Every inventory clerk in London carries the same torch, and the beam goes to the same two places first: the oven door glass and the shower screen. Monster Cleaning has cleaned move-out flats to that torch since 2014, in every borough, at £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report rather than anyone’s opinion of tidy. This page is the city hub: how the London check-out works, what it costs, where the borough detail lives. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.
Last updated July 2026. We cover every London postcode: E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC in the middle, and the outer ring from BR, CR and DA round through HA, IG, KT, RM, SM, TW and UB. This page sits inside the service directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning.
You are being marked against a photograph
On the day you collected the keys, somebody walked the flat with a camera and wrote down the condition of every surface. That document, the check-in inventory, is the only standard your check-out will ever be measured against. Not “clean”. The photographs. And because most London lets are photographed straight after a professional clean or a developer handover, the standard in those pictures is a professional one, which is why a free Sunday and a mop so rarely gets a deposit back on its own. End of tenancy cleaning is the deep clean a landlord or letting agent expects before releasing that deposit, done on an empty property and judged against the check-in record.
Cleaning is the most common reason a deposit gets argued over in England; in the Tenancy Deposit Scheme’s most recently published dispute figures it featured in 54% of adjudicated cases, ahead of damage and redecoration. It leads for a dull reason. Cleaning is the easiest deduction to evidence: a clerk photographs a greasy extractor filter, the line goes in the report, and the burden quietly shifts to you.
The clerk works for the agent.
London sharpens all of this. The check-out here is usually run by a professional inventory clerk instructed by the letting agent, not by a landlord with a clipboard, and a report with nothing on it looks to the agent like a report nobody read, so the clerk goes looking. Torch angled along the floor, thumbnail down the tap. That is the examiner we clean for.
Five weeks’ rent, held by neither side
Your deposit never sat in your landlord’s account, or should not have. Within 30 days of being paid it must be protected under the government’s deposit protection rules, through the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, the Deposit Protection Service or mydeposits. On the typical London let it is the agent who lodged it, the agent who instructs the clerk, and the agent who proposes deductions off the back of the report. The landlord may live abroad and never see either document.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 caps that deposit at five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000, six weeks above. Run the cap against the market. The Office for National Statistics put the average London private rent at £2,252 a month in June 2026, which makes a typical protected deposit around £2,600, and in Kensington and Chelsea, where the average is £3,616, a five-week deposit clears £4,100. Nobody shrugs off a number like that, which is why the cleaning line on a London report gets read so carefully.
The same Act killed the blanket cleaning fee. No agent can charge a routine “professional cleaning” fee simply because your tenancy ended, and a clause demanding a paid professional clean has been unenforceable on any agreement started or renewed since 1 June 2019. What survives is narrower: a deduction for a genuine shortfall against the documented check-in condition, with evidence. So the whole contest reduces to evidence. A dated invoice from a named company, an itemised receipt, your own time-stamped photos on the way out.
You can only win a cleaning dispute with evidence of your own.
What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it did not
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. Fixed-term assured shortholds are gone, every existing tenancy has converted to a periodic one, Section 21 is abolished, and a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than riding out a fixed end date.
None of that touched cleaning. The Tenant Fees Act still stands, the check-in benchmark still stands, and the deposit maths on your last day is exactly what it was the week before the Act. What changed is when London moves. Check-outs used to bunch at fixed-term ends, overwhelmingly the last days of the month; now they can land any week a tenant chooses, and the first months under the Act have spread move-outs across the calendar without thinning the month-end pile at all. Book earlier than instinct says, and treat the old “ring on the 29th for the 31st” habit as retired.
Four kinds of London rental, four different check-outs
There is no London flat, singular. A clerk can check out a glass-walled tower studio before lunch and a draughty split terrace after it; each loses its deposit somewhere different. Four archetypes cover most of the renting here.
The workhorse is the period conversion: late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces divided into two or three flats, lining the side streets from Walthamstow down to Tooting. Deep moulded skirtings, picture rails, cornices that hold a decade of dust, panelled doors, older window frames whose runners silt up with grime. None of it is difficult work. It is slow work, and a clerk who covers these streets knows the picture rail and the window runner are exactly where a rushed clean stopped. Our Camden and Hackney pages live mostly in this world.
