Deposit deductions for cleaning

The short version

A landlord can deduct for cleaning only if the property is less clean than it was when you moved in, and only by enough to put that right. Not to improve it. Not to bring it up to a standard it never had. The check-in inventory is the benchmark, and if there is no usable check-in inventory the landlord is in a weak position before anything else is argued.

In England, since 1 June 2019, a tenancy agreement cannot require you to pay for professional cleaning as a condition of the tenancy. That was made a prohibited payment by the Tenant Fees Act 2019. A clause saying you must produce a professional cleaning receipt is not enforceable.

What survived that Act is different, and people confuse the two constantly: a landlord can still claim damages for a breach of the agreement. Schedule 1 paragraph 5 of the same Act says so in one line — “a payment of damages for breach of a tenancy agreement … is a permitted payment”. So if you leave the property dirtier than you found it, that is a breach and the cost of fixing it can come out of the deposit. What cannot happen is being charged for a professional clean regardless of the state you left it in.

How often this actually comes up

Cleaning is the most common area of dispute in the figures the Tenancy Deposit Scheme publishes. In its 2024–25 statistical briefing it appeared in 54% of cases, ahead of damage at 49%, redecoration at 31%, gardening at 14% and rent arrears at 10%. Those add to more than 100 because one dispute usually raises several issues at once — the table counts the cases where a claim arises, not a single cause per dispute.

Now the part most pages leave out. That 54% is captioned “reasons for tenancy deposit disputes in TDS Insured”, and TDS Insured is one product, of one of the three approved schemes in England and Wales. It is not a national figure, and nobody publishes one: the same briefing carries reasons tables for TDS Insured, for TDS Northern Ireland and for SafeDeposits Scotland, and for nothing else. There is no TDS Custodial table and no England-and-Wales table, even though custodial is the larger half of the market — 2,560,711 deposits against 2,145,759 insured.

A different scheme reports a very different rate. mydeposits states that “around 30% of all cases deal with an aspect of cleaning”. So the honest position is a range, not a headline: somewhere between roughly a third and just over half of disputes touch cleaning, depending on whose book you are in.

The share also moves a lot year to year, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes it at you as a constant. In the same TDS table cleaning was 65% in 2023–24 and 54% in 2024–25 — an eleven-point fall in a single year — and it was 42% in 2019–20. TDS's own summary above that table says cleaning appears “in over half of all cases in each year”, but four of the eleven years printed underneath it are below half. We are pointing that out about our own best source, because it is the kind of sentence that gets repeated for a decade.

Your odds of ending up in a dispute at all

Lower than the internet suggests, but not as low as the headline figure implies either.

In the year to March 2025 there were 46,950 adjudications across England and Wales, against 4,706,470 deposits protected at the end of that March. TDS puts that at 1.00%. Read it carefully though, because it is easy to over-read: the 46,950 is one year of decisions, and the 4.7 million is every deposit being held on a single day — most of them for tenancies that were nowhere near ending and so could not have produced a dispute.

The figure a tenant actually wants is disputes as a share of tenancies that ended, and no scheme publishes it. So the true rate at the end of a tenancy is higher than 1%. By how much is not known, and anyone who tells you precisely is guessing.

The standard you are held to

As clean as it was at check-in, allowing for fair wear and tear. That is the whole test. Not “professionally cleaned”, not “spotless”, not “as new”. mydeposits puts it plainly: the tenant is only responsible for returning the property cleaned to the same standard it was in at the start.

Fair wear and tear is the deterioration you would expect from ordinary use over the length of the tenancy. Carpet flattened in a hallway after three years is wear. The same carpet with a curry stain is not.

Betterment is the other half, and it is the one that kills most over-claims. A landlord cannot end up better off than before. If a five-year-old carpet is ruined, the claim is the remaining value of a five-year-old carpet, not the price of a new one.

Proportion. A claim has to match the breach. If one oven needs cleaning, the claim is for cleaning an oven — not a full property clean because it was easier to book. Adjudicators routinely award a percentage of what was claimed for exactly this reason.

What makes a deduction stick

If you are a landlord, this is the list. If you are a tenant, it is the list to check the claim against.

A check-in inventory, dated, detailed and photographed, that the tenant signed. Without it there is very little to compare the check-out against, and the burden is on the person claiming. mydeposits names poor-quality inventories as a leading reason claims fail.

A check-out report against that same inventory, room by room, so the difference is visible rather than asserted.

An itemised invoice. A generic invoice for “cleaning — £450” is weak evidence. One that lists what was cleaned, for how long, at what rate, is strong.

Evidence the work was actually needed and actually done. Photographs at check-out, and receipts after.

Restraint on the amount. Claims that look like an upgrade get reduced. Claims that match the damage get paid.

If you disagree with a deduction

Ask for the breakdown first, in writing. What is being claimed, for what, and on what evidence. A surprising number of deductions shrink or disappear at this step, because the landlord has to actually assemble the case.

Agree and take the undisputed part. If £600 is held and £150 is genuinely in dispute, the other £450 should be returned to you now. The TDS rules expect parties to have tried this before a dispute is raised at all.

Then raise it with the scheme your deposit is in — free, and decided by an adjudicator on the documents. You do not need a solicitor and there is no hearing.

What happens after you raise it

Both sides are asked for evidence — under the TDS Insured rules, within 10 working days each. The adjudicator reads the inventory, the check-out report, the photographs and the invoices, and decides. The report is normally completed within 28 days of the scheme receiving all the evidence and both parties agreeing to use adjudication.

The decision is binding, and there is no appeal on the merits. You do keep the right to go to court instead, but that is a different route with costs attached, and it has to be chosen rather than tried afterwards.

The practical consequence: the evidence you file is the case. There is no chance to explain in person, no benefit of the doubt for the more reasonable-sounding party. Dated photographs beat a well-written paragraph every time.

The number we are not going to give you

Every page about this seems to state a typical cleaning deduction. We are not going to, because no scheme publishes one and any figure we invented would be repeated back to a landlord as though it meant something.

What can be said honestly: deductions are supposed to be the reasonable cost of the specific work needed, evidenced by an itemised invoice, reduced for wear and betterment. If the amount you have been quoted does not look like that, that is the argument to make — not “the average is lower”.