Building a Night Shift Cost Baseline Before a Lease Quote

What does an empty night shift actually cost?

Most facility teams begin a robot search with the machine. A better first step is to price the overnight hours nobody fills. The working formula is simple to state: scheduled hours left unworked, multiplied by a loaded hourly cost, plus the cost of floor work that slipped because those hours were empty.

Every input already sits in your records. Payroll holds the rates, the roster holds the planned hours, and the overnight log shows what got done. You can build the baseline without a vendor, and you should build it before you open a single lease quote.

Keep the baseline honest. It describes what your site pays today for work that is not happening on time. It is not a promise about what a machine might save, and mixing those two ideas is the fastest way to make a comparison unfair.

Which overnight hours are truly empty?

Start with the roster. Count the overnight hours the schedule called for, then count the hours a qualified person actually worked. The difference includes open shifts, call outs nobody covered, and nights when one worker stretched across two zones and skipped the second.

Use a full quarter of data if you have it. One unusually quiet week can flatter the baseline, and a seasonal peak can hide a chronic gap. Note which nights and which weeks carry the most unfilled time, because that pattern shows where the gap is concentrated.

What belongs in the loaded hourly cost?

A wage rate is only the starting point. Your true cost per unfilled hour also carries employer taxes, benefits, and any premium paid to cover the shift. Pull those figures from payroll rather than estimating them from memory.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a reference point, not a rate for your site. According to BLS, total employer cost for private industry workers averaged $46.89 per hour worked in June 2026, and wages and salaries were $32.82, or 70.0 percent of that cost. That average spans every private industry, so use it to sense check your burden ratio.

Compare with care. BLS reported a median hourly wage of $17.27 for janitors and building cleaners based on May 2024 data, and that figure covers the wage side only. BLS has also said that starting with December 2026 data it will remove workers' compensation costs from its employer compensation series, so check which version a benchmark uses before you set it against your own burden share.

• Employer payroll taxes attributable to the overnight roles
• Benefit contributions for those positions
• Workers compensation cost allocated to overnight staff
• Premium or overtime pay used to cover gaps
• Recruiting and onboarding cost for replacement hires

Which floor zones and tasks go unserviced?

Hours alone do not show what got skipped. Walk the building with the overnight log and mark every zone and task the crew used to finish, such as aisle scrubbing, restroom sanitizing, lobby entries, and dock apron sweeping. For each one, record how often it was due and how often it was done.

Then price the miss. A delayed lobby pass costs little. A wet aisle that the day shift walks through, or a dock apron that collects debris and draws a complaint, carries real exposure. Write down what each miss causes, not only that it happened.

Replacing the worker is harder than the hours suggest. BLS projects janitor and building cleaner employment to grow 2 percent from 2024 to 2034, which is slower than the average for all occupations. A slow outlook does not mean those roles are easy to fill, and it gives you no reason to assume your open night shift will refill on its own.

How do you turn the gap into a baseline?

Build one formula and run it for each building. Annual gap cost equals unfilled overnight hours per year, times the loaded hourly cost, plus the annual cost of the work that missed or ran late. Total the buildings only after each has its own number.

Use your own figures from start to finish. A site that loses one night a week to open shifts and a site that loses every night to a vacancy produce very different baselines, and the formula handles both without adjustment. It only needs measured inputs.

Keep the baseline separate from any savings claim. The baseline says what the gap costs today. A quote says what one specific lease costs across its term. Only the comparison of those two numbers tells you anything useful.

How does a three year lease quote compare with that baseline?

Service Robot Co. leases commercial robots through financing on a three year lease, and we quote one fixed payment after a site assessment. That structure makes the comparison clean. Your baseline becomes a known annual cost, and the quote becomes a known figure over a known term.

Match the time frame before you compare. Project the baseline across the same three years, using the same hours, burden and zones, and set it beside the quote. If the quote leaves out a zone you priced, the comparison is incomplete, and you should ask why before you decide.

Ask what the quote covers, and get the answer in writing. Our RoboCare service plan covers every unit we deploy, backed by regional service engineers in each state we service. We are OEM neutral, so the machines we recommend are chosen for your floor, not for one manufacturer's catalog.

What should the site assessment confirm first?

A site assessment turns your zone list into a map a machine can follow. It confirms which aisles, lobbies and dock aprons can be covered, where charging can sit, and what the first night should look like. Without that step, the baseline rests on guesses about coverage.

• Each zone and surface the machine must cover, matched to the overnight log
• Charging location and power access inside the overnight window
• Staff touchpoints that remain, such as opening checks and exception handling
• Go live steps and training for the people who will supervise the unit
• Service response expectations written into the quote

Where can the baseline mislead you?

Three traps show up often. Blending several buildings hides which site carries the gap. A single strong month can flatter the numbers. A national wage average is never a substitute for your own payroll, however tidy it looks on a slide.

Watch for costs that never reach a ledger, such as complaints, slip incidents, and day staff spending early hours catching up. Count them where you can, and flag them where you cannot. A baseline you can defend in a budget meeting is one that states its assumptions plainly.