When people think about master plans, they usually picture facilities planning, architecture, or building development. But there’s another type of master plan that is just as critical for long-term efficiency and cost savings for the highest everyday operations cost for most organizations: the Custodial Master Plan (also known as the Cleaning Master Plan).

A custodial master plan is a strategic framework that outlines how cleaning and maintenance services will be delivered across a facility, campus, or portfolio of buildings. It takes into account staffing, equipment, technology, and service standards to ensure that spaces are not only clean but also safe, healthy, and sustainable while mapping to budget and resources.

Why Cleaning Planning Matters

Custodial cleaning services go far beyond appearances. Cleaning teams are a crucial everyday partner to the community in your buildings ensuring building environments are clean, well-maintained and responsive to occupant needs. 

Cleaning operations directly affect:

• Health & Safety – Proper cleaning reduces the spread of illness and minimizes workplace hazards.
  
  
• Asset Protection – Flooring, furniture, and fixtures last longer when cared for consistently.
  
  
• Operational Efficiency – A clear plan ensures resources are used wisely, reducing redundancies and waste and enabling your team to “do more with less”
  
  
• Sustainability Goals – Many custodial master plans include eco-friendly cleaning practices and green certifications that drive sustainability goals
  
  
• User Experience – Clean spaces shape first impressions for visitors, employees, students and community members.
  

Without a plan, cleaning operations often default to reactive work, leading to inconsistent results, higher costs, and employee burnout.

Key Questions to Answer in your Custodial Master Plan

As you look to create your Cleaning Master Plan, many organizations have a few decisions to make. First, are they building it internally or using a third party vendor. Second, is how often do you go back and adjust your master plan.

No matter how you decide to build your Cleaning Master Plan, the following questions will need to be answered as you document and plan your operations.

Assessment of Current State

1. What is your building portfolio? List of all buildings and the spaces within that will include:
   
   1. Cleanable square footage
   2. type of space
   3. use of spaces
   4. type of cleaning (and frequency of cleaning)
      
      
2. What are the current staffing levels and shift schedules? If using vendors, what are your current contract details?
3. What existing equipment and cleaning technologies do you use?
4. What are your current service gaps and challenges?
5. What is the current cleaning performance in your buildings? What is the current cleaning quality by location?
   

Cleaning Standards

1. What are the measurable levels of cleanliness based on building and space type? (e.g. classrooms vs. cafeterias vs. office space vs. laboratories vs. restrooms)
2. What benchmarks do you use for cleaning quality such as APPA standards (Association of Physical Plant Administrators)?
3. What cleaning procedures should custodians complete for each type of cleaning and space? (Training materials are often included as part of this plan)
   

Staffing & Workloading

1. What benchmarks and service levels do you use for workloading for custodians? Typically, custodians' scope is based on square footage that can be cleaned per day.
2. How do you measure on-going fair workloading with staffing and scope changes over time?
   

Equipment & Inventory

1. What current tools do you have (vacuums, auto-scrubbers, robotics) or plan on testing to help drive efficiency?
2. What inventory do you need for each cleaning based on annual scope?
   

Budget & Resource Allocation

1. What is the forecasted labor, supply, and equipment costs based on scope and cleaning quality expectations?
2. Where are there opportunities for cost savings across the building portfolio?
   

Training & Safety Programs

1. What is the training plan and certifications for your cleaning team?
2. How often do you provide training opportunities for staff and what is the budget for these training sessions?
3. What is the new hire training to ensure proper cleaning protocols are met for new employees?
4. What safety programs are in place to ensure employee health & safety?
   

Performance Measurement

1. How do you measure completed cleaning activities everyday by location and team members?
2. How do managers provide feedback to custodians? How often do they conduct spot inspections for cleaning quality?

What is in a Cleaning Master Plan?

A Cleaning Master Plan will give you the foundation to effectively protect your people, your buildings, your budgets and your community relationships. 

In its simplest form, the custodial master plan provides the granular details into the scope of work that cleaning operations teams need to perform each day while matching it up to the economic realities of budget and staffing at your organization. This document is the foundation for communicating cleaning operations to the rest of the organization.

The final document may include:

• Total cleanable square footage with granular details down to the room type across the building portfolio
• Cleaning type and scope for each room type (with time expectations)
• Cleaning quality expectations for each building - with many doing a cleaning quality assessment of buildings to understand current state
• Staffing requirements based on cleaning scope and quality expectations
• Cost and staff considerations based on salaries, benefits and supply costs for in-house and vendor teams
• Training and cleaning procedure documentation for managers and end user staff
• Cleaning quality tracking protocols and evaluation criteria

Overall, this document will be a centralized resource to go back to as changes in budget, staffing and scope occur.

Why Your Cleaning Master Plan Might Go Stale?

The major drawback of a Cleaning Master Plan is not just that it is a major endeavor to document and analyze (and a major cost of using a third party vendor) but that it is often a static document that gets stale over the years. There are a number of reasons the master plan might become outdated including:

• Closing Buildings or Schools
• Budget Deficits that cause Cleaning Cuts
• Staffing and/or Vendor Turnover
• Cleaning Quality Standard Adjustments

So the question is how do we ensure these plans stay relevant and help drive better cleaning outcomes at higher qualities. Enter technology and real-time data.

Using Technology to Operationalize Your Cleaning Master Plan

Your Cleaning Master Plan should be a living, breathing document and cleaning validation technology can help you measure cleaning expectations (aka “the Master Plan” scope) against reality (aka “What is being done each day”). This will enable for agile decision making to impact real-time results in accordance with your plan.

The first step is making it easy for your end user custodians to report on the cleaning activities they complete at each location on their routes. With mobile app technology, custodians are able to use their mobile device to scan QR codes to validate completion of cleaning with picture confirmation with pinpoint location (i.e. 2nd floor women’s bathroom in the west building). This forms the foundation for real-time cleaning activity data that enables full measurement against your cleaning operations scope.

Cleaning validation will take your entire cleaning scope and measure against daily operations:

• Building and spaces with cleaning frequency and type scope  (vs. percent of spaces cleaned in compliance with scope)
• End-user team members and locations (and square footage) they are responsible for vs. actual square footage covered by each team member
• Cleaning quality expectations by building and location vs. rapid inspection data from managers weekly or monthly

The key here is that you ensure the master plan data is not a research document but an operational system that can be measured against based on budget, operational and environmental realities. 

As scope changes, most likely due to less resources or budget, the updated scope can be updated in the system, updating the data benchmarks to reflect updated cleaning expectations (both quality and frequency requirements) while delivering new routes/schedules to end user custodians in their mobile app so they know what they need to do going forward. 

The result is an agile operational model that ensures seamless communication across the team as needs change and strategy evolves.

Cleaning is the foundation for impactful operations

A Custodial Master Plan is more than a cleaning schedule—it’s a strategic blueprint for operational excellence. By aligning resources, technology, and people, organizations can ensure their spaces are not only clean, but also safe, efficient, and welcoming for occupants to do their best work, learning and community building.