Second, the mansion block, the red-brick Edwardian original of the buy-to-let idea, clustered through Westminster, Maida Vale and Marylebone. High ceilings, long corridors, a porter who signs contractors in, and often original parquet or a pre-war bathroom that wants patience and the right product, nothing stronger.
Third, and newest, the build-to-rent tower. Whole districts that were rail land fifteen years ago are managed rental estates now: at Wembley Park in Brent the developer has delivered 6,000 homes with more than half run as rented stock, and the pattern repeats at Stratford in Newham and across the Nine Elms towers. These buildings check out on corporate spec sheets, stricter than most private landlords would ever write, over engineered timber and porcelain that show every smear under an angled torch, with integrated appliances hidden behind matching panels until the clerk opens them. A flat like this reads flawless or filthy. There is not much middle.
Fourth, the ex-council flat and house: solid post-war stock sold under right-to-buy and now let privately across the outer ring from Croydon up to Barking. Long tenancies, family kitchens, and the deductions here are almost always cooking, years of grease in an extractor the check-in photos show pristine.
All four are scored by the same machinery of inventory, clerk and scheme. Riverside boroughs mix all four inside one postcode; Wandsworth and Tower Hamlets both run from warehouse conversion to managed tower inside a ten-minute walk.
The building changes the work, never the test.
Fifty-seven points, and the oven is point one
Every job in the city runs to the same 57-point agent-approved checklist, tuned over a decade of London check-outs to the lines clerks actually score. The full list travels with the crew. Here is its spine.
The kitchen first, because that is where London deposits go. The oven is stripped rather than wiped: racks out and soaked, door glass split so the brown film between the panes comes out, fan, element and seals all done. If the oven is the only thing your agent flagged, standalone oven cleaning exists for exactly that. Hob and extractor degreased, the filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard inside and out. Appliances pulled where safe so the floor behind the fridge and washing machine gets cleaned, and the machine’s own detergent drawer and door seal scrubbed, because that rubber seal is the first thing half the clerks in this city open.
Bathrooms are a descaling job before they are a cleaning job, for reasons the next section explains. Screens and tiles brought back to clear glass, chrome polished until the scale is gone rather than hidden under a shine, grout scrubbed towards white and photographed honestly where ten years of tenants got there first, the toilet done to the hinge bolts and the floor behind the pedestal.
Then the rooms everyone assumes are easy. Inside every wardrobe and built-in cupboard. Skirting, architraves, door tops, handles, switch plates and sockets. Light fittings and the ceiling line. Windows inside, sills and reveals, the runners on older frames, the slow careful pass a sash needs in period stock. Radiators behind and beneath. Hard floors finished to the edges, where the torch rakes. Carpets are the one thing prose cannot rescue: where a tenancy requires professional hot-water extraction, the carpet cleaning add-on covers it on the same visit, and a hard-used sofa in a sharer flat sometimes needs proper upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover.
The last point on the list is the one tenants forget. A photographed walk-through, every room, before and after, sent with the itemised invoice. That pack is your half of any argument that follows.
Water off the chalk
London’s water comes off chalk. It filters through the North Downs and the Chilterns, picks up dissolved calcium on the way, and arrives at the tap officially classed as hard, at roughly 270 to 300 milligrams of calcium carbonate per litre across most of the capital on Thames Water’s own hardness data, among the hardest supplied to any big European city. Water dries; calcium stays.
The consequence is the fastest-forming deduction in the city. Limescale films a shower screen in weeks and crusts a mixer tap in months, and it forms whether or not anyone is home much. A wiped bathroom with a hazed screen reads as an uncleaned bathroom no matter what else was done, so we descale first and clean second. And on the original brass and older chrome you meet in mansion blocks and conversions, brute-force removers do damage that costs more than the limescale would have, so the older stock gets slower, gentler treatment.
Two specialist cases sit beside the standard visit. Floors with a history, parquet, encaustic tile, freshly oiled boards, take their own products, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for. And where an inventory itemises exterior glass or a balcony, window cleaning folds into the same booking.
