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Same buildings, very different prices: what 97 Illinois cleaning bids show
We compared 97 bidder prices on 15 public custodial contracts in Illinois. On the typical contract the highest bid was about 2.5 times the lowest, and on one job it was more than 7 times higher.
When a school district, park district or city puts its cleaning out to bid, every company prices the same buildings, the same square footage and the same specs. You would expect the prices to land close together. They don't.
We pulled the published bid tabulations and board documents for 15 public custodial contracts across Illinois, from Chicago's north suburbs down to Effingham. Together they hold 97 prices from different bidders. Here is what they show.
The highest bid is usually far above the lowest
- Typical gap: the top bid is about 2.5 times the bottom. On the middle contract, the highest bid was 2.45 times the lowest, or 145% higher.
- More than half doubled. On 8 of the 15 contracts, the highest bid was at least twice the lowest. A library with one 32,614 square foot building drew 10 bids, and the highest was about 3.1 times the lowest.
- The widest: 7.2 times. Eleven companies bid on three park district buildings in Downers Grove in November 2025, and the highest bid was 7.2 times the lowest.
- The tightest: 25%. Even the closest contracts we found, a school district job and an hourly-rate theater contract, still had the top bid a quarter above the bottom.
The average contract drew about 6 or 7 bidders. So on a typical Illinois cleaning bid, you are one of six or seven companies, and the prices around you can cover a very wide range.
Why the range is so wide
The tabs don't explain the prices, but the bid documents point to a few common causes:
- Staffing assumptions. One city threw out three proposals because they planned too few labor hours to do the work in the specs.
- Reading the specs differently. On a large school contract, the lowest bidder withdrew after the opening, saying it had misunderstood the specifications.
- Not knowing the market. A company bidding a district for the first time has no idea what the incumbent charges, or what similar buildings nearby went for.
What a wide spread means for your next bid
If prices on the same job routinely differ by 2 times or more, then not knowing where the rest of the field will land is expensive, even when your own costs are dialed in. Bid too high and you're out of the running. Bid too low and you win a contract that loses money every month, or you get disqualified for not staffing it properly.
The fix is information that's already public: what similar contracts were awarded for, who bid, and what the winner charged. A single published award can be turned into a cost per square foot for that building type. That figure isn't a price to copy, since every building, schedule and spec is different, but it shows where past awards actually landed.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure above comes from an agency's own published bid tabulation, board packet or records-request response. We included contracts where at least two bidders were priced on the same basis. Contracts with only one bid, or where the top bid was listed only as a range, were left out of the spread figures.
Figures are from public records available as of October 30, 2026. Newer bids may have been awarded since; subscribers get every new result.
Know where the field lands
Prices on the same buildings often run two or three times apart. Subscribers see every bidder's price and the winner on Illinois public cleaning bids every Monday, with comparable awards per square foot where the documents show it. $99 a month, cancel anytime.