Need end of tenancy cleaning in Peckham?

Moving out around Rye Lane and Peckham Rye

End of tenancy cleaning in Peckham starts at £156 for a studio and runs to £425 for a four-bed, charged on the size of the flat and never by the hour, with a 57-point checklist worked through against your check-in inventory. That is the short answer. Most people reading this have a deposit on the line and a checkout date that is already too close, so the rest of the page is the detail behind that one sentence.

Peckham is a particular patch to clean. You have long Victorian terraces around Bellenden Road and Choumert Road, chopped into flats decades ago; bands of ex-council estates near the Library and along the Old Kent Road edge; and a thick layer of new-build blocks that went up as the area changed. The postcode at the heart of it is SE15 5HR, the wards are Peckham, Peckham Rye and Rye Lane, and the station most renters use is Peckham Rye on the Overground and Southern lines. Each of those flat types fails an inventory check in its own way, and a cleaner who has never worked SE15 finds that out the hard way.

We have been at this across Southwark for over a decade, since 2014, and the move-out clean is the bulk of what we do here. It is its own job, not a bigger version of a weekly tidy. A regular clean keeps a lived-in flat fresh. An end of tenancy clean is graded by a stranger against a report and a row of photographs, with real money riding on the outcome. The two want a different head, and most of the trouble we get called in to fix comes from someone treating the first as though it were the second.

The licence that now covers most of Peckham

Here is the local fact that catches Peckham landlords out, and it is worth a tenant knowing too. Southwark runs a borough-wide selective licensing scheme that started on 1 November 2023 and runs for five years, to the end of October 2028. It covers a long list of named wards, and Peckham sits squarely inside it.

The Peckham, Peckham Rye and Rye Lane wards are all named in the designation, and so is Nunhead and Queens Road next door. In those wards a selective licence is needed for nearly every private rented home let to a single household or to two sharers, on top of the borough-wide additional HMO licensing that has run since 1 March 2022 for houses shared by three or more people from different households. So whatever shape your Peckham let takes, a single flat or a four-person share, the odds are it needs a licence of one kind or the other. You can check the current position on Southwark Council’s property licensing pages.

Why does any of this matter for a clean? Because a licensable property is on the council’s radar, and a landlord whose flat is licensed is far less likely to wave through a soft final clean. The check-in inventory on a licensed let tends to be more thorough, the deductions more closely argued, and the cleaning standard the clerk expects sits a notch higher than on an off-the-books single let. The licence and the deposit are separate things, but the same scrutiny usually lands on both.

It also shapes who is on the other side of the table. On a licensed sharer flat the landlord is often a company or a portfolio holder rather than a single owner, and they bring in a professional inventory clerk for check-out, not a quick walk round. A clerk works to a written standard and photographs everything, so a clean that would slip past a distracted landlord can still pick up a line or two from a clerk. We have done enough work across these Southwark wards to know that difference, and we clean a licensed Peckham flat to the harder standard every time.

The deposit itself sits in one of the three government-approved schemes, and the clock after you leave is tight. Once you and the landlord agree the deductions, the protected money has to come back within ten days. If you cannot agree, the scheme runs a free dispute service, and the landlord then has to prove the flat was left worse than the check-in photos show. A solid final clean is what keeps you out of that process, which is the quietest and cheapest way through a move.

The three kinds of Peckham flat

The honest truth is that the building decides most of the job. We see three broad types of home around SE15, and each leaves its own mess for the clerk to find.

First, the Victorian terraces. The streets off Bellenden Road, Choumert Road and around the conservation area are lined with them, mostly split into upper and lower flats, and they are the bread and butter of Peckham renting. Period flats mean original windows with deep glazing bars and runners, picture rails, ceiling roses, and skirting painted over so many times that the brush marks themselves trap dirt. The windows are slow to clean properly because dust gathers in the runners and behind the meeting rail, and a clerk runs a finger along the bottom rail every time. We keep that work careful and unhurried, because rushing a terrace flat is how a deposit gets nibbled.

