An inventory clerk working ME10 checks the shower screen before the sofa. Chalk water off the South East Water mains fogs glass within weeks once the daily wipe-down stops, and that fog is the first thing a clerk photographs. We run end of tenancy cleaning across Sittingbourne, Kemsley, Iwade and the Milton Regis side of Swale from £156 for a studio up to £425 for a four-bed, every job worked to a 57-point agent-approved checklist with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind it. Ring 0333 555 2076 and we will price yours in a few minutes.
Last updated July 2026. We cover Sittingbourne town, Kemsley, Iwade, Murston, Milton Regis, Grovehurst, Bapchild and the wider ME10 postcode area of Swale. This page sits inside the Kent directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Kent.
The oven costs more than the carpet ever does
Tenants brace for the carpet. The carpet is rarely the problem. What actually gets deducted in a Sittingbourne check-out is the oven, the hob, the extractor filter and the grout nobody bends down to look at, because those are the surfaces an inventory clerk was trained to check first and a tenant was never trained to check at all.
The mechanism behind it is simple once you see it. When you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote a check-in report, usually with photographs, describing every surface as it stood that day. That report was written against a flat that had just been professionally cleaned for the incoming tenant, so the oven was genuinely spotless and the report says so. At check-out, a clerk compares the same surfaces against that same document. Anything worse than fair wear and tear becomes a deduction, and cleaning is the one category with almost no argument either way: the report either says the oven was clean at move-in or it does not.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means a Sittingbourne landlord cannot force you to book a professional cleaner as a condition of the tenancy. Nobody can make you ring us. What the Act does not change is the benchmark the clerk is working from, and matching a professional check-in standard with a bottle of spray and a free Saturday is harder than it looks, particularly on the oven.
What 1 May 2026 actually changed here
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, and a tenant can give two months’ notice whenever they choose rather than waiting for a fixed term to expire.
None of that changes what the clean has to look like. The Tenant Fees Act still stands, the check-in benchmark still stands, and the clean itself did not change on 1 May, only the notice period did. Sittingbourne already has a churn-heavy rental market built around the commute to London, and a rolling notice period spreads move-out dates across the whole month instead of bunching them at the traditional quarter days. Book earlier than you used to. That is the one practical change worth acting on.
The clean itself did not change on 1 May. Only the notice period did.
Chalk in the pipes: the second-biggest deduction in Sittingbourne
Kent sits on chalk, and South East Water draws most of its supply for this stretch of the county from chalk aquifers, which means the water reaching Sittingbourne taps is properly hard. Limescale builds on shower screens, taps, kettles and tiled splashbacks faster than most tenants expect, and it builds even faster once the daily wipe stops in the weeks before a move.
The clerk knows exactly what to look for. A cloudy shower screen, a crusted tap spout, white rings left inside a kettle for the next tenant: all of it reads as neglect against a check-in photo that shows clear glass. We carry a dedicated scale remover and softer pads that lift it without scratching chrome, and we work the screen, the taps and the tiled joints back to the state the check-in photos recorded. On the newer Iwade and Kemsley bathrooms the fittings are modern and the scale lifts cleanly. In the older Milton Regis terraces, where nobody has descaled properly in years, it takes longer, which is why we ask what kind of property it is before we quote a slot length.
Limescale is not carpet. It does not photograph as dramatically. It costs deposits anyway.
It does not photograph as dramatically. It costs deposits anyway.
A town the mill built, and what that means for the kitchens we clean
Sittingbourne is a paper town before it is anything else. Kemsley Paper Mill, on the north side of town by Milton Creek, has been making paper here for over a century, and the site remains one of the largest recycled paper mills in Europe, running at roughly 830,000 tonnes a year. A new stock preparation line went into commissioning there in early 2026 as part of a wider investment programme, which tells you the mill is not a relic. It is still the reason a good slice of Sittingbourne exists.
