This is a challenging category to survey because spending on wages is highly discretionary and fluctuates significantly. Where owners’ remuneration, drawings, or salaries are clearly identifiable, those amounts are excluded from the survey (see the list of excluded income and expenses). The aim is to capture only wages paid to cleaners, excluding payments to minders/managers, administration staff, or maintenance wages. Accordingly, the charts below present results for both filtered and unfiltered datasets.

The unfiltered dataset includes “outlier” samples where zero wages are recorded as paid to cleaners, as well as samples where wages exceed 20 percent of revenue, which appears excessive. This dataset also includes accounts that show payments to managers/minders and administration staff; however, those amounts are not counted as cleaners’ wages.

The filtered dataset excludes samples with either zero wages or wages exceeding 20 percent of revenue, and also excludes samples where wages are recorded for minders/managers, administration, or maintenance staff.