Rushing a terrace flat is how a deposit gets nibbled.

Second, the ex-council flats. Peckham carries a lot of them, from the older estates near Peckham Library and the multi-storey car park to the regeneration blocks that replaced the old Heygate and reshaped the area around it. The solid post-war ones tend to have hard floors, big metal-framed windows, and storage heaters that gather dust along the top. The newer regeneration flats are closer to a private new-build in finish. Both are inspected as carefully as anything else, and a clerk does not soften the standard because a flat was once council-owned, so neither do we.

Third, the new-build flats. The blocks that went up around the station and along the main roads as Peckham changed are quicker to clean in some ways, but they fail on their own points. Gloss kitchen units show every smear, integrated appliances hide grease behind the fascias, and the bathrooms grow limescale fast around the screen and the tap base. We carry the proper descalers for that rather than a kitchen spray that just smears the deposit around the chrome.

Location feeds into the work in a plain, practical way too. A great many of these flats are a short walk from Peckham Rye station, and renters without a car are the norm here rather than the exception, which suits us because the cleaners can reach most of the patch on the 12, 36, 63 or 343 buses without fighting for a space. When a job does need a van outside, the streets around Rye Lane and the market are tight and the bays fill early, so we plan the loading around it. Parking on a market Saturday is the genuinely annoying part of working SE15, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

One thing ties all three types together. Whatever the flat, the standard you are held to is the standard recorded at check-in. Shelter is clear on this: you only have to return a home to the cleanliness it had when you moved in, fair wear and tear aside, and a landlord cannot force you to pay for professional cleaning as a blanket clause in the agreement. That is the bar. We clean to it.

The 57-point check, room by room

Our cleaners carry a 57-point agent-approved checklist, and it is built around the lines an inventory clerk actually marks rather than a general tidy-up. Every room is covered top to bottom, because dust falls and a clerk inspects in the same direction.

In the kitchen the oven comes apart so the door glass, racks and trays are degreased separately, the extractor and filter are cleaned, and the hob, splashback and tops of the units get the same attention as the fronts. We pull out freestanding appliances where it is safe to, clean behind and beneath, and wipe the inside of the fridge and freezer once you have defrosted them. The sink, taps and drainer are descaled, because hard-water lime on the chrome is one of the first things a clerk notices.

Bathrooms are about lime and mould. The shower screen, tiles, grout, taps and showerhead are descaled, the seals checked for the black mould that grows in a windowless SE15 bathroom, the toilet done inside and behind, and the mirror and chrome left without a streak. Extractor fans get a wipe too, because a furred-up bathroom fan is exactly the small thing a clerk notes when the rest of the room looks done. Living rooms and bedrooms are dusted from the picture rail down: light fittings, the cobwebs in high terrace corners, skirting, switches, sockets, the insides of fitted wardrobes, and the marks on the wall where furniture stood. Carpets are hoovered thoroughly, hard floors mopped, and the windows cleaned on the inside.

It is the spots out of eye-line that lose deposits, not the obvious ones. The top of a kitchen wall unit, the gap behind the toilet, the runner of a tall sash window, the seal inside the washing machine drawer, the dust on the storage heater in an ex-council flat. A renter cleaning their own place the night before the van comes almost always does the visible surfaces well and forgets these, and a clerk knows exactly where to look. The 57-point list exists so none of them gets skipped, whoever is holding the cloth that day.

If a clerk does propose a cleaning deduction, the deciding factor is evidence. The check-in report and its photos set the baseline, and the check-out is compared against them line by line, so a flat returned to its move-in condition leaves nothing to argue over. That is the whole point of cleaning to the inventory rather than to a general idea of clean. We would rather you never reached the dispute stage, and on the figures most of our customers never do.

