Putney deposits and the river-town let
The Boat Race starts at Putney Bridge, and on race day half of SW15 is on the Embankment watching the crews push off past the boathouses. The rest of the year those same streets, the ones running back off the river towards Putney High Street and up Putney Hill, are some of the most expensive rented postcodes in south-west London. A check-out clean here is not a tidy-up. It is the test your tenancy gets marked against, and the pass mark is whatever the check-in report said the place looked like on day one.
End of tenancy cleaning in Putney starts at £156 for a studio and runs to £425 for a four-bed, charged at the full inventory standard with no shortcuts on the oven or the bathroom. We work the whole of SW15: the mansion flats up Putney Hill, the Victorian and Edwardian terraces off Upper Richmond Road, the riverside flats around Putney Wharf and the Embankment, and the houses backing onto Putney Heath and the Common. This page sets out what the clean covers, what it costs, what your agent and the inventory clerk actually check, and where Wandsworth Council licensing now sits for landlords renting in the East Putney and West Putney wards.
We have been doing this since 2014, long enough to know the Putney check-out by its quirks. The agents cluster their offices along the upper end of the High Street and the Upper Richmond Road, they tend to use the same two or three inventory firms, and those clerks have seen every shortcut a rushed tenant ever tried. Putney moves people through fast. It is a first proper London base for a lot of young professionals coming out of university, a sharer town with a constant churn of two and three-bed flats changing hands, and that churn means a steady run of check-outs where a deposit is on the line and the clock is short.
What the inventory clerk marks you against
A deposit deduction is not a judgement on how clean your flat looks today. It is a comparison. The clerk holds the check-in inventory from the start of the tenancy, walks the property at check-out, and notes anything worse than it was. Cleanliness sits in that report alongside damage, and on most Putney lets it is the single biggest source of dispute.
Your deposit is held in one of three government-backed schemes, and the rules on what can come out of it are set nationally. You can read how protection works on the GOV.UK tenancy deposit protection guidance, and what happens when you disagree on the GOV.UK deposit disputes pages. The short version: a landlord can charge to return the property to its check-in condition, less fair wear and tear, and not a penny more.
Cleaning is where that line gets argued. Shelter’s tenancy deposits advice is blunt that you cannot be charged to leave a place cleaner than you found it, and Citizens Advice on getting your deposit back says a receipt for a professional clean is solid evidence if the charge ever goes to adjudication. That is the practical reason a paid clean matters in SW15. Half of what you pay for is the work. The other half is the paperwork that work generates.
A deposit deduction is not a judgement on how clean your flat looks today. It is a comparison.
The adjudicator never visits. They decide on documents: the check-in report, the check-out report, photos, and any receipts. So a clean that satisfies the clerk on the day, plus our invoice in your inbox, closes the argument before it starts. When tenants lose cleaning disputes, it is almost always because they cleaned to a domestic standard and the clerk was marking to an inventory one. Those are not the same bar.
The gap between those two standards is where the money goes. A domestic clean gets a flat looking nice for visitors. An inventory clean is judged on the parts visitors never see: the runners of the oven shelves, the seal around the shower screen, the dust on the top edge of a door, the grouting behind the taps. A clerk works through a property with a checklist and a camera, and they photograph the misses, because the photo is what the adjudicator looks at later. We clean for the camera, not the casual glance.
There is a timing trap too. A landlord has ten days from the end of the tenancy to tell you what they want to deduct, and if you disagree the deposit is frozen until an adjudicator rules, which can take weeks. During that time you have usually paid a deposit on your next place and you are out of pocket on both. In Putney, where deposits regularly run past three or four thousand pounds, that is not a small sum to have stuck in limbo over a kitchen nobody degreased properly.
- Check-in inventory
- The report made at the start of the tenancy describing the condition and cleanliness of every room. It is the baseline you are compared against at the end, so it decides what counts as a deduction.
- Inventory clerk
- An independent inspector, often booked by the agent, who walks the property at check-out and logs anything worse than the check-in report. Many Putney agents use the same handful of firms.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual ageing a landlord cannot charge you for, like a carpet thinning over years. Dirt and grime are not wear and tear, which is why cleaning deductions stick when decoration ones do not.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme that requires a landlord to hold a licence to rent out an ordinary single-household home in designated wards. East Putney and West Putney are covered from 1 April 2026.
The 57-point clean, room by room
Our cleaners follow a 57-point agent-approved checklist on every end of tenancy job, and it is the same list whether the flat is a studio behind the High Street or a four-bed terrace up Putney Hill. The checklist exists because clerks check the same things every time, and because we would rather not be the firm that forgot the extractor filter.