Getting a crew to your door in a city that fights vans
The hard part of a London clean is rarely the flat. It is landing a crew and forty kilos of kit at the right door at the right hour, in a city that regulates its kerbs like a stock exchange. Controlled parking runs through the working day in nearly every inner borough. The towers do not want a van at all; they want a booked loading bay, a contractor sign-in, sometimes lift pads up before anything moves. A conversion wants none of that, just three flights of stairs and nowhere to stop.
So we plan the transport with the clean. Inside the middle zones we routinely send crews in by Underground, Overground or the Elizabeth line with kit rather than gamble an hour against a permit bay, and since the ULEZ now covers the whole of Greater London, our vehicles are compliant for the outer runs where driving wins. Tell us the access reality when you book and the day gets built backwards from your handover time.
Month-end in London is a stampede.
Booking, in order:
- Ring 0333 555 2076. Postcode, property size, check-out date, any known trouble spots, and anything the check-in report marked “new”.
- We fix the slot, ideally the day before check-out. Month-end wants 7 to 10 days’ notice; mid-month usually runs 3 to 5.
- Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture gone, rubbish cleared. Our removals team can put the move and the clean on one booking, which helps where every contractor visit is a signed-in event.
- Photo proof at the end, every room, with an itemised invoice on company paper.
- Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we return and fix free.
What it costs, set against what is at stake
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio (tower or conversion) | 3-4 hours, 1-2 cleaners | £156 |
| 1-bed flat | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | £207 |
| 2-bed flat or maisonette | 5-6 hours, 2 cleaners | £243 |
| 3-bed terrace or large flat | 6-8 hours, 2-3 cleaners | £339 |
| 4-bed house | 8-10 hours, 3 cleaners | £425 |
| Carpet add-on | Same visit | £36 per bedroom, £43 per living room, £115 whole 2-bed |
| Oven add-on | Same visit | £77 single, £110 double, £114 range (90cm) |
Those are our standard rates across the city, with £30 per hour per cleaner for anything that does not fit a category, kit and products included, quoted as a fixed figure before anyone lifts a mop. A handful of prime central postcodes price above the standard table because the properties run bigger and the access slower; we quote the exact number for the actual flat on the phone rather than print a guess here.
What never varies is the arithmetic underneath. A 1-bed clean at £207 protecting a deposit around £2,600 is not a hard decision, and every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: any cleanliness issue the agent raises inside two days, we come back and put right free, provided the flat is still empty and as we left it. Across London we hold a 97% first-time pass rate on agent-led check-outs. We sit on the books of 300+ letting agents in this city, and the paperwork and re-cleans behind that work have kept £1.2m of deposit money in tenants’ pockets rather than in deduction lines. That last figure is the honest summary of the job.
An E20 check-out from March
“Eighteen months in a 2-bed in one of the East Village towers, and the operator’s check-out spec ran to six pages. My partner and I had kept the place clean, or thought we had, until you shone a light along the floor and every streak showed, and the integrated fridge panel had marks we had never once noticed. Monster booked the loading bay through the concierge, sent two cleaners for five hours and went through the spec line by line. Passed first time, full £2,880 back nine days later.”
Priya, Stratford E20, March 2026
That job is the newer London pattern: no real dirt, and a standard set by a document most tenants never read until the final week. Operator checklists are the strictest in the market. Cleaned to line by line, they are also the easiest to pass, because nothing the clerk wants is left ambiguous.
Which clean you actually need
Four phrases get used interchangeably in this city, and they are four different purchases. Booking the wrong one is how people spend money and still lose the deposit.
- End of tenancy clean
- The only one done on an empty property, to a third party’s checklist, with money riding on the result. Judged by a clerk against the check-in inventory, at £30 per hour per cleaner, and backed by the 48-hour re-clean guarantee.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are keeping: the build-up, the behind-and-under jobs, the descaling. Thorough, but scored by nobody official, from £30 an hour.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing upkeep from a domestic cleaner you keep, at £22 per hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.
- One-off team clean
- A team blitz for a viewing, a landlord between tenants, or a house after works, at £26 per cleaner per hour with a £186 minimum, which is two cleaners for three hours plus the £30 kit charge. Useful, and still not an inventory-standard clean.
