A Folkestone inventory clerk runs a fingernail down the shower screen runner before checking anything else in the bathroom. If it catches on scale, the report marks it there and then, and the deposit conversation starts on the back foot.
Monster Cleaning has worked CT19 and CT20 hand-backs since 2014, cleaning to the standard the check-in report set: kitchen first, bathroom close behind, every other room after that, at a fixed price by bedroom count, backed by a 48-hour re-clean guarantee if the agent flags anything once we have gone. Ring 0333 555 2076 and we will price the job in a few minutes.
Last updated July 2026. We cover CT19 and CT20 across central Folkestone, Cheriton, Sandgate Road, the Old High Street and the Leas, and we run the same crew into Hythe and Dover either side of the tunnel corridor. This page sits inside the Kent directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Kent.
What the inventory clerk checks first in a Folkestone flat
End of tenancy cleaning
from £176
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
Get your price0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
Water is the story here before anything else is. South East Water draws Folkestone’s supply from chalk and greensand under the North Downs, and both postcodes read firmly inside the very hard band on the published scale (see South East Water’s hardness guidance):
- CT19
- 267 parts per million
- CT20
- 277 parts per million
A shower head left two weeks without attention grows a ring a clerk can read with a fingernail. Taps go the same way, and so does the inside of a kettle nobody thinks to check.
None of this is a Folkestone quirk exactly, most of the county sits on the same chalk, but the town’s clerks have learned to look for it first because it is the fault that shows up fastest and photographs worst.
We descale every fitting the same way:
- A scale-removing paste, two passes with proper dwell time.
- Then a polish.
- Then a fingernail check of our own before we sign off.
It is slow. It is also the single job most likely to decide whether a Folkestone check-out passes first time.
The clerk is not working from guesswork. They are working from the check-in report your letting agent wrote on the day you moved in, usually with photographs, usually describing the bathroom and kitchen as new or as new.
That report is the benchmark, not some abstract idea of a tidy flat. Fail to match it and the difference gets priced against your deposit, line by line.
What 1 May 2026 changed for Folkestone move-outs
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 commenced on 1 May 2026.
- Section 21
- No-fault eviction is gone.
- Running tenancies
- Every assured shorthold tenancy still running has converted to a periodic tenancy.
- Notice
- A tenant can now give two months’ notice whenever they choose rather than waiting for a fixed term to end.
The cleaning side of a move-out has not moved an inch:
- The check-in benchmark still applies.
- The deposit maths is the same maths it was in April.
What has changed is the calendar. With no fixed end date forcing everyone’s hand at once, Folkestone move-outs are likely to spread more evenly across the month instead of bunching at the end of it.
A tenant giving notice on a whim now has far less runway to book a proper clean than one who has known their lease date for a year.
The cleaning side of a move-out has not moved an inch.
Book earlier than instinct tells you to. That is the whole practical lesson.
Room by room, the way the checklist actually runs
Every Folkestone booking runs against the same 57-point agent-approved checklist, built and refined against what CT19 and CT20 clerks actually flag rather than a generic idea of clean. Here is the shape of it.
Kitchen
The oven gets a proper hand clean. Racks soak separately, the door glass splits where the design allows so the grease film between the panels comes out, and the cavity, fan, element and door seals all get worked.
- Hob rings and knobs come off and get washed on their own.
- The extractor hood is degreased and the filter pulled and soaked, which matters more than tenants expect in the tighter kitchens above the Old High Street shops, where the extractor is doing more work in a smaller space.
- Every cupboard gets done inside, outside, on top and underneath.
- Fridge and freezer, once defrosted.
- The gaps behind and under the appliances, once we have pulled them out.
- Sink, taps and drainer descaled and polished.
- Grout scrubbed. Bins washed.
- Floor mopped twice with the edges done by hand.
Bathrooms
- Bath, shower tray, screen and tile descaled with a scale-removing paste, two passes, rinsed properly
- WC bowl, rim, hinge, base and behind the pedestal, every face
- Sink, taps and overflow polished once the scale has come off
- Mirror and cabinet, and behind them where they pull away from the wall
- Extractor cover off, fan wiped, filter rinsed
- Floor into the corners and behind the toilet
Bedrooms and living areas
- Wardrobes and drawers inside and out.
- Skirting, door frames and handles.
- Light fittings, switches and any ceiling rose, which in the older Old High Street and Bayle flats holds decades of dust nobody has reached before.
- Window sills, reveals and frames, with the sash windows on the Leas and Marine Parade conversions needing a slower, careful pass because the original glazing bars are not something worth forcing.
- Radiators behind, under and on top.
- Carpets vacuumed in two directions with marks spot-treated, or lifted for a proper shampoo where the tenancy calls for one.
- Walls spot-wiped, with a realistic line drawn between a mark and a decorator’s job that is not ours to fix.
