract. The alkaline pre-spray breaks the bond between the soil and the fiber, and it needs five to fifteen minutes of dwell time to do it. Agitation with a brush or a rake works it into the pile. Only then does the wand come out, and its job is to flush and remove what the chemistry already released.

What a rushed job looks like: the technician sprays and immediately starts extracting. Nothing has been released yet, so the wand is mostly pushing hot water through the carpet and sucking it back. The carpet gets wet, looks better briefly because the surface soil moves, and dries looking much as it did.

So: watch whether they walk away after spraying. A technician who sprays a room, goes to do the next one, and comes back is doing it right. One who sprays and immediately drops the wand is selling you hot water.

Extraction or low moisture

Extraction is what most people mean by steam cleaning, and it is the right default. It is the only method that gets down to the base of the pile, and the only one worth doing on a carpet that has gone a few years.

Low moisture — encapsulation — puts down a polymer that dries into brittle crystals around each soil particle, so your own vacuum lifts them out over the following few days. It genuinely works, it costs less, and the carpet is walkable in an hour. On a maintenance schedule it is excellent. On a carpet that has not been cleaned in five years it will disappoint you.

A reasonable pattern on a busy house: extraction once a year, encapsulation in between.

Pet urine is in the pad, and deodorizer is perfume

If you are booking because of a smell, read this part carefully.

Urine goes through the carpet. It soaks the backing, saturates the pad underneath, and frequently reaches the subfloor. The carpet fibers are the least contaminated part of the whole assembly, and they are the only part a surface clean touches.

What proper pet work looks like:

1. Finding it, with a UV lamp in a dark room and often a moisture meter. Dried urine fluoresces, and the stain you can see is usually smaller than the contamination you cannot.
2. Treating where it actually is, which means saturating down to the pad with an enzyme or oxidizing product and giving it time to work on the crystals. Sometimes injecting under the carpet.
3. Extracting with a subsurface tool, which pulls from the backing rather than the surface.
4. Deciding about the pad. On a heavy spot, the pad is replaced and the subfloor sealed, because nothing applied from above will fully clear it.

What inadequate pet work looks like: a deodorizer sprayed over the top. It smells better for a week, and then the humidity rises and so does the odor, because the source never moved.

Pet treatment adds about 45% on this calculator, which is $95 on a 1,000 sq ft job. Pad replacement and subfloor sealing are a separate job again and are usually quoted per affected area.

Dry time, and the damage that comes from getting it wrong

A properly extracted carpet is damp, not wet, and dry in 6 to 12 hours. Past about 24 hours you have a problem, and it is worth knowing what the problem causes:

• Wicking. Soil deep in the backing travels back up the fibers as the water evaporates, so the stain you watched disappear is back the next morning. This is the commonest complaint after a cleaning and it is almost always over-wetting.
• Delamination. The latex holding the carpet's primary and secondary backings together softens, and the carpet separates and ripples. Permanent.
• Odor and mold. A pad that stays wet for days in a warm house does what you would expect.

Help it along: open windows or run the HVAC fan, put a fan on the room, and keep the air moving. Do not put the furniture back on damp carpet without the tabs or blocks — wood stains and metal rusts straight into the pile.

Soil comes out. Some stains never will

Worth setting expectations on, because it is the main source of disappointment.

• Soil — the general dinginess and the traffic lanes — is what cleaning removes, and the result on that is usually dramatic.
• Stains are a different thing. Anything that has dyed the fiber is a color change, not a deposit. Red drink dye, some foods, bleach spots, long-standing rust and plant tannins may lighten but will not leave, and a technician who promises otherwise is setting you both up badly.

Ask for an honest opinion on each spot before the work, not after. A good technician will walk the job with you and say which marks will go and which will not.

What you are paying for

For 1,000 sq ft of carpet, hot water extraction, normal soiling, at $210:

Note the shape: the trip and the fixed hour together are most of a small job, which is exactly why minimums exist and why doing the whole house at once is so much better value than doing a room. Four hundred square feet costs $140 — two thirds the price of two and a half times the work.

How often, and the warranty nobody reads

Most carpet manufacturers require professional hot water extraction every 12 to 18 months to keep the warranty valid, and many require you to keep the receipts. If your carpet is still under warranty, that is a real reason to use a company that gives you an itemized invoice.

Beyond the paperwork: 12 months for a busy house with pets or children, 18 to 24 for a quiet one. The argument for keeping to it is that grit at the base of the pile is abrasive, and a carpet that is never deep cleaned wears out from the bottom while looking merely tired from the top.

Rental machines, honestly

A supermarket rental is $35 to $50 a day plus solution, so on a 1,000 sq ft job it is $60 to $90 against $210. It is a real saving and it is not the same job.

The difference is heat, vacuum and water flow. A truckmount delivers water at 200°F or more with enormous recovery; a rental runs at tap temperature with a small vacuum motor. The practical consequence is that a rental machine puts down nearly as much water and pulls far less of it back, which is why DIY carpet is often still wet the next day — and wet carpet is where wicking and delamination come from.

Reasonable for a single room, a spill, or a rental property between tenants. Not a substitute for an annual deep clean on a carpet you intend to keep.

Questions worth asking

• What is the price per square foot, and how many square feet is this quote for?
• Are halls, stairs and closets included? How many steps, and at what rate?
• Is a pre-spray included, and how long does it dwell?
• Hot water extraction or low moisture?
• How long until I can walk on it, and how long until furniture goes back?
• Which of these marks will not come out? Before you start.
• If pets: do you use a UV lamp, and do you treat at the pad?
• Do you move furniture, and what counts as light?
• Is there a minimum, and does this job meet it?
• Will I get an itemized invoice? Your carpet warranty may need it.