The kitchen takes the longest. The oven comes apart, glass, racks, the door, the trays, and gets degreased back to bare metal. We pull the hob, clean under and behind it where the grease creeps, and clear the extractor and its filter. Cupboards inside and out, the fridge and freezer defrosted and wiped, the sink and taps descaled. In a Putney kitchen that has done a year of Sunday roasts and weeknight cooking, the oven is the single item a clerk will open first, every time.
Bathrooms are about limescale. Putney sits on London’s hard water, and a year leaves a chalky film on glass, taps and tiles that a quick wipe never shifts. We descale the lot: shower screen, grout, taps, showerhead, the toilet inside and out. We polish the mirrors and chrome so there are no spots left under the clerk’s torch.
Then the rest of the place. Skirting boards, door frames, light switches, sockets, the tops of doors where dust gathers. Internal windows, sills and frames. Wardrobes and drawers cleared and wiped inside. Cobwebs off the high corners, which in the older Edwardian flats with their tall ceilings means a proper reach pole, not a tiptoe. Floors are vacuumed and mopped last so nothing gets tracked back over finished work.
Bedrooms and living rooms are quicker but no less checked. We clear and wipe inside every wardrobe and drawer, do the picture rails and the cornice in the older flats, clean behind radiators where dust bakes on, and finish the windows so the glass is clear. In a Putney Hill mansion flat the cornicing and the tall sash boxes alone add half an hour, because the detail up there is exactly what the developer charged the rent for and exactly what a clerk notices is dirty.
Hallways matter more here than people expect. They are the first thing a clerk sees walking in, they take the worst of the foot traffic, and on a riverside flat they collect the towpath grit. We do the floor, the skirting, the switches and the inside of the front door, because a grubby entrance sets the tone for the whole inspection and a clerk who starts unimpressed reads the rest of the flat harder.
We do not clean around your things. The flat needs to be empty of belongings for an inventory clean, because the clerk inspects empty and so do we. If the carpets are being cleaned, that goes last of all and the place is left to dry.
Mansion flats, terraces and riverside apartments
Putney’s housing stock is not one thing, and the clean changes with it. The grand mansion flats up Putney Hill and along the Upper Richmond Road have the high ceilings, the deep cornices and the original parquet that take time and the right kit. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces running back off the High Street have been carved into flats over the decades, so you get period bathrooms next to newer kitchens in the same building. And the riverside apartments near the Embankment and Putney Wharf are newer, often glossier, and let furnished to professionals on the move.
The river is its own factor. Flats a short walk from the Thames pick up damp more readily, and the path dust off the Embankment and the towpath gets walked into hallways and onto carpet edges all year. We see it most on the ground-floor and lower-mansion flats, where the carpet by the front door greys faster than the rest of the room. That edge is exactly where a clerk runs a hand.
Sharer lets are the other big slice of the market here. A lot of Putney two and three-beds go to groups of young professionals, the kind of household the new selective licensing rules are written around, and those flats tend to need the most at check-out because the cleaning rota slipped somewhere around month three. We are not judging. We have cleaned enough of them to know the pattern.
Out towards Roehampton Lane the picture changes again, with the Dover House and Ashburton estates and the larger family houses on the Heath side. These are bigger jobs, often three and four-beds with more carpet and more bathroom to descale, and the families in them have usually lived there long enough that a year of normal life shows. A four-bed handed back after a long tenancy is a full day, not an afternoon, and we price and crew it accordingly.
Putney Heath and the Common edge bring a different problem in spring. Pollen and the general green-space mess that drifts in through open windows settles on sills and soft furnishings, and a flat backing onto the Heath in May needs the upholstery and the sills given proper attention before a clerk sees it. The Wimbledon Common side of Putney Vale is the same story.
Transport shapes the work in a small way most people miss. East Putney sits on the District line and Putney mainline runs South Western trains into Waterloo, so the flats clustered around both stations turn over fast with commuters, and those are the lets where we get the most short-notice weekend calls because the tenant is moving the day their season ticket area changes.
What an end of tenancy clean in Putney costs
Here are the full prices, not a teaser rate that climbs once we arrive. End of tenancy cleaning in Putney is £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. Those cover the whole 57-point clean. Carpet cleaning and oven work, if you want them, are priced on top and listed further down.
- Studio flat: £156
- One-bedroom: £207
- Two-bedroom: £243
- Three-bedroom: £339
- Four-bedroom: £425
Prices are per property, not per cleaner per hour, so you are not watching the clock. If you would rather pay by the hour for a part-job rather than a full check-out clean, that is £30 per cleaner per hour, though for an actual end of tenancy we always recommend the fixed price because it carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and the hourly rate does not.
