Staff scheduling in cleaning: work sites and travel time

Published on 28 October 2026

Building a roster for a cleaning company is nothing like building one for a shop or a production line. You are not scheduling a single team at one location, but dozens of short shifts across dozens of work sites, often before 7 a.m. or after 6 p.m., with a workforce that is largely part-time. One absence immediately puts four sites at risk.

The legal framework does not make that puzzle any easier, but it is clear enough once you know it. Below are the three rules that shape your scheduling in cleaning and facility services most strongly, plus a practical approach.

Why a cleaning roster is a different kind of puzzle

In Joint Committee 121 (cleaning), the average weekly working time is 37 hours. On documents for the National Employment Office (RVA/ONEM), 36.5 hours is usually stated, because the sector grants additional leave days. But most staff sit far below those 37 hours: office cleaning happens in blocks of two to four hours, and one employee often covers several of them back to back.

That means your schedule has to get three things right at the same time:

the length of each shift (is this block allowed to be that short?)
the travel between sites (who pays for that time and those kilometres?)
the publication of the work schedule (when does the employee need to know?)

If you handle those three separately — scheduling in Excel, travel on a separate tab, work schedules by email — you pay for it with payslip errors and arguments afterwards.

Rule 1: how short can a shift be?

The general Labour Act sets a minimum: in principle, every work shift lasts at least 3 hours. A shift here means a continuous working period, possibly interrupted by a short break. That minimum can be departed from by Royal Decree or by a collective agreement at sector or company level — and that is exactly what has happened in cleaning.

In the sector, employees in categories 1A (ordinary cleaning) and 1B (cleaning with added difficulty) may not work less than one hour per site. Directly consecutive sites are allowed — "directly consecutive" meaning a maximum of 10 minutes' walk between the two sites. In that case, the travel time between those sites counts as working time.

The practical consequence for your planning: three 45-minute offices in the same street is fine, but then you schedule them as one continuous block including the walking time in between — and you pay that walking time as time worked. Three 45-minute offices spread across the city is a different story.

Rule 2: paying travel time between sites correctly

If an employee has to cover several consecutive sites and travels a distance to do so, the sector provides a flat-rate allowance for the travel time — known in practice as the inter-site allowance. According to the sector brochures, from 1 January 2026 this amounts to a flat €0.1075 per kilometre, with a minimum of €2.15 per journey. These amounts are index-linked, so always check the current scale before locking them into your payroll engine.

The conditions and exceptions matter:

the distance travelled must be more than 1 kilometre;
no more than 3 hours may elapse between the end of the previous site and the start of the next;
the allowance does not apply to window cleaners, waste collection and industrial cleaning (category 8).

In addition, there is a separate mobility allowance for travel from the company's registered office or a meeting point to the site, proportional to the distance in kilometres. Those amounts are also set at sector level and index-linked.

The scheduling lesson: your roster directly determines your wage cost. Two 2-hour sites 8 km apart with 30 minutes in between costs you the travel time and possibly a kilometre allowance. Assigning those same two sites to an employee who combines them in reverse order with a third site nearby can bring that cost down. This is not an accounting exercise after the fact — it is a choice you make at the moment you schedule. More background on that logic in Cutting wage costs: workforce engineering.

Rule 3: publishing variable part-time schedules on time

Since the Labour Deal, you must publish the applicable work schedule of part-time employees with a variable schedule at least 7 working days in advance. A sector collective agreement declared generally binding can shorten that period, but never to less than 3 working days. The period that applies to you must be stated in your work rules. Fail to publish schedules correctly and you run a serious risk: the presumption then applies that the part-timer worked full time, with the corresponding social security (NSSO) consequences. The official guidance is available from FPS Employment on part-time work and variable work schedules.

In cleaning, that deadline collides hard with reality: a client calls on Monday asking for an extra clean on Friday, an employee calls in sick, a site closes for renovation. You then have three levers: a pool of staff with enough contractual flexibility, a proper procedure for schedule changes (see Changing a work schedule: what does Belgian law say?) and a system that communicates every change with proof.

Don't forget the deviations register either: if part-timers deviate from their published schedule, you have to record those deviations. If you use a time-tracking system that meets the legal conditions, you no longer need to keep a separate register. That is immediately the strongest argument for putting scheduling and time tracking in one system instead of two separate worlds.

A concrete example

Take Fatima, part-time 24 hours a week, category 1A. Her Tuesday:

06:00–08:00: office building A (2 hours)
6 km journey to site B
08:30–10:30: office building B (2 hours)
17:00–19:00: practice C (2 hours)

What do you need to check? Each shift reaches at least one hour per site. Less than 3 hours and more than 1 kilometre separate A and B, so the inter-site allowance is due. More than 3 hours separate B and C — there it does not apply. The break between 10:30 and 17:00 makes it a split day: check what your work rules and the sector agreements say about that, and how you schedule it structurally without people dropping out.

Start site A at 05:30 instead of 06:00 and you enter the territory of evening and night work rules; the sector provides a premium for work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. More on that in Night work & premiums.

From scattered spreadsheets to a single schedule

Most cleaning companies outgrow their Excel file around the 30 to 40 employee mark. Not because the roster gets too big, but because the number of combinations explodes: sites × employees × journeys × contract types × publication deadlines.

What a workable system has to be able to do, at minimum:

link sites to time blocks, with address and distance, so that journeys become visible while you schedule;
monitor contractual part-time hours against hours actually scheduled;
communicate schedules with proof, within the applicable deadline;
record hours worked and link them automatically to payroll processing and to your HR administration.

That is exactly what Forganiser is built on: scheduling, time tracking and Dimona in one chain, so that a change on site doesn't have to be retyped three times.

Checklist for your next scheduling round

Does every shift meet the minimum duration that applies to your category and sector agreements?
Are consecutive sites logically clustered in terms of distance and time window?
Do you know, for each journey, whether the inter-site allowance is due (>1 km, <3 hours, not an excluded category)?
Have the variable schedules been published on time and with proof, within the deadline set in your work rules?
Are deviations recorded in a system that exempts you from the paper deviations register?

Answer those five questions as standard before you publish the roster, and you will lose far less time afterwards to corrections, arguments and back payments.