House Cleaning Cost UK 2026: Hourly Rates, Flat Fees and Deep-Clean Prices

A cleaner quoting £17 an hour and one quoting £34 an hour are frequently selling unrelated services, and the cheap one is not automatically the worse buy. The confusion comes from three different jobs sharing a name: ongoing maintenance, a one-off reset of a house that has drifted, and a specification-driven clean to release a deposit.

Get the diagnosis wrong and you either pay deep-clean money for a routine visit, or book three hours of maintenance and expect it to undo eighteen months of neglect. Below are 2026 UK figures for all three, plus the questions that separate a real quote from a doorstep guess.

Do this before you ring anyone. Walk the house and stop at the first check that describes it.

• •Run a finger along the top of a door frame and look at the skirting behind the sofa. Dusty, but kitchen and bathroom broadly sanitary? You want regular domestic cleaning — two to four hours a visit, priced hourly.
• •Oven glass opaque, shower screen scaly enough to feel, grout gone grey, extractor filter tacky? No weekly visit catches up on that. You need a one-off deep clean first, then maintenance afterwards.
• •Handing keys back to a landlord or agent? That is an end-of-tenancy clean — a written specification covering cupboard and appliance interiors, light fittings and skirting, sold with a re-clean guarantee. Not a deep clean with a different label.
• •Is the problem one surface — shadowed traffic lanes in the hall, a sofa that smells of dog, an etched screen? Buy the specialist trade. General cleaning hours will not touch it, and carpet cleaning is priced per room, not per hour.
• •None of the above, but the house never feels on top of itself? The honest answer is usually a better routine, not a contract. Start with a written cleaning schedule.

Regular work is sold by the hour with a minimum booking, almost always two hours and commonly three. One-off work is sold as a flat fee, because the cleaner is pricing risk as much as time. Agency rates below include cover when your cleaner is ill, vetting and insurance; direct-booked rates do not.

• •Self-employed cleaner, regular visit: £15–£20 an hour outside the South East, £20–£28 in London and the commuter belt
• •Agency regular visit: £20–£28 an hour regionally, £28–£38 in London
• •One-off or occasional visit: a £3–£6 an hour premium over the same cleaner's regular rate
• •Deep clean flat fee: £160–£240 for a one or two-bed flat, £240–£360 for a three-bed semi, £350–£550 for four or five bedrooms
• •End of tenancy: £130–£190 studio or one-bed, £180–£270 two-bed, £250–£400 three-bed, £380–£600 for four bedrooms up — add 25–40% inside the M25
• •Single oven deep clean £55–£80, double oven £75–£110, range cooker £110–£160
• •Carpet cleaning £30–£45 a room, with a £60–£90 minimum charge
• •Interior windows £3–£6 per opening; ironing £14–£18 an hour or £12–£18 a basket

Cleaning is the rare home service where materials barely register: on a typical £60 visit, £2 to £5 covers products. Everything else is time. There is no material inflation to blame and no markup on parts, so a high price means someone is either allowing more hours or taking a bigger margin.

• •Cleaner's take-home: 60–75% of an agency rate, or 90%+ booked direct
• •Agency margin for scheduling, cover, vetting and complaints: 20–35%
• •Products and consumables: £2–£5 a visit, roughly 3–5% of the bill
• •Travel, fuel and parking: £3–£8 a visit, more where congestion or ULEZ charges land on top
• •VAT at 20% applies only above the £90,000 turnover threshold, so most sole traders do not charge it and most agencies do

Experienced cleaners price condition, not floor area. A cluttered two-bed takes longer than a minimal four-bed, because every quote is really an estimate of how many surfaces must be cleared before anything gets wiped.

• •Frequency: weekly is usually £1–£3 an hour cheaper than fortnightly, and fortnightly cheaper than monthly, because dirt compounds
• •Clutter: moving objects before wiping costs 20–30 minutes a visit, and it will be in the price
• •Pets: a shedding dog adds roughly half an hour and a much heavier vacuum load
• •Hard water: across Kent, Essex, Cambridgeshire and most of London, limescale can double bathroom time on a deep clean
• •Bathrooms outweigh bedrooms — each extra bathroom adds 25–40 minutes to a deep clean, each extra bedroom perhaps 15
• •Access: no parking, a third-floor flat with no lift, or a key handover across town all add cost
• •Extras rarely included as standard: oven and fridge interiors, interior windows, blinds and limescale removal

• •Fortnightly maintenance, two-bed terrace, Leeds — 3 hours at £17 booked direct = £51 a visit. Twenty-six visits = £1,326, plus one oven clean in December at £65. Annual total £1,391, about £116 a month.
• •One-off deep clean before family stay, three-bed semi, Bristol — two cleaners for 5 hours each is 10 labour hours at £24 = £240. Double oven dismantled and dip-tank cleaned, £85. Eleven interior windows at £4 = £44. Total £369 in a single day.
• •End of tenancy, two-bed flat, Manchester — £215 flat fee covering cupboard interiors, oven, limescale and light fittings, plus hot-water extraction on two carpeted bedrooms at £80. Total £295, against a £400–£700 deposit deduction if the agent instructs their own contractor.

Convert every flat fee back into an implied hourly rate. A £320 deep clean done by two people in four hours is £40 an hour; the same £320 across twelve labour hours is £26.67 and buys a genuinely thorough job. Identical headline price, different purchase. Some add-ons are also DIY — an oven costs £55–£80 professionally but about £12 in materials and two hours if you use the method the trade uses.

• •Ask how many cleaners and how many hours the quote assumes. A price with no hours behind it is a guess dressed up as a figure.
• •Ask what is excluded. Oven and fridge interiors, interior windows, blinds and carpets are the usual omissions.
• •Check public liability cover — £1m minimum, £2m normal — and whether the cleaner is employed or self-employed, because that determines who is liable if something breaks.
• •For end of tenancy, get the re-clean guarantee in writing. Forty-eight to seventy-two hours is standard, and it is usually void if the property is not empty on arrival.
• •Treat anything under about £13 an hour as a warning. After travel, products and unpaid gaps it is not sustainable, and you will be recruiting again within two months.
• •Get three quotes for one-off work; for regular work, book a trial visit before committing.

Figures were compiled in early 2026 from published agency price lists across ten UK regions, quotes obtained against identical written property briefs, and rates charged by independent cleaners we work with. Hourly rates are what the customer pays, not what the cleaner takes home.

Flat fees assume average soiling and a lightly furnished property, and exclude VAT unless the provider is registered. Read the ranges as the middle 80% of the market — quotes exist at both ends, and both deserve questions.