That industrial history shaped the housing stock in a way that matters to a cleaning job. The oldest streets, packed in around the High Street and running down toward Milton Regis, were built for mill and dockyard workers: terraced two- and three-bed houses, narrow kitchens, small bathrooms often bolted on later. Between the 1930s and the 1960s the council added estates at Murston and Grovehurst to house the next generation of the same workforce, solid brick semis and terraces with slightly bigger kitchens but the same basic layout. Everything built since the 2010s, out toward Iwade and the newer Kemsley roads, is a different animal entirely: open-plan kitchens, en suites, an integrated oven that is usually the only thing in the property that has ever gone wrong.
We clean all three, and we clean them differently. A modern Iwade kitchen is quick, because there is less of it and the surfaces are new. A Milton Regis terrace with sixty years of tenants behind it takes longer, because grease and scale have had decades’ worth of chances to set into grout that was never sealed particularly well.
Milton Regis to Iwade: the postcode runs street by street
Everything on this page sits inside ME9 and ME10, and within that the town splits into recognisable bands rather than one uniform sprawl.
Start at the centre. The High Street, the Forum shopping centre and the roads around the railway station are a mix of older terraces converted into flats and shared houses, plus some newer infill. Southeastern trains run from Sittingbourne station to London Victoria and, via the HS1 link, to St Pancras in well under an hour, which is why so much of this housing turns over to commuters on one- and two-year lets.
West and south of the centre, Murston and Grovehurst carry the mid-century council-built stock, semis and terraces on wide, quiet roads, plenty of them now privately rented rather than council-owned. East, Bapchild and Tonge stay smaller and more rural, with a scatter of older cottages among newer infill. North across the railway and the creek, Kemsley sits by the mill itself, part original mill-village terrace, part newer estate. Further out, Iwade has grown fast over the last fifteen years and is now mostly modern estate housing, three- and four-bed family homes with integrated kitchens.
Milton Creek, the tidal inlet of the Swale that separates Kemsley from the town centre, is the natural boundary most locals use when giving directions, and it runs through a genuinely pretty stretch of country park if you have never walked it. If your postcode is not listed here and it falls anywhere in ME9 or ME10, ring and ask. We are almost certainly already working a street or two from you.
Swale’s new stance on shared houses
Swale Borough Council does not currently run a selective licensing scheme across Sittingbourne, so a standard single-family let is not automatically licensed the way it would be in some London boroughs. Houses in multiple occupation are a different story. Larger HMOs still need a mandatory licence from the council under the national rules, and Swale adopted a new supplementary planning document in June 2026 tightening the planning side further: a new HMO cannot go ahead if it would push more than 10% of homes within a 100-metre radius into HMO use, and the council will refuse permission where a new HMO would sandwich an ordinary family home between two others.
For a tenant, none of that changes the standard the clean has to meet. What it does mean is that licensed HMOs, common around the older streets near the High Street and Milton Regis where large Victorian and Edwardian terraces were long ago split into bedsits, get inspected against condition standards on top of the usual check-out. A shared kitchen with three tenants’ worth of cooking behind it needs the same 57-point standard as a single-family kitchen, just applied to a room more people have used.
The 57 things we go through, room by room
Every Sittingbourne booking runs against the same 57-point checklist, built from a decade of check-outs and tuned to what agents in this part of Kent actually flag. Here is the shape of it, not the full list, because the full list is long enough to be its own document.
Kitchen
The oven comes apart properly: door glass split so the film between the panes comes out, racks and trays soaked rather than wiped, the cavity, fan and seals all done. Hob rings and burner caps come off and get degreased back to bare metal. The extractor filter is lifted out and soaked, not glanced at from below. Every cupboard gets done inside and out, including the awkward deep corner units that turn up in the older Milton Regis kitchens. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once defrosted. Appliances pulled forward so the gap behind and under the fridge, washing machine and dishwasher gets done, then pushed back. Sink, taps and splashback descaled, because the water here gives that no choice. Floor lifted where it comes up, hoovered and washed.
