ZIP code strategy: which areas should a cleaner actually work?

Most cleaners pick their service area by accident. They take whatever job calls, drive wherever it is, and end up with a map full of scattered pins that looks busy but barely turns a profit. The ZIP codes you choose to work — and buy leads in — decide your margin before you clean a single home. Get this right and the same number of jobs pays more, takes less time, and is far easier to win. Here is how to choose.

Drive time is the cost nobody puts on the invoice

The minutes you spend behind the wheel are minutes nobody pays you for. Industry guidance for service businesses is blunt about it: every hour a crew spends driving between jobs is an hour generating no revenue, and cutting that drive time roughly in half "essentially adds 30 minutes of billable work each day without increasing payroll" (CigoTracker). Route optimization alone typically trims travel by 10–20% — and with it the fuel, vehicle wear, and idle hours that quietly drain a small operation.

That matters more than it sounds, because margins in this trade are thin to begin with. A healthy net margin for a home service company runs 15–20%, while the industry average hovers around 10% (Contractor in Charge). When you only keep a dime on the dollar, an extra 45 minutes of unpaid driving per job is not a rounding error — it is the difference between a profitable week and a flat one.

Density beats radius

The instinct is to cover as much ground as possible: draw a big circle and say yes to everything inside it. That is exactly backwards. The metric that actually pays is route density — how many jobs you can complete inside a small geographic cluster, like a neighborhood or a couple of adjacent ZIP codes. The higher your density, the more stops you make in less time, with less travel and less idle time between them (Landscape Professionals).

The numbers are concrete. When clients are clustered tightly, drive time between appointments drops to 5–15 minutes instead of 20–40 (). Three homes on the same street beat five homes scattered across the metro every time — fewer miles, more cleaning, a fuller day. A wide, thin map looks impressive and pays poorly. A tight, dense one looks small and pays well.