The checklist is why we hold a 97% first-time pass rate. It is also why, on the rare flat where a clerk does flag something, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee exists: tell us within seventy-two hours and we come back and put it right at no cost, before the deduction is ever agreed. Over the years that approach has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have been swallowed by cleaning charges.

What a Peckham clean actually costs

Prices go on the size of the property, not the clock. That matters in Peckham, because a tall Victorian terrace flat with original windows can take a cleaner far longer than its bedroom count suggests, and an hourly job would punish you for that. With us the quote is the quote.

• Studio flat, £156
• One-bed, £207
• Two-bed, £243
• Three-bed, £339
• Four-bed, £425

Those are full end of tenancy prices, supplies and detergents included, with the team staying on site until the checklist is done. If you would rather book cleaners by the hour for a part-job or a top-up, that runs at £30 per cleaner an hour, though for a move-out the fixed price almost always works out better and carries the guarantee. A two-person sharer studio off Rye Lane is the cheapest case; a three-bed terrace conversion with deep windows and a tired oven is where the effort climbs, and we will say so on the quote rather than spring it on the day.

To give a price we ask the number of bedrooms, whether there are carpets, the state of the oven, and whether it is one of the period terrace flats, because that last point changes the time on site. The flat needs electricity, running hot water, a defrosted fridge and your belongings gone before we start, or the team cannot finish the job properly.

People sometimes ask why they cannot simply pay for two hours and have us race round. The honest answer is that a proper move-out clean on a Peckham flat does not fit two hours, and an hourly job tempts everyone to cut it short and skip the awkward corners the clerk checks. The fixed price removes that pressure. The cleaners stay until the list is done, the guarantee stands behind the work, and you are not watching a clock while someone decides whether the oven is worth finishing. For most renters that is the difference between a returned deposit and a deduction, so it is the option we steer people towards.

Set against a deduction, the maths is usually easy. A clerk’s cleaning charge on a two-bed can run past the cost of the clean itself, and unlike the deduction the clean is something you control. Spend £243 on a guaranteed two-bed clean, or risk a similar sum coming off the deposit with carpets and oven added on top. Put like that, most people book the clean.

The churn behind the market

Peckham turns over faster than almost anywhere we work. Rye Lane is the spine of it, a long market street with the Peckhamplex cinema, the African and Caribbean food shops, and the multi-storey car park that since 2009 has carried Bold Tendencies and Frank’s Cafe on its top decks through the summer. The flats behind all that fill with renters who move when work or study moves, which means move-out cleans get booked late and on awkward days.

Some of what makes Peckham, Peckham is right out in the open if you walk it. Peckham Library, the upside-down-L building by Will Alsop that won the Stirling Prize in 2000, sits at the top of the square. Peckham Rye, the common and park where William Blake said he saw a tree full of angels as a boy in 1765, runs along the south edge. Bellenden Road has its rusted Antony Gormley bollards, paid for by local traders when the regeneration funding was pulled. None of this is trivia for a cleaner. It is why the flats here are full of renters on short, sharp tenancies who want a fast, reliable move-out clean and have no free day to do it themselves.

We work seven days a week for that reason. A Saturday checkout the same day the Rye Lane market is heaving, a Sunday handover, a clean squeezed between one sharer leaving and the next moving in, we have done all of it around SE15. Booking ahead helps in summer, when half the area seems to move at once and Frank’s is full every evening.

The sharer flats throw up a wrinkle worth flagging. When three or four people are named on one agreement, the deposit is usually held jointly, and the deductions come off the lot of you together, not split tidily by room. So if one housemate’s bedroom drags the check-out down, everyone feels it in their share. Booking a single end of tenancy clean for the whole flat, rather than each person doing their own patch, is the cleaner way to protect a shared deposit, and it is how most of the Peckham shares we work with handle it.