The figure can move a little on condition. A studio handed over reasonably tidy is the £156 job; one that has been a four-person flat-share with a year of neglect takes longer and we will say so when we quote. We give you the number before we book, not after we have finished. The deposit you are protecting in Putney is large enough that the clean is a rounding error against it, which is rather the point.
People sometimes ask why a Putney clean is the same headline price as one in a cheaper postcode when the rent and deposit are so much higher. The honest answer is that the work is the work: a two-bed is a two-bed to clean, whether the flat overlooks the river or sits behind the station, and we are not going to charge you more because your landlord charges you more. What the bigger flats cost is time, and that is already built into the four-bed price. The premium in Putney is in the deposit at risk, not in our rate.
Licensing for Putney landlords, and why it matters to you
This part is for landlords and for tenants who want to know the ground they are standing on. Wandsworth Council now runs property licensing across the borough, and Putney is squarely in it. From 1 April 2026 the council’s selective licensing designation 2 covers all privately rented homes let to a single household or to two unrelated sharers in the East Putney, West Putney and Northcote wards, and it runs for five years. You can confirm the current position on the council’s own Wandsworth private rented property licences pages.
That sits on top of two schemes already running. A first selective licensing designation went live on 1 July 2025 for Furzedown, South Balham, Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway, on the Tooting side of the borough. And additional HMO licensing has applied borough-wide since 1 July 2025, alongside the long-standing mandatory HMO licensing for larger shared houses. For a sharer flat in Putney, that means a licence is now part of letting it legally.
Why does a tenant care? Because a licensed landlord is one the council can hold to standards, and because an unlicensed let where one is required can leave the landlord exposed to a rent repayment order. It also shapes the check-out. Licensing and the wider tenancy rules are tightening together, with the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 reshaping how tenancies end across England, and agents in Putney are running check-outs more carefully than they did a few years ago. A clean that meets the inventory standard is the easiest part of that to get right.
Carpets, ovens and the extras worth adding
Two add-ons earn their keep at a Putney check-out more than any others: carpet cleaning and oven cleaning. They are the two items a clerk inspects hardest, and the two most likely to trigger a deduction if they are skipped.
Carpet cleaning is £36 per bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 to do a whole two-bed flat. If the check-in report listed the carpets as professionally cleaned, you are usually expected to return them the same way, and a hot-water extraction clean lifts the Thames-path grime out of the pile rather than smearing it around. On those greyed front-hall edges near the river it is the difference between a pass and a line item.
Oven cleaning is £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range. It is included in the full end of tenancy clean already, but plenty of people add a standalone oven clean mid-tenancy or before a landlord’s inspection, and a range cooker in one of the bigger Putney Hill kitchens is worth booking as its own job.
We also handle upholstery cleaning for furnished lets, which matters on the river and Heath-side flats where pollen and damp settle into sofas. For a fuller picture of everything we cover beyond end of tenancy, the deep cleaning service is the one to look at. A deep clean and a check-out clean are different jobs. A deep clean restores a home you are staying in; an end of tenancy clean is built to pass an inventory and protect a deposit. People mix the two up and book the wrong one.
A deep clean restores a home you are staying in; an end of tenancy clean is built to pass an inventory and protect a deposit.
Booking, parking and the day itself
Booking is a phone call. Tell us the size of the property, the postcode, roughly what condition it is in and when the check-out is, and we give you a fixed price and a slot. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] and we will sort it. We work seven days, which is the only way to fit Putney professionals whose only free day is a Saturday.
Parking is the genuine headache here, and we say so up front. Most of SW15 is in a controlled parking zone, the streets off the High Street and around the stations are tight, and the riverside roads by the Embankment fill up early. Tell us when you book whether there is a permit, a bay, or nothing, because it changes how we load the van and how early the team needs to set off. On a job near Putney Bridge station we will usually plan around the morning, before the High Street clogs up.
On the day, the flat should be empty of your belongings and have working electricity and hot water. That is it from your side. We bring everything: machines, chemicals, cloths, the reach poles for the high Edwardian ceilings. The team works through the 57-point list room by room, and we leave the place ready for the clerk.
If the inventory clerk or the agent flags anything we cleaned, call us within 48 hours and we come back and put it right, free. That re-clean guarantee is the whole reason the fixed-price job beats the hourly one for a check-out. It is also why our first-time pass rate sits at 97%, because the cleaners know a sloppy job means a return trip, and nobody wants the return trip.
One last practical note on timing. Book the clean for after you have moved out and before the check-out inspection, with a clear day between the two if you can manage it. That way the flat is empty when we arrive, there is room to fix anything if a carpet needs a second pass to dry, and you walk into the inspection knowing the work is done. Leave it to the morning of the check-out and you are gambling on the traffic and the parking, neither of which is on your side in SW15.