The parts nobody thinks about until the clerk does
- switches, sockets, thermostats and intercoms
- internal doors both sides, with handles and hinges
- stairs and bannisters where the property has them
- cobwebs out of every ceiling corner
A final walk-through, photographed room by room, closes the job. That photo set is the evidence you keep.
Old Town glamour and Cheriton ordinariness, one postcode district
Folkestone runs two very different housing stories at once, and both sit inside the same CT19 and CT20 boundary.
The Old Town and the Leas
Down at the harbour end, the Old High Street and the streets around Tontine Street have spent the last twenty years turning from a run-down fishing quarter into what the town now calls its Creative Quarter.
- The Roger De Haan Charitable Trust bought and restored around ninety buildings, leased on long peppercorn terms to Creative Folkestone.
- The Old Town now holds close to six hundred working artists, makers and small studios above shopfronts that were derelict a generation ago.
- The Folkestone Triennial, the town’s outdoor art exhibition, has run since 2008 and has left permanent pieces scattered through those same streets.
Up on the clifftop, the Leas keeps its own version of the same story: a Victorian promenade lined with grand hotels, several of them now converted into flats, looking down the funicular Leas Lift toward the harbour and, on a clear day, France.
Cheriton
None of that describes Cheriton. Cheriton sits inland and north, and it has been a working suburb since long before any of the Old Town’s regeneration started, mostly because the Channel Tunnel terminal has sat on its doorstep since Eurotunnel opened the crossing in 1994.
The streets around there, and the similar stretch out toward Foord, are ordinary terraced and semi-detached housing built for people who work rather than exhibit:
- shift patterns tied to the tunnel and the freight yards
- a steadier and less photogenic rental market
- tenancies that tend to run longer, because nobody rents a Cheriton semi for the view
The clean does not change much between the two, but the property does.
- A converted Old High Street shop unit
- Low ceilings, tight stairs and original features a clerk will name individually in the report.
- A Cheriton terrace
- More straightforward rooms, a bigger kitchen, and a garden that sometimes ends up as its own line item if nobody has touched it in a while.
What it costs, and why the tunnel does not move the price
The cost in Folkestone depends on the property, and a Cheriton semi costs the same as an Old Town house of the same size.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (Creative Quarter, Tontine Street) | 4-5 hours, 1 cleaner | From £176 |
| 1-bed flat (Sandgate Road, Leas conversion) | 5-6 hours, 2 cleaners | From £227 |
| 2-bed terrace (Cheriton, Foord, Bouverie Road) | 6-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £263 |
| 3-bed semi (Cheriton, Radnor Park) | 7-9 hours, 2 cleaners | From £359 |
| 4-bed house (Leas, Bouverie Square) | 9-11 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £445 |
| Hourly or part-job clean | Flexible | £30 per cleaner |
Add-ons run to the same figures as everywhere else on our books:
- Carpet shampoo
- From £29 a bedroom, £36 for a living room, or £94 to cover a whole two-bed’s worth of carpet in one go.
- Oven deep cleans
- From £31 for a single oven and £62 for a double or a 90cm range. Most of the older Old Town kitchens only need the single-oven price, since a period kitchen rarely has room to fit anything bigger.
Run the numbers the way the deposit does. A one-bed at £227 against a deposit that is commonly five weeks’ rent, often £1,300 or more on a Folkestone let, is not a close call.
Every job here carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: flag anything within 48 hours and we come back and fix it free, no argument, provided the flat has not been reoccupied.
Across our 300+ letting agents nationally we have helped tenants recover more than £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
Booking around shift patterns and the tunnel traffic
A fair share of our Cheriton and Newington bookings work around shift patterns tied to the Channel Tunnel terminal and the freight operation next to it. That means early starts, late finishes, and tenants who are not always around during a standard nine-to-five.
We can work early or late where the diary allows, and we would rather know that upfront than turn up to a locked door.
- Ring 0333 555 2076. Give us the postcode, property size, hand-back date and any known problem areas, particularly the oven and bathroom.
- We confirm a fixed quote on the call. Add-ons, access arrangements and any tunnel-shift timing quirks get sorted then.
- Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture and personal items out, rubbish cleared. We can arrange removals alongside the clean if the move itself is the harder part.
- Photo record on completion. Every room, before and after, which becomes your evidence if the agent pushes back.
- 48-hour window. Anything flagged inside that window, we come back and fix it free.
Traffic on the M20 corridor into Folkestone backs up hard around peak crossing times, so if your flat sits anywhere near the tunnel approach roads, tell us the access arrangement when you book. It saves everyone twenty minutes standing on a doorstep.
End of tenancy, deep clean, regular visit: not the same job
Three different jobs get asked for under one name more often than not. Worth being clear about which one you need.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document your letting agent wrote on moving-in day, usually with photographs, describing every surface. It is the benchmark the check-out gets measured against, which is why we clean to it rather than to a general idea of tidy.
