Three-Year Lease Math for a Night Floor Robot

How do you compare a fixed lease with overnight labor?

A three-year lease with one fixed monthly payment is worth comparing against one thing: the total cost of the overnight hours you would otherwise staff across the same 36 months. Add up the fixed payments, add the costs the lease leaves to you, and set that total against loaded labor for the hours the robot will really cover. The gap, or the lack of one, is your answer.

The labor side starts from public data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the May 2025 median for janitors and building cleaners at $17.71 an hour, with the 10th percentile at $13.77 and the 90th at $24.17. Your night crew may sit anywhere in that band, so pull your own payroll before you lean on the median.

Service Robot Co. does not publish a payment in this article. We quote the lease payment only after a site assessment, because hours, floor layout and route complexity all move the number.

Which inputs should you gather first?

Collect these before you open a spreadsheet. Most weak comparisons fail on hours, not on the robot itself. Write each figure down with its source. A supervisor's estimate is a fair starting point, but the payroll export is what a finance reviewer will ask to see.

• Scheduled night hours per shift, using the start and end times that really apply rather than the posted schedule.
• Nights per year after closures, holidays and nights when the floor sits idle.
• Floor area split into the zones a robot can enter and the zones it cannot, such as stairwells, tight back aisles and loading aprons.
• Supervision minutes per shift, including dashboard checks, alert response and blocked-aisle clearing.
• Coverage gaps: sick calls, vacant shifts, and hours a manual crew still has to finish after the robot is done.

How much does the labor line really cost?

Base wage is the floor of the labor line, not the total. Employers also carry payroll taxes, benefits and paid time off, and a 2026 aggregator estimate loads base wages by 1.35 to 1.65 times to reach employer cost. Applied to the $17.71 median, that multiplier gives roughly $23.90 to $29.20 an hour. It is a secondary estimate, so swap in your accounting team's loaded rate if one exists.

Night work adds a further layer. According to Paychex, U.S. night differentials most commonly range from 5 to 15 percent of base pay, or about $1 to $3 an hour. Check whether your differential sits on top of the loaded rate or inside it, since that depends on how your payroll is built.

What does a worked example look like?

Take a hypothetical facility with one 8-hour night shift, five nights a week, 52 weeks a year. That is 2,080 covered hours a year. At the $17.71 median, base wages come to about $36,837 a year. Loaded at 1.35 times, the labor line is about $49,730 a year, or roughly $149,190 across a 36-month term before raises, supervision time or gap coverage.

The example is illustrative, so replace each input with your own. A 5 percent night differential on base wages adds about $1,840 a year before loading, and that tilts the answer further once supervision and gap hours enter the sum.

The comparison then becomes plain: does the fixed payment over 36 months, plus the costs the lease leaves to you, come in under the labor you can truly retire? Vendor cases can make payback look quick. Sproutmation reports a 9 to 12 month payback in one store case, which is that vendor's own result. Your break-even depends on your hours, not on someone else's store.

How do supervision time and coverage gaps change the answer?

A robot rarely covers every minute of a shift. Someone still checks the dashboard, clears a blocked aisle, reloads consumables or answers an alert. Count those minutes as robot-side cost, and count them again if the robot absorbs only part of the route.

Coverage gaps work the same way. If the robot cannot reach stairwells, a few narrow aisles or a loading apron, the crew still covers those zones. The figure that matters is robot-covered hours as a share of scheduled hours. Only the hours a robot truly absorbs produce a saving.

One reseller's guide offers a useful test: a robot is worth it when the floor hours it absorbs exceed its monthly cost. Apply that test to covered hours, not to scheduled hours.

What does a monthly line leave out?

Ask what the lease covers in writing. Consumables are a common gap. An easytoclean reseller guide estimates $500 to $1,000 a year per floor scrubber for consumables, and it labels that as an estimate. The same guide says battery replacement typically falls between years three and five at a cost of 2,000 to 5,000 euros. On a 36-month term, that item sits near the edge of the window, so ask who carries it.

Maintenance is another line. Thesweeper's rental page lists an optional maintenance add-on at 15 percent, which is a different vendor's offer with its own terms, so compare what each one includes. Everwise notes that leasing terms typically run 24 to 60 months, which places a 36-month term inside the common range.

Where does Service Robot Co. fit in the math?

Service Robot Co. leases robots only. We arrange a three-year lease with one fixed payment, and we quote that payment after a site assessment that maps the floor, the routes and the coverage gaps. We are OEM-neutral, so we select the unit across manufacturers, then handle financing, deployment, integration, training and service through a nationwide US engineer network.

Bring the inputs from the list above. We check them against your floor, then give you one fixed payment for the term. If the hours do not support a robot, the assessment should say so plainly.