Office cleaning contracts: how pricing actually works

Three proposals, three different shapes

One is priced per hour. One is a monthly figure with no hours in it at all. One is per square metre. They are not three prices for one job — they are three descriptions of three different jobs, and none of the documents says which.

This page carries no price of ours. Office work is quoted after a site visit, for the reason set out further down, and a figure here would be a figure we might not honour. What it does is give you the questions that turn three unlike documents into a comparison.

Every figure below belongs to somebody else — a government specification, a wage rate, an insurance floor — and is attributed where it appears.

The one piece of arithmetic that makes them comparable

Hours on site per visit × visits per week × weeks per year. Ask every bidder for those three numbers, including us. A proposal that will not give them is not a proposal you can check.

Once you have them, a monthly figure becomes an hourly one and an hourly one becomes an annual commitment, and the three documents finally sit on the same axis. It also exposes the commonest gap between two quotes, which is not the rate at all — it is that one bidder has assumed four hours a week and the other six.

If a price is quoted per square metre, ask what it assumes about how much floor one person covers in an hour, and what happens when that assumption turns out to be wrong on your building. A per-square-metre price is an hourly price with the hours hidden inside somebody's productivity assumption.

A specification is three columns, not a list of jobs

Most disputes come from a scope that lists tasks and stops. The NHS's national standard for healthcare premises sets out the anatomy plainly, and although an office is not a hospital, the structure transfers even where the frequencies do not. It names three parts: *“cleaning elements – a list of individual items/categories of items that require cleaning; performance parameters – the expected standard of each item (element) after cleaning; cleaning frequencies – how often each item (element) should be cleaned.”*

The middle column is the one almost everybody leaves out, and it is the one that decides arguments. “Desks” is an element. “Desks, clear of marks and dust, edges and under-lip included” is a standard. Only the second can be checked at eight in the morning by somebody who was not there.

The same standard makes the point that frequency should follow risk rather than being uniform: *“different functional areas do not carry the same degree of risk … For example, a records storeroom will not require as frequent cleaning as an intensive care unit.”* Read “meeting room” and “stationery cupboard” for those, and the principle is identical.

It is also honest about its own machinery not being universal — even for hospitals, *“adoption of all 6 functional risk (FR) categories where practicable is considered good practice but is not mandatory.”* So do not let anybody sell you healthcare audit apparatus for a twelve-desk office.

Routine work and periodic work are two contracts under one cover

This is the structural thing worth taking away, and the government's own live facilities-management framework shows it better than any brochure.

On that framework, deep and periodic cleaning is a separately specified service with its own annual programme: the supplier must *“provide a programme for periodic and Deep Cleaning activities to the Buyer for Approval within one Month of the start of each Contract Year”*, and tell the buyer a month before each periodic activity happens. It is planned, approved and scheduled — not something that occurs when someone remembers.

Window cleaning sits apart again, on its own cycle: internal and external window cleaning *“shall be carried out bi-annually”*, scheduled with the buyer through the planned-maintenance system.

In fact that specification breaks cleaning into twelve separately standardised services — routine, infection control and touchpoints, barrier mats, mobile, deep and periodic, external areas, internal windows, external windows, communications rooms, out-of-hours reactive, housekeeping, and IT equipment — each with its own defined standard. A cleaning contract is a set of separately specified services, not one thing with a price on it.

The healthcare standard draws the same line for a different reason: *“periodic cleaning of items less frequently than fortnightly or monthly (for example, carpet washing, floor stripping/polish/sealing and external window cleaning) is not considered routine and should form part of a planned and documented annual programme.”*

So when you compare proposals, separate the two questions. What happens every visit, and what happens on a programme? A cheap routine price with no periodic programme behind it is not cheaper. It is smaller.

What sits on every hour

Not to make anybody sympathetic — to explain why a quote well below the others usually resolves into one of a small number of things.

