What cleaning labour costs, by US state

Cleaners are paid most in Washington at $22.79 an hour and least in Mississippi at $14.32 — a spread of 1.59 times. That is the obvious reading, and it mostly tells you where wages in general are high.

The derived column asks a different question: what does cleaning pay come to as a share of what everyone in that state earns? On that measure Nevada leads at 64.2% and District of Columbia comes last at 36.6%, with a median of 57.3%.

Nevada sits at the top because its economy is built on hospitality: cleaning is close to the middle of that labour market rather than at its edge. District of Columbia sits at the bottom because it is full of highly paid professional and government work, which pulls the average away from everyone else.

So the ratio is not a measure of generosity. It is a measure of how far cleaning sits from the middle of the local labour market — which is what determines how hard the work is to staff, and against whom an employer is competing for the same person.

Cleaning wages cluster tightly across the country. The all-occupation average does not: it ranges far more widely, because it carries the whole local economy in it.

That is why the share varies more than the wage. Almost all of the movement in the ratio comes from the denominator — the state around the cleaner — rather than from the cleaner’s own pay.

These are gross wages paid to employees. They are not the cost of employing someone, which adds payroll taxes, insurance, equipment, supervision and turnover, and they are not a contract rate.

OEWS is an establishment survey published once a year for the previous May, so it lags the market. In a year where wages moved quickly, this will be behind them.