Commercial Kitchen Hood Cleaning Cost Calculator

In this calculator a visit is the sum of four parts: $18 per foot of hood, $95 for each exhaust fan, $9 per foot of duct and $60 for each floor above the first. The default kitchen with one 12 ft hood and 20 ft of duct comes to $216 + $95 + $180 = $491 per visit. At the quarterly schedule for high-volume cooking that is 4 visits and $1,964 a year.

Size drives the price quickly. A 20 ft hood with the same duct run costs $635 per visit, or $2,540 a year. Two 12 ft hoods cost $802 per visit and $3,208 a year. A larger kitchen with three 12 ft hoods, 60 ft of duct and a second floor to reach comes to $1,533 per visit, which is $6,132 a year at four visits.

Actual quotes vary with region, access, how much grease has built up and whether the crew works overnight. Use the pricing section to replace any unit price with a number from your own quote.

NFPA 96 is the national fire protection standard for commercial cooking ventilation. It ties how often the exhaust system must be inspected and cleaned to the kind and amount of cooking. The calculator uses four tiers: monthly for solid-fuel cooking such as wood or charcoal, quarterly for high-volume cooking such as 24-hour operations, wok cooking and charbroiling, twice a year for moderate-volume cooking, and once a year for low-volume cooking such as churches, day camps and seasonal operations.

Those tiers turn into visits per year: 12, 4, 2 and 1. For the default kitchen at $491 per visit that is $5,892 a year for solid-fuel cooking, $1,964 for high volume, $982 for moderate volume and $491 for low volume. Because the cost per visit is the same, the cooking tier alone changes the annual budget by a factor of twelve.

The standard also expects more frequent cleaning when inspection finds grease build-up, and your fire marshal, building department or insurer may require a stricter schedule than the one in the calculator. Treat the automatic frequency as a planning starting point and confirm the schedule that applies to your kitchen with the authority having jurisdiction. You can override the automatic tier with a monthly, quarterly, semiannual or annual schedule.

The number of hoods and their length set the base. Each hood adds its own cleaning and its own fan, so a second hood nearly doubles the visit. Duct length matters too: long vertical runs to a rooftop take more time and are charged at $9 per foot here. Each floor above the first adds $60 per visit in this model for the extra roof access.

Filters are an optional extra. The calculator sizes them at one filter per 1.6 ft of hood, so a 12 ft hood has 8 filters. Exchanging them adds $112 per visit, which takes the default job from $491 to $603 per visit and from $1,964 to $2,412 a year. A fan hinge kit is a one-time purchase of $165 per hood that lets the crew tilt the fan for cleaning and inspection. Adding it to the default job makes the first-year cost $2,129.

Small kitchens hit the minimum. A single 4 ft hood with no duct run prices at $167 for the hood and fan, so the calculator raises it to the $375 per-visit minimum and shows the $208 difference as its own minimum service charge line.

Most cleaning contracts are written as a recurring service, so the annual figure is the number to budget against. The results panel lists each cost component as a yearly amount along with the visit count, and a one-time hinge kit appears as its own line so it is not repeated every visit.

If you are the contractor, switch to bid mode to add overhead, profit and tax on top of the line items and generate a proposal for the restaurant. The materials amount in bid mode covers the filter exchange and the hinge kit.

When comparing quotes, ask what is included in each visit, whether the crew leaves a service sticker and a report with the date of the cleaning, and which parts of the system are covered. The International Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Association (IKECA) is the industry association for the trade, and the NFPA 96 page describes the standard that most schedules are based on.