- End of tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and protect a deposit, done to an empty property, with the 48-hour guarantee attached, at the fixed prices above (£30 per cleaner per hour for a part property).
- Deep clean
- A full reset for a home you are keeping, no agent standard to hit and no inventory report behind it, priced the same way.
- Regular clean
- Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance, from £23 an hour, for a home that just needs keeping on top of rather than reset.
Getting this wrong is not a disaster. It just means paying for more, or less, than the job in front of you actually needs.
What the council’s licensing gap means for your hand-back
Folkestone & Hythe District Council does not currently run a borough-wide selective licensing scheme, so most single-household tenancies in CT19 and CT20 are not individually licensed.
- Mandatory HMO licensing
- Still applies wherever five or more people from two or more households share a property, administered through the council’s Private Sector Housing team.
- The gap
- A council-linked report earlier this year put the estimated number of shared houses that should hold a mandatory licence at around 312, against roughly 63 actually licensed.
- The response
- The gap is wide enough that the council is now consulting on a revised Statement of Licensing Policy for 2026 to 2031.
None of that changes what a cleaning job needs to look like. It does mean an agent managing a shared house tends to be more careful than usual about the paperwork side of a hand-back, cleaning included, simply because the property itself is under more scrutiny than a standard single-family let.
The council’s HMO licensing page lists the current thresholds and the application route if you are a landlord rather than a tenant reading this.
Property in the Old High Street and Bayle Conservation Area sits under its own set of planning controls too, on top of the licensing question, which is one more reason those particular hand-backs tend to get looked at more closely.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Folkestone?
From £176 for a Creative Quarter studio up to £445 for a four-bed house, with £227 for a one-bed, £263 for a two-bed and £359 for a three-bed in between. Carpet and oven add-ons are priced separately, and an hourly rate of £30 per cleaner covers anything that does not fit the standard sizes.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change anything for Folkestone tenants?
From 1 May 2026, Section 21 evictions are gone and every existing assured shorthold tenancy has converted to a periodic one, so tenants can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning standard you are held to at check-out has not changed at all.
Do you cover Cheriton and the streets near the Channel Tunnel terminal?
Yes. We work Cheriton, Newington and Folkestone’s tunnel-side streets as often as the Old Town and the Leas, and we can fit round shift patterns tied to the terminal where the diary allows.
Is Folkestone’s water really that hard?
Yes. South East Water supplies the town from chalk sources reading 267 parts per million in CT19 and 277 in CT20, both in the very hard band, which is why scale on taps and shower screens is the most common thing a Folkestone check-out gets marked down for.
How long does the clean take?
A one-bed Sandgate Road or Leas conversion typically runs five to six hours with two cleaners. A two-bed Cheriton or Foord terrace runs six to seven. A three-bed semi runs seven to nine. We work to the checklist rather than the clock.
Do you guarantee my deposit back?
We guarantee the clean, not the deposit itself. If the inventory clerk flags any cleaning-related item within 48 hours, we come back free under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Deposit deductions for damage, missing items or wear we were never asked to touch sit outside that guarantee.
Does Folkestone & Hythe District Council run selective licensing?
Not borough-wide, no. National mandatory HMO licensing applies to shared lets of five or more people from two or more households, and the council is currently consulting on an updated licensing policy for 2026 to 2031 after a report found a large gap between estimated and actually licensed shared houses.
Do I need to be there for the clean?
No. Most CT19 and CT20 clients leave a key with the letting agent or in a key safe. We send a written record of what was done once the team has finished.
Can you clean the Old High Street and Bayle flats with original features?
Yes. Those buildings often have low ceilings, tight staircases and original joinery a clerk will note individually in the inventory. We work carefully around anything original and do not use anything abrasive on features the report has flagged as period.
What if my landlord uses a specific inventory clerk or agency?
Most central Folkestone lettings run through a small pool of agents and clerks who know each other’s standards. We have worked against most of their reports before. If yours is new to us, we clean to the same 57-point checklist regardless.
Is carpet cleaning included, or extra?
Extra, and priced from £29 a bedroom, £36 for a living room, or £94 to cover a whole two-bed’s carpeted area in one visit. Many Folkestone tenancies write a professional carpet clean into the contract as a condition, so check yours before assuming a vacuum will do.
What happens if my landlord disputes the clean after a re-clean?
Escalate to your deposit scheme’s adjudication service. Our invoice, photo record and re-clean note are the evidence that goes with you, and a tenant with a complete paper trail rarely loses that argument. Shelter’s housing advice covers the process in plain terms.
Get a price
Booking takes three steps
- Your postcode and the property. The form gives the price.
- A date that suits you. Seven days a week.
- We confirm it with you by phone or WhatsApp.
0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
Ring 0333 555 2076 and we will price the job in a few minutes. Have these to hand:
- postcode
- property size
- hand-back date
- anything you already know needs attention
We cover every CT19 and CT20 street from the Old High Street to Cheriton, and if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will tell you honestly what we can do.