Furnished lets add to the work as well, and plenty of the flats near Rye Lane come furnished for the student and young-renter crowd. That means tired sofas, mattresses that have seen a few tenants, and kitchen kit that builds up grime in places nobody thinks to clean. A clerk inventories furniture as carefully as the fixtures, so the dust on top of a wardrobe and the marks on a sofa arm are fair game at check-out. We factor the furniture into the quote.

The flats behind all that fill with renters who move when work or study moves, which means move-out cleans get booked late and on awkward days.

Carpets, ovens and the lines people forget

Some end of tenancy lines need their own kit, and they are the ones renters most often skip and then lose money on. We can fold any of these into the same visit.

Carpets take the worst of a sharer flat: foot traffic in the hall, a wine ring in the living room, the flattened patch under a bed. A hoover does not lift ground-in dirt, so we use hot water extraction, which rinses the pile and pulls the dirt back out. Deep carpet cleaning is charged at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat. A clerk who finds a marked carpet on the check-in photos will deduct for it, so this is rarely money wasted.

Ovens are the other classic. Daily cooking bakes grease and burnt-on residue onto the door glass and the element, and it is the appliance a clerk opens first. Our oven cleaning takes the unit apart, soaks the racks and trays, and degreases the interior, the glass and the seals: £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double, £114 for a range. We also handle upholstery cleaning for the tired sofas that come with so many furnished Peckham lets, again by hot water extraction, which lifts both the marks and the smell a flatful of housemates leaves in a fabric three-seater. For the terrace flats whose windows face the street, exterior window cleaning by water-fed pole leaves the outside glass clear for the inspection.

None of these add-ons is compulsory, and we will say so plainly. If your flat has hard floors throughout there is no carpet to clean, and if you barely touched the oven it may only need a light going-over inside the main service rather than a full strip. We quote the add-ons separately so you can see what each one costs and decide, instead of being handed one padded figure. The aim is to cover the lines a clerk will actually mark, not to sell you cleaning you do not need.

Booking the clean around your move

Booking is meant to be simple. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected], tell us the size of the flat, the postcode and your checkout date, and we give you a fixed quote there and then. No survey visit, no hourly meter.

Time the clean for after the van has gone and the flat is empty, ideally the day before your inventory check-out or the morning of it, so the place is still fresh when the clerk walks through. Cleaning a week early and then living in the flat for another six days rather defeats the point, because a clerk inspects what is there on the day. If your agent has sent the original check-in report, pass it on, because that is the document we clean against and it tells us exactly which marks were logged at the start. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, several of them working the Peckham and Rye Lane patch, so there is a fair chance we already know your agent’s clerk and what they look for.

For those without an agent, where the landlord runs the let directly, the advice is the same. Ask for the check-in inventory if you have not kept your copy, get the clean booked for the empty flat, and keep our invoice. A dated professional cleaning invoice is useful evidence in a deposit dispute, because it shows the flat was cleaned to a standard on a known day, and it is the kind of paper a scheme adjudicator likes to see. We send one as a matter of course.

One practical note on access. If you have already handed the keys back, we need someone to let the cleaners in, whether that is you, the agent or the incoming tenant, so it helps to sort that out when you book. The older Peckham blocks with shared doors and entry phones can be fiddly, and a wasted trip with a van on a tight market street is the last thing anyone wants on moving day.

After the clean, the 48-hour re-clean window runs from when we finish. If anything is queried at the inspection inside those seventy-two hours, we return and redo it free. That guarantee, plus cleaning to the inventory rather than to a guess, is how we keep the pass rate where it is. If you want a sense of the wider area first, the Southwark end of tenancy hub covers the whole borough, and we run the same service in next-door Nunhead, Camberwell and East Dulwich.

Terms your clerk and agent will use

Move-out paperwork is full of terms that decide who keeps your money. A few worth knowing before the inspection:

Check-in inventory

The report and photos taken at the start of your tenancy recording the condition and cleanliness of the flat. Your final clean is judged against it, not against a showroom standard.