The wage floor moves every April. From 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour, with lower rates for younger workers and first-year apprentices. A multi-year contract priced off today's floor has a known increase in it.

Employer National Insurance is 15% above a £5,000 secondary threshold in 2026–27 — but not on every worker and not for every employer. Under-21s and apprentices under 25 attract 0% up to £50,270, and eligible employers can reduce the annual bill by the Employment Allowance, which for 2026 to 2027 is £10,500. Anyone quoting you a flat NI percentage on a cleaning contract is simplifying hard.

Holiday has to be covered by somebody. Almost all workers get 5.6 weeks' paid leave a year — 28 days on a five-day week — and the building still needs cleaning during it.

Pension, where the worker qualifies for automatic enrolment: a minimum total of 8% of qualifying earnings, of which the employer pays at least 3%. Qualifying earnings, not every pound, and not every worker.

Sick pay changed on 6 April 2026. Statutory sick pay is now owed from the first day of sickness rather than the fourth, and the lower-earnings condition was removed — so far more part-time cleaners now qualify from day one, at £123.25 a week or 80% of normal weekly earnings, whichever is lower.

And there is a voluntary rate above all of it. The Living Wage Foundation's 2025–26 real Living Wage is £13.45 across the UK and £14.80 in London. A bidder paying it is not overcharging you; a bidder well under the statutory floor has a problem they have not told you about.

Consumables are a question, not an assumption. Who buys the hand towels, the bin liners and the washroom stock, and is it inside the price or recharged? Ask, because the two answers are a long way apart over a year.

TUPE: the obligation that arrives with a change of contractor

The thing buyers most often meet too late. Changing your cleaning contractor is usually a “service provision change” — a distinct route into the TUPE regulations that exists alongside the sale of a business, and one that outsourcing, insourcing and contractor-to-contractor changes all fall under.

It applies where the activities after the change are fundamentally the same as those that stopped, and where three conditions are met: there is an organised grouping of employees in Great Britain whose principal purpose is that client's work; the client intends the activities to continue *“other than in connection with a single specific event or task of short-term duration”*; and the activities are not wholly or mainly the supply of goods. That is the test, and this page stops there — whether it applies to your contract is fact-specific.

Acas, the statutory conciliation service, says there is no minimum size for that grouping — it can be one person — and lists office cleaning among its own examples. So a small contract is not automatically outside it.

Where it applies, the cleaners' contracts do not end. They transfer to the incoming contractor, with most of the liabilities attached. Two things do not carry over: criminal liability, and occupational pension rights relating to old age, invalidity or survivors.

Dismissing somebody because of the transfer itself is automatically unfair. A dismissal for an economic, technical or organisational reason entailing changes in the workforce is not — but it is then tested for fairness in the ordinary way. What that means for you as a buyer is narrow and useful: a bidder who has priced on reducing the staff must be able to say what the reason is, and “we won the contract” is not one.

There is a 28-day deadline, and it does not run to you. The outgoing contractor must give the incoming one employee liability information at least 28 days before the transfer. You cannot compel it — you are not the recipient. What you can do is ask each bidder whether they have had it, because one pricing without it is pricing blind, and that is where a mobilisation goes wrong.

For informing and consulting representatives there is no fixed number of days — the standard is long enough before the transfer to allow consultation to happen. Readers expect a number here and there isn't one. That duty sits on each employer, not on you.

The questions to send all three bidders

Send the same list to everyone, including us, and compare the answers rather than the totals.

When none of this applies

A small office cleaned twice a week does not need a twelve-service specification and an annual periodic programme. It needs a one-page scope with a standard column, an agreed frequency, and somebody's phone number. Applying the apparatus above to it will cost you more in meetings than it saves.

And sometimes the right answer is not to go to market at all. The contractor you have already knows which door sticks, which alarm code changed and which desk the person who works late sits at. That knowledge is worth something real, and a renegotiation with a specification attached is often a better outcome than a switch — for you, if not for us.