Housekeeping Formulas Every Hotel Manager Should Know

Rooms Per Attendant measures how many rooms one room attendant cleans in a standard shift. It is the primary productivity benchmark for the department, and every roster, every labour cost calculation and every productivity conversation starts here. The right number depends on your hotel's tier and room type: a limited-service hotel might run 16–18 rooms per shift, a full-service property 12–14, and a luxury or resort property 8–10.

What moves the number is not effort, but service standard. Turndown service, nightly amenity refresh, pillow menus, robes and extra towels, deep-clean cycles and guest-requested extras all consume minutes. Track RPA by day-of-week and by floor, not as a single monthly average, or you'll miss which floors and which shifts are quietly dragging the whole department down.

Minutes Per Room is the mirror image of RPA — instead of rooms per shift, it tells you how many minutes it actually takes to clean one room. That matters because it lets you build rosters from first principles rather than copying last year's numbers. It also exposes where the real time is going: a checkout clean is not the same as a stayover clean, and a suite is not the same as a standard king.

Benchmarks vary by room state and type. A departure clean in a standard room often runs 25–35 minutes; a stayover clean 15–20 minutes; a suite 45–60+ minutes. If you build rosters using one blended MPR, you'll always be wrong on the days that matter most — the heavy checkouts and the suite turns.

Linen par stock is the total quantity of each linen item (sheets, pillowcases, towels, bath mats, etc.) you must hold to keep operations running without interruption. "Par" means the level at which you can have one set on the bed, one set in the laundry and one set on the shelf simultaneously — a three-par system. Four-par is common in resorts and high-occupancy properties where laundry cycles are slower.

Getting par wrong is expensive both ways. Too low, and you'll be short-sheeted on a busy weekend, forced to send linen to an outside laundry at premium cost, or worse, run out entirely. Too high, and you tie up working capital in inventory that wears out in the cupboard. Track par item-by-item, not in aggregate, and review it every time occupancy patterns or laundry cycle times change.

Linen wears out — through normal laundering, stains, tears and loss — and it must be replaced on a predictable schedule. The linen replacement rate is the percentage of your par stock you replace each month or year, and it's the number that quietly determines how big your housekeeping capex or expense line will be. Standard industry guidance sits around 2–3% per month for towels and 1–2% per month for bed linen, but the actual number depends heavily on laundry chemistry, water hardness and how much linen goes to outsourced cleaners.

Track replacement by item (bath towels, hand towels, sheets, pillowcases) so you can see which category is wearing out faster. If towels are being replaced at 5% a month and sheets at 1%, the problem isn't the laundry overall — it's likely detergent strength, drying temperature or how towels are being handled during cleaning.

Laundry Cost Per Occupied Room captures all the cost of processing linen, towels, uniforms and guest laundry for one occupied room. It's a per-room metric, which makes it comparable across hotels of different sizes and lets you track it against ADR and RevPAR. If ADR is rising but CPOR is rising faster, the department is eating into your pricing gains.

In-house laundries usually measure this through water, chemicals, energy and labour — plus the amortised cost of the equipment itself. Outsourced laundries measure it as the invoice divided by occupied rooms. Whichever model you run, the calculation is the same: all laundry cost for the period, divided by occupied rooms in the same period. Watch it by month, and split it between guest laundry and house linen, because the two behave very differently.

Cleaning Cost Per Occupied Room is the total cost of cleaning — attendant labour, supervisor labour, cleaning chemicals, guest supplies and equipment depreciation — divided by occupied rooms. It is the single most useful cost benchmark in the department, because it lets you compare a hotel in Delhi to a hotel in Dubai in a way that absolute currency can't.

Split the number into labour and consumables when you report it. Labour is usually 70–80% of the total, and consumables (amenities, cleaning chemicals, guest supplies) are the balance. If your cleaning CPOR is rising but labour is flat, the problem is in consumables — theft, over-use, or a guest-amenity upgrade that hasn't been matched with a price increase.

Public area cleaning is the least-understood part of housekeeping and the one most often over-resourced because there's no clear productivity benchmark. The fix is to measure square metres per hour, by area type: lobby, corridors, restrooms, restaurants, meeting rooms, spa, pool deck and so on. Each area has a normal cleaning rate — for example, restrooms take far longer per square metre than corridors.

Once you have per-area productivity rates, you can build public area rosters the same way you build room attendant rosters. A common benchmark for a mid-tier hotel lobby is around 200–300 square metres per cleaner per hour; restrooms run 40–80 square metres per hour; guest corridors 250–350 square metres per hour. These numbers vary widely, so track your own for a month before you use them to defend a roster change.