Who pays the cleaner?

When you kill civilians in Payday 2, you are deducted "cleaner costs" which scale with difficulty and vary between heists.

This money is obviously not taken from your end of heist payday, since otherwise (as an example) killing all of the civilians on Jewellery Store normal difficulty at $8000 per kill would result in negative income.

Where is this money taken from, as it doesn't appear to be deducted from your end of heist payday?

Solution 1:

Cleaner costs come directly out of your available spending cash.

I entered a solo jewelry store heist with 32,990,000 offshore and 3,072,690 in ready cash. I started murdering civilians left and right, and managed to escape with three bags.

This is what I saw when I finished the stage.

Apparently you have a direct debit account with the cleaner.

One thing worth noting is that depending on the offshore percentage, you'll have to steal more cash to compensate for killing a civilian than the stated on-screen cost. For example, when the offshore percentage is 0.25, killing a $2,000 civilian really costs you $8,000 worth of heist loot.

Solution 2:

When you kill a civilian, the money is taken directly from your spending money. When you finish a mission, 20% of your money earned, goes towards to your spending money and 80% goes towards your offshore account. So basically, if you kill a civilian worth 5k, you need to get 25k from a mission, to get back that 5k spending money you lost.

Solution 3:

Money is wired straight out of your account the moment you kill the civilian. You will get the -$ during the heist, not after it. Why I've said this is because if you've gone infamous/have no cash for some reason, you can just do a bank heist and massacre everyone inside w/o penalty, still getting 100% of the cash you earned from the heist. The only time this wouldn't work is if you were in a multi-day heist where you can pick up instant loot on the first day and killed on any day after you picked up the cash (applicable to Hotline Miami, but I don't know about any others) but you'll only lose the instant cash you picked up the day(s) before.