Why cleaning quotes vary so much

Two quotes, one flat, and no way to compare them

The gap is usually not greed and it is usually not a bargain. It is that the two firms have quoted different jobs and neither document says which. One includes the oven and one does not. One means laundering the linen that is already there and one means supplying it. One is four hours of somebody's time whatever that covers; the other is a defined list finished when it is finished.

So the useful question is never “why is that one dearer”. It is “what did each of you assume you were doing”. Everything below is aimed at making that answerable in writing before you commit.

This page will not tell you what a clean should cost. Nobody publishes a trustworthy average, the honest range is wide enough to be useless, and a number invented here would be quoted back at a cleaner as though it meant something. What it will tell you is what you are entitled to be told, and what to ask.

What they told you is part of the contract

This surprises people, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

Every contract to supply a service is treated as including a term that the trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill — Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 49. That is automatic. It does not need to be written down and it cannot be left out.

More than that: anything a trader said or wrote to you about the service, which you took into account when deciding to enter the contract, is itself a term of that contract (section 50). If the person who came round said “that includes the oven”, that is not sales patter, it is a term.

The qualifier matters as much as the rule, so here it is in the same breath. What was said is *“subject to anything that qualified it and was said or written to the consumer by the trader on the same occasion”*, and to any change you both expressly agreed. So “that includes the oven, if it hasn't been left burnt on” is the term — the caveat travels with the promise.

Information the trader had to give you under the Consumer Contracts Regulations counts too, and a change to any of it *“is not effective unless expressly agreed between the consumer and the trader”*. One side cannot quietly move it afterwards.

And a trader cannot write the reasonable-care duty out of its own terms, or bury the remedy behind a condition designed to make it unusable — section 57.

You are entitled to a price, or to how the price will be worked out

Before you are bound, a trader must give you the total price of the service — or, where the nature of the work means it genuinely cannot be calculated in advance, the manner in which the price will be calculated. That is the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, Schedule 1 for contracts made at the trader's own premises and Schedule 2 for contracts made at yours or at a distance.

Read that second limb carefully, because it is the one that gets abused. “We'll see when we get there” is not the manner in which the price will be calculated. “£X per room, £Y for an oven, confirmed before we start” is.

Separately, since 6 April 2025, where a trader does advertise a price, the total price is material information under section 230 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Three qualifiers travel with that, and pages that quote it usually drop them: it applies to an “invitation to purchase”, which means a practice indicating the product's characteristics *and its price*; it bites only on information not already apparent from the context; and it is subject to the limitations of the medium. A trader who advertises no price at all is outside that section — which is exactly why the Regulations above, not this one, are the backbone of your rights here.

Two more that are worth knowing about. Presenting true information in a misleading way is still a misleading action — the Act says in terms that an overall presentation *“may be deceiving even if the information it contains is true”*. And advertising a price the trader has reasonable grounds to believe it cannot supply at, without saying so, is banned outright.

Ask what the quote is measured in

Rooms, beds, bathrooms, hours, or square metres — five different units, and a quote that does not say which is not really a quote. It is the difference that explains most of the spread, and almost nobody states it.

An hourly price transfers the overrun risk to you. If it takes longer, you pay more, and the estimate you were given was never a commitment. A per-property price transfers that risk to the firm. Which you want depends on whether you would rather have certainty or the chance of paying less — but you should at least know which one you have been handed.

The same job counted two ways gives two different-looking numbers. A property counted in bedrooms and a property counted per bed are not the same count: a twin room is one bedroom and two beds to make, and a bunk room can be four.

“Deep clean” is not in the statute book

Search the whole of UK legislation for the phrase and you get, in its own words: *“Your text search for "deep clean" in the English language of legislation has returned no results.”* Same for “deep cleaning”.

That does not make the phrase meaningless — it means it means whatever the person quoting you has decided it means, and two firms using it are not necessarily offering the same work. It is the single most common source of a gap between two quotes.

The move is to ask for the list, not the adjective. And we hold ourselves to that: our changeover deep clean is the 12-point changeover check, and the tenancy version is the published included list on that service page. Both are written down and we will send either before you book.

What can actually be checked

Most reassurance in this trade is unverifiable. Two things are not.

Keys. A cleaner holding your key does not need a Security Industry Authority licence, and a firm implying otherwise is selling you something. The Private Security Industry Act 2001 excludes exactly this case: holding a key for purposes incidental to providing services that are not themselves security work. So do not use a licence as a proxy for trustworthiness here — ask instead how keys are stored, who has access, and what happens the day somebody leaves.

Anything being taken away. This one exposes both sides. Transporting somebody else's waste in the course of a business without being a registered carrier is an offence under the Control of Pollution (Amendment) Act 1989. And under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 the occupier of a domestic property in England or Wales must take reasonable measures to pass household waste only to an authorised person — so if a cleaner takes your rubbish away and is not registered, you have a duty you may have failed. In England a fixed penalty can follow, set by default at £200.

Checking is free: the public register is searchable on gov.uk, and a carrier's number starts with “CB”. Registering is not free, which is worth knowing before you assume anyone offering to clear a flat holds one.

Cancelling, and what it can cost you

Two different things get muddled here, and they have different answers.

A cleaner's own cancellation term is a matter of contract. Most set a notice period and a charge inside it — ours is 24 hours and 50% — and that is legitimate: the slot is gone and the people are booked. Ask what it is before you book, because it is the term most often left out of a quote and most often discovered on a bad day.

A statutory right to cancel is different, and it is not something a cleaner's terms can take away. Where you agree a contract at your home or at a distance rather than at the trader's premises, you generally have 14 days to cancel. There are exceptions — notably where an off-premises contract involves a payment of no more than £42, under regulation 27(3).

If that right applies and you asked the trader to start work inside the cancellation period, you do not walk away for nothing: you pay a proportionate amount for what was actually supplied, calculated from the agreed price, or from market value if the agreed price was excessive. Proportionate to work done — not a flat percentage of a job nobody started.

And the sharpest one: if the trader never told you about the cancellation right, you bear no cost at all for service supplied in that period. A trader who left it out of their terms has given something away.

Where the right exists and you were not told about it, the cancellation period itself extends — by up to twelve months.

If the clean is wrong

Under the Consumer Rights Act the first remedy is repeat performance — the trader has to do it again, within a reasonable time, without significant inconvenience to you, and at its own cost. If repeat performance is impossible, or it cannot be done in a reasonable time or without significant inconvenience, you can require a price reduction instead.

What is often stated too narrowly: those are the Act's own remedies, and the Act expressly does not stop you seeking others — damages, or treating the contract as at an end — instead of or as well as, so long as you do not recover twice for the same loss.

In practice the sequence that works is unglamorous: tell them quickly, in writing, with dated photographs, and give them the chance to put it right. Most firms will. The ones that will not have told you something useful.

The same test, applied to us

It would be easy to write all of the above and then not meet it, so here is where we stand against our own page.

Changeovers carry a published starting figure and a calculator that works out the price from your beds and bathrooms before you speak to anybody. Carpets and upholstery have a published rate card with a visit minimum on it.

End of tenancy and office work carry a method and no figure, deliberately. Both vary enough with the state of the property that a number on a website would be a number we might not honour, and we would rather give you the way it is calculated — which is the second limb of exactly the rule set out above — than a figure that moves once somebody has seen the place.

We do not hold a waste carrier registration, so we will not take a tenant's leftovers off site. It is on our end-of-tenancy page in those words, and it is the sort of thing this page tells you to go and check.