What a cleaner really costs in England in 2026

Ask five cleaning companies for a price and you will get five different answers, most of them vague until someone visits. That is not much use when you are trying to work out whether you can afford a cleaner at all.

So here is a straight answer, including what we charge and why.

The going rate

Across England, an agency cleaner works out at roughly £16 to £20 an hour. London sits at the top of that, usually £19.50 or more; the rest of the country tends to be £16 to £17. A private cleaner found through a local group will often quote £13 to £15.

Our rates:

• £17.50 an hour for a weekly clean
• £18.50 an hour fortnightly
• £20.95 an hour for a one-off

Weekly is cheaper for a straightforward reason: a regular slot is worth more to us than a gap in the diary, so we share the benefit.

Why the private quote is not the bargain it looks

A £14 an hour private cleaner is genuinely cheaper per hour. What you are also taking on is everything an agency price includes:

• Products and equipment. Ours are in the price. Privately, you usually buy them.
• Insurance. If a private cleaner breaks something or hurts themselves in your home, you may find your own home insurance is involved.
• Cover. When your cleaner is ill or on holiday, an agency sends someone else. Privately, you go without.
• Vetting. We identity-check and DBS-check every cleaner before their first job.
• Somewhere to complain. If the work is not right, there is a company to ring rather than an awkward conversation with someone standing in your kitchen.

Neither option is wrong. Plenty of people are very happy with a private cleaner they trust. It is just worth comparing the whole thing rather than only the hourly figure.

How many hours do you actually need?

The most common mistake is booking too few hours and being disappointed. As a rough guide, for a regular clean:

• One-bedroom flat — 2 to 2.5 hours
• Two-bedroom home — 3 hours
• Three-bedroom house — 3.5 to 4 hours
• Four bedrooms or more — 4.5 hours plus

Add half an hour if you have pets, and another half hour if you want ironing.

For a first clean of somewhere that has not had one in a while, book a deep clean instead. It is a fixed price and it gets the property to a point where a regular slot can keep it there.

Where the money goes

We are open about this because it explains why the very cheapest quotes tend not to last.

The cleaner takes the majority of what you pay: £13 an hour on hourly work, and half the job price on fixed-price work like an end of tenancy or a deep clean. The rest covers insurance, products, equipment, vetting, the office, and the cost of putting a job right when something goes wrong.

A company charging £14 an hour is either paying the cleaner around £9, or not carrying real insurance. Neither ends well for the customer.

Fixed prices, so nothing changes on the day

Hourly work suits regular cleaning. For everything else we quote a fixed price by the size of the property, the same wherever you are in England:

• End of tenancy — from £109
• Deep cleaning — from £119
• After builders — from £159
• Carpets — £32 a room

No London surcharge, no weekend surcharge, and nothing added once the cleaner is standing in your hallway.

What you should expect for the money

Whoever you go with, these are reasonable things to insist on:

• A price in writing before the work starts
• Proof of insurance
• A named cleaner rather than whoever is free
• A way to raise a problem and have it fixed

Ours comes with a 72-hour guarantee: if something has been missed, tell us within three days and we return and put it right at no charge. In the last year we have been called back on fewer than two cleans in a hundred, and every one was redone free.

Try it without committing to anything

There is no contract and no notice period. Book a single clean, see what you think, and set up a regular slot only if you want one. You can pause or cancel it from your account whenever you like.

See your price in under a minute — no card needed to book.