Thirty-two boroughs, the City, one phone number
One city-wide fact worth knowing: most London boroughs now run some form of landlord licensing, and no two run it alike. Some license whole districts, some a scatter of wards, some only larger shared houses, and the fees and boundaries shift every year or two. All of that is the landlord’s paperwork. None of it moves the standard a check-out clean has to reach.
The borough pages carry the local grain, the streets and estates, the dominant agents, the parking reality: Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Brent, Bromley, Camden, City of London, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston upon Thames, Lambeth, Lewisham, Merton, Newham, Redbridge, Richmond, Southwark, Sutton, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth and Westminster.
Sitting on a boundary? The check-out works identically on both sides of every borough line, and the number is the same everywhere.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in London?
Fixed prices by property size: a studio is £156, a 1-bed £207, a 2-bed £243, a 3-bed £339 and a 4-bed £425. Unusual or partial jobs run at £30 per hour per cleaner. Carpet shampooing adds £36 per bedroom or £43 for a living room, and ovens run £77 to £114 by size, all quoted up front.
Can my landlord or agent force me to pay for professional cleaning?
No. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 banned blanket professional-cleaning charges, and a clause demanding a paid professional clean has been unenforceable on tenancies started or renewed since 1 June 2019. An agent can still deduct for a genuine shortfall against the documented check-in condition, with evidence.
Where is my deposit held, and who decides on deductions?
By law it must be protected within 30 days in a government-approved scheme: the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, the Deposit Protection Service or mydeposits. On most London lets the agent lodged it, instructs the inventory clerk and proposes any deductions from the check-out report. If you disagree, the scheme adjudicates on documented evidence, free for the tenant.
How much can be held as a deposit on a London tenancy?
Five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000, six weeks where it is higher, under the Tenant Fees Act 2019. With the ONS putting the average London rent at £2,252 a month in June 2026, a typical protected deposit sits around £2,600, and prime-borough deposits clear £4,000.
Did the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change end of tenancy cleaning?
The standard did not move. Since 1 May 2026 tenancies are periodic, Section 21 is abolished and tenants can give two months’ notice at any time, so move-outs now land across the whole month rather than only at fixed-term ends. The flat still has to match the check-in inventory. The practical change is timing, so book the clean earlier.
How far ahead should I book a London move-out clean?
For a check-out in the last three days of a month, allow 7 to 10 days. Mid-month, 3 to 5 days is normally enough. The whole city clusters at month-end and quarter-end and the good slots go first.
Do you clean build-to-rent flats with operator checklists?
Yes, constantly. Wembley Park, Stratford, Nine Elms and the other managed estates check out against corporate spec sheets stricter than most private landlords would ever write. Send the operator’s document with the booking and the crew cleans to it line by line, with loading bay, sign-in and lift booking arranged in advance.
Which parts of London do you cover?
All of Greater London: the 32 boroughs plus the City. Every postcode area from E, EC, N and NW round to SE, SW, W and WC, along with the outer codes from BR and CR through to RM, TW and UB. One phone number covers the lot.
Why does a London shower screen scale up so quickly?
Because the water is hard. Most of the capital’s supply is drawn through chalk and carries roughly 270 to 300 milligrams of calcium carbonate per litre, so dissolved minerals dry onto glass and chrome as a white crust within weeks. Clerks check for it out of habit, so our bathroom work starts with descaling.
What happens if the agent still flags the clean after check-out?
Tell us within two days and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee applies: we come back and put the flagged items right free, provided the flat is still empty and as we left it. If the agent pushes a deduction anyway, escalate to your deposit scheme with our dated invoice and photo pack; Shelter’s deposit guidance walks through the process step by step.
Do you work with London letting agents directly?
Yes. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across the city, from the big networks (Foxtons, Dexters, Winkworth, Chestertons, Hamptons and Marsh & Parsons among them) down to single-office independents. If your agent has a preferred checklist, we clean to that document.
Get a price
Call 0333 555 2076 and the quote takes about three minutes: postcode, property size, check-out date, anything the check-in marked “new”. Out of hours, email [email protected] and someone rings you back first thing. A couple of phone photos of the kitchen and bathroom tighten the number, which matters most on the bigger houses. Check-out tomorrow? Ring anyway. Month-end permitting, we have rescued shorter notice than that.