Where else we clean around Putney
Putney sits inside the borough of Wandsworth, and we cover the whole of it for end of tenancy work. If your move is just over a boundary, we are almost certainly already cleaning there.
Cross Putney Bridge and we clean in Fulham. Out towards the Heath and the university campuses there is Roehampton, where the sharer and student lets keep us busy. Along the river to the west sits Barnes, with its pond and its village feel. And the District line one stop down takes you to East Putney and on to Southfields, both of which we cover on the same rounds.
The clean is the same wherever the flat is. The 57-point list, the fixed price, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and the agent relationships do not change between SW15 and the next postcode along. What changes is the parking, the housing stock and the local clerk, and we know those by area.
If you are moving within Putney rather than out of it, that is the easy case. We can clean the place you are leaving and, if you want, deep clean the one you are moving into before your furniture lands, which on a same-week move saves you the worst of the chaos. Plenty of our SW15 work is exactly that: one family, two flats, a fortnight apart.
Questions Putney tenants ask us
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Putney?
End of tenancy cleaning in Putney is £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. That is the full price for the whole 57-point clean, with carpet and oven work added on if you want them.
Do you guarantee I will pass the check-out inspection?
We hold a 97% first-time pass rate, and if the inventory clerk or agent challenges anything we cleaned, we come back and put it right free within 48 hours. We cannot guarantee a clerk’s mood, but the re-clean guarantee means cleaning is not what costs you the deposit.
Will my Putney letting agent accept your clean?
Almost certainly. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents and our cleaners follow a 57-point agent-approved checklist built around what inventory clerks actually inspect. If your agent has a particular checklist, tell us when you book and we will work to it.
Is carpet cleaning included or extra?
Carpet cleaning is priced separately: £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat. If your check-in report listed the carpets as professionally cleaned, you will usually need to return them the same way to avoid a deduction.
How much does oven cleaning cost on its own?
A standalone oven clean is £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. Oven cleaning is already part of the full end of tenancy clean, so you only book it separately for a mid-tenancy clean or a landlord inspection.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
No. Most Putney tenants hand over a key or arrange access through the agent, since the flat needs to be empty of belongings anyway. We just need working electricity and hot water on the day. We will confirm access and parking when you book.
Can you clean at short notice before a Putney check-out?
Usually yes. We work seven days a week, which suits Putney professionals whose only free day is the weekend. Call as early as you can, because Saturday slots near the stations and the river fill up, but we keep capacity for last-minute check-outs.
Why is the bathroom limescale so bad in SW15?
Putney is on London’s hard water, so a year of showers leaves a chalky film on glass, taps and tiles that ordinary wiping leaves behind. We descale the screen, grout, showerhead and taps properly, which is exactly the surface a clerk checks under a torch.
Does living near the Thames affect the clean?
It can. Flats near the Embankment and the towpath pick up path dust on carpet edges and hallways, and lower-floor riverside flats see more damp. We give those front-hall carpet edges and any mildew extra attention, because that edge is where a clerk runs a hand.
What is the difference between end of tenancy and a deep clean?
An end of tenancy clean is built to pass an inventory and protect a deposit, cleaning to the check-in standard with the flat empty. A deep clean restores a home you are staying in. They overlap, but you want the end of tenancy job for a check-out.
How do I handle parking for the cleaners in Putney?
Tell us when you book whether there is a resident permit, a bay or nothing, since most of SW15 is a controlled parking zone and the streets near the High Street and river are tight. It changes how we load the van and how early the team sets off.
Will a professional clean really help me get my deposit back?
Yes, partly for the work and partly for the paperwork. Citizens Advice and Shelter both note that a receipt for a professional clean is strong evidence if a cleaning charge goes to adjudication, and the adjudicator decides on documents, not a site visit.
Do landlords renting in Putney now need a licence?
From 1 April 2026, Wandsworth’s selective licensing covers single-household and two-sharer lets in the East Putney, West Putney and Northcote wards, for five years. Additional HMO licensing has applied borough-wide since 1 July 2025. Check the council’s licensing pages for your exact ward.
How long does an end of tenancy clean take?
It depends on size and condition. A studio handed over tidy is a few hours; a four-bed terrace up Putney Hill that has had a hard year is most of a day. We send enough cleaners to finish in one visit and leave the place ready for the clerk.
Can you clean carpets and upholstery in furnished riverside flats?
Yes. Many Putney riverside and Heath-side flats are let furnished, and we clean upholstery as well as carpets, which matters where pollen and damp settle into sofas. We do the soft furnishings last and leave them to dry before the check-out.