Check-out report

The clerk’s inspection at the end, compared line by line with the check-in. Differences beyond fair wear and tear become proposed deductions from the deposit.

Fair wear and tear

The normal ageing of a home over a tenancy. A landlord cannot charge your deposit for it, only for damage or for cleanliness below the level recorded at check-in.

Deposit protection scheme

The government-approved scheme holding your deposit, with a free dispute service if deductions are unfair. The rules are set out on gov.uk, and what a landlord may keep is explained by Citizens Advice.

Selective licence

The Southwark licence required for nearly every private rented home in the Peckham, Peckham Rye and Rye Lane wards, separate from the deposit but bringing the same close scrutiny to the property.

Peckham end of tenancy questions

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Peckham?

It runs from £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. The price is fixed on the size of the flat, not charged by the hour, and all supplies are included.

Do you charge by the hour or a fixed price?

A fixed price for an end of tenancy clean, set on the number of bedrooms. We do offer cleaners by the hour at £30 per cleaner for smaller jobs, but for a move-out the fixed price is usually cheaper and it carries the re-clean guarantee.

What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?

If your inventory clerk or letting agent flags anything about the clean within seventy-two hours of us finishing, we come back and put it right free of charge, before any deduction is agreed with the landlord.

Will my Peckham flat pass the inventory check-out?

We hold a 97% first-time pass rate because we clean against your check-in inventory using a 57-point checklist. On the rare flat where a clerk queries something, the 48-hour re-clean covers it at no cost.

Does my Peckham flat need a property licence?

Most likely, yes. The Peckham, Peckham Rye, Rye Lane and Nunhead and Queens Road wards all fall under Southwark’s selective licensing, so nearly every private rented home here needs a licence whatever the number of tenants.

Do you clean flats in the Victorian terraces off Bellenden Road?

Yes, that is a big part of our SE15 work. Period flats have deep window runners, picture rails and painted-over skirting that hold dirt, so we allow the time to clean them properly rather than rush a row of terraced conversions.

Can a landlord deduct cleaning costs from my deposit?

Only to return the flat to the cleanliness recorded at check-in, and not for fair wear and tear. A landlord cannot make you pay for professional cleaning as a blanket tenancy clause, which is why cleaning to the inventory matters.

How far in advance should I book the clean?

A few days is usually fine, but Peckham turns over fast and summer is the busy stretch, so book earlier if your checkout lands on a weekend. We work seven days a week, including the Saturdays the Rye Lane market is busiest.

What needs to be ready before the cleaners arrive?

The flat should be empty of your belongings, with electricity and running hot water on and the fridge and freezer defrosted. With those in place the team can work through the whole checklist in one visit.

Do you bring your own cleaning supplies?

Yes. The cleaners bring all the products and equipment, including the descalers for the limescale on taps and shower screens and the hot water extraction machine for carpets and upholstery. There is no charge for any of it.

Do you clean carpets and ovens as part of the move-out?

We can fold both into the same visit. Carpet cleaning by hot water extraction is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room or £115 for a whole two-bed; oven cleaning is £77 single, £110 double and £114 for a range.

Do you clean ex-council flats on the Peckham estates?

Yes. The flats on the older estates around the Library and the newer regeneration blocks are part of our regular round, and both get the same 57-point clean and the same guarantee as a private terrace conversion.

Do you work with letting agents in Peckham?

We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, several working the Peckham and Rye Lane patch, so we often already know the standard a given agent’s inventory clerk inspects to and what they tend to flag.

What happens to my deposit after I move out?

Once you and the landlord agree any deductions, the protected deposit must be returned within ten days. If you cannot agree, the scheme runs a free dispute service and the landlord has to prove the flat was left worse than the check-in record.

What areas near Peckham do you cover?

The same service runs across Southwark, including Nunhead, Camberwell and East Dulwich. The Southwark hub page links the lot if your flat sits just over a ward boundary from Peckham.