APPA Level 2 Cleaning Standards: What Ordinary Tidiness Looks Like, Room by Room

Where Level 2 Sits Among the APPA Levels

APPA, the association for educational facilities leaders, defines five appearance levels in Operational Guidelines for Educational Facilities: Custodial (4th edition, 2023). Level 1 is the showpiece standard and Level 5 is what years of deferred custodial budgets produce. Level 2, which APPA also calls Comprehensive Care, is the middle ground most institutions actually buy: clean enough that students, staff and visitors judge the building well, without paying Level 1 labor for every office and corridor.

The value of any APPA level is that it is written down. "Clean the classrooms nightly" can't be enforced. "Maintain classrooms at APPA Level 2" can, because there is a description to inspect against. For the full five-level overview and how levels become staffing plans, see APPA Cleaning Levels Explained.

What Level 2 Looks Like, Room by Room

APPA writes one description per level, not one per room. Applying it room by room is where contracts succeed or fail, because the same words mean different things in a lecture hall and in a restroom. Below is how we read Level 2 in each of the main campus space types, and the first things we look at when we inspect one. The inspection points are CSS practice, not APPA text.

Classrooms and lecture halls

Level 2 here means a room a professor can walk into at 8 a.m. without noticing anything. Floors are clear under and between the seats, with no gum, paper or grit along the rows and no buildup where the floor meets the wall. Desktops, tablet arms and the lectern are wiped, and whiteboards and their trays are clean. A little dust on a high ledge, seen only if you look for it, still passes. The checks we start with: under the back rows, the corners behind the door, the whiteboard tray, and the trash by the exit.

Offices

Offices hold Level 2 more easily than any other space, because they are lightly used and the occupants keep them in order. Level 2 is carpet vacuumed in the traffic lanes and under the desk, cleared surfaces dusted, glass free of obvious handprints, and the trash emptied. Light dust on a cluttered desk the custodian is not allowed to move is normal at Level 2 and should be written into the contract as such, so it never becomes a complaint.

Restrooms

Restrooms are where Level 2 stops tolerating "a little." Fixtures, partitions and tile have to be clean and the room has to be odor-free, with soap, paper and hand drying stocked. In practice that means restroom Level 2 and Level 1 look almost the same to a visitor. APPA publishes no restroom staffing rate below Level 2, which tells you how the guidelines treat this room: it is never a place to save money. We check the floor around the base of each fixture, the partition edges, the dispensers, and the smell as you open the door.

Corridors, lobbies and stairwells

Public circulation space is the first impression of every building, and it is also the cheapest space to keep at Level 2 because the work is mostly long, uninterrupted floor care. Level 2 is bright floors with no dull walking lane, entry mats clean, no buildup at the edges, and stair treads and handrails wiped. We look at the entry zone first, since tracked-in grit is the earliest sign a corridor is sliding toward Level 3.

Labs

Teaching and research labs are labor-heavy at any level, because of floor area under benches, sinks and specialist waste. Custodial Level 2 in a lab covers the floors, sinks, general surfaces and ordinary trash; bench tops, equipment and regulated waste usually belong to the lab staff, and the contract should say so space by space. Where lab work demands a healthcare-adjacent standard, that space should be written at Level 1 rather than stretched from Level 2.

How Much Staffing Level 2 Takes

APPA converts each level into production rates: the cleanable floor area one full-time custodian can hold at that level. At Level 2 the rates vary more than tenfold by room type, and floor finish matters too:

Cleanable square feet per custodian FTE at APPA Level 2. Source: APPA, Operational Guidelines for Educational Facilities: Custodial (4th ed., 2023), Appendix B, “Summary of Hard Surface Cleaning” (p. 300) and “Summary of Soft Surface Cleaning” (p. 301); the hard-floor table also appears in APPA's Cleaning Operations chapter (August 2024). APPA lists the same restroom and lab rates for both floor types.

Two things stand out. First, carpet cuts what a custodian can hold in a corridor at Level 2 by more than half, from about 115,900 to 55,300 square feet. Second, the choice between Level 1, 2 and 3 is a large budget decision, not a small one:

That is why the right question is never "what level is our campus?" but "what level is each space?" A campus that writes Level 1 for showcase areas, Level 2 for classrooms, offices and every restroom, and Level 3 for low-traffic support space can often deliver better service where it is noticed for the same total budget. To run the numbers on your own square footage, use the free APPA custodial staffing calculator, which applies these rates by space type, level and floor finish.

Level 2 vs. Level 1 and Level 3: Choosing the Right Level

• Choose Level 1 where a single visible flaw costs you something: admissions and visitor lobbies, executive and board suites, child care, and labs or clinics with a health requirement.
• Choose Level 2 for the bulk of academic and administrative space, and as the floor for every restroom. It is the level most people mean when they say a building "looks well kept."
• Choose Level 3 only where few people go and nobody judges the institution by it: storage, mechanical-adjacent support rooms, low-use back corridors. Below Level 2 the change is visible to anyone, with buildup along walls and dull walking lanes, so don't use Level 3 in public space to balance a budget.

Writing Level 2 Into a Contract, and Proving It

A Level 2 requirement works only if three things are in the contract:

1. A space-by-space level schedule. Every room type, and any exceptions, listed with its target level. Include the exclusions too, such as cluttered desks or lab benches, so nobody argues about them later.
2. The bidder's work-loading math. The production rates and floor finishes the price assumes, and the custodian count by building and shift. Two bids at the same price can hide very different Level 2 coverage. Our guide to performance-based and open-book custodial contracts covers how to ask for it.
3. Scored inspections against the written description. Each space scored element by element (floors, surfaces, restrooms, trash, lighting), with photos for any deficiency, deficiencies kept open until fixed, and results the client can see directly, not a monthly PDF.

We run that last step in FHL Inspect, part of Facility Hub Live: inspectors score each space item by item against its target level, and the client sees the same live quality scores we do. When occupancy sensors are in place, inspections and labor can follow real traffic. A restroom that saw heavy use today gets attention before an empty lecture hall does, which is how Level 2 holds in the spaces people actually use. We explain the idea in this episode of The Living Campus:

Watch the episode · 7 minStop Guessing Your APPA Level: Is Your Budget Paying for Cleaning You Don't Need?

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