Bathroom
Shower screen taken back to clear glass, taps and shower head descaled, grout scrubbed rather than wiped, sealant lines cleaned and any black spotting treated. Toilet done inside the rim, round the base and behind the pedestal, where the clerk always looks and the tenant never does. Mirror and cabinet inside and out. Extractor vent dusted. Floor into the corners and behind the pan.
Bedrooms, living rooms and everywhere else
Skirting, door frames and door tops, light switches and sockets, both sides of every radiator, inside every wardrobe and built-in cupboard. Window sills, reveals and frames on the inside. Carpets vacuumed properly, not skimmed, and hard floors washed with the right product for the surface. Walls spot-checked for marks, with a fair line drawn between a scuff and genuine damage, because nail holes are a decorator’s job and not something scrubbing fixes. Cobwebs out of every ceiling corner. Stairs, spindles and the airing cupboard where the property has them. A final photographed walk-through, room by room, before anyone leaves. That photo set is the evidence you keep if the agent ever pushes back.
The maths a deposit this size makes for you
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (town centre, near the Forum) | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £156 |
| 1-bed flat (Milton Regis, Murston) | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed house (Quinton, Iwade estates) | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed house (Grovehurst, Bapchild) | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed house (Iwade, Kemsley new estates) | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Oven add-on, single (hourly job) | 1.5-2 hours | £77 |
| Carpet add-on, per bedroom | Same visit | £36 |
Sittingbourne runs at our standard Kent pricing: £30 an hour per cleaner if you would rather book it as a part job than a fixed price, kit and products included either way. Carpet cleaning rides alongside the main clean as an add-on where the tenancy calls for it: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted run of a two-bed done together. Ovens sit inside the fixed price already. Book by the hour instead and a single oven is £77, a double is £110, and a 90cm range cooker is £114.
Run the numbers the way a deposit forces you to. A one-bed clean at £207 against a deposit that, on an average Sittingbourne rent, runs well over £1,000, is not much of a decision once you have seen what a failed check-out costs to put right afterwards. Every job carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: flag anything cleaning-related within 48 hours and we come back and fix it free, provided nobody has moved back in. Our first-time pass rate across Kent sits at 97%, and we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, which between them have helped recover £1.2m in deposits for tenants who cleaned to the report instead of to guesswork.
A Grovehurst clean in February
“Three years in a 1950s council semi off Grovehurst Road, my partner and me, and I will admit the oven had not had a proper going-over in most of that time. The agent’s inventory clerk had already flagged the extractor filter at the mid-tenancy check. Two cleaners came for six hours, stripped the oven right down, sorted the extractor filter properly and got the shower screen back to actually clear instead of the frosted look it had gone. Deposit came back in full ten days later, no argument from the agent at all.”
Karen, Grovehurst, Sittingbourne ME10, February 2026
That job is a fair example of the mid-century estate pattern: a longer tenancy, an extractor filter nobody had thought about since move-in, and a bathroom that had quietly scaled up without anyone noticing day to day. The scrubbing mattered, but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice is what actually closed the argument, and it is the thing most DIY check-outs never have when an agent pushes back.
Booking around the regeneration works and the month-end scramble
Sittingbourne town centre is mid-way through a genuinely large regeneration scheme, the kind that reshapes a place rather than tinkers with it. St Michael’s Road is being reconfigured for a new multi-storey car park, several sites around the High Street are being redeveloped for a cinema and restaurant quarter, and the wider plan links the High Street through to the railway station and out toward Milton Creek Country Park. It is a good sign for the town. It is also a reason to check access and parking before your move-out date rather than on the morning itself, because road layouts near the centre have shifted more than once during the works.
Outside the town centre the bigger issue is ordinary month-end clustering. Like most Kent towns, Sittingbourne sees most check-outs land on the last two or three days of the month, and slots for those dates go first. The steps, in order:
- Ring 0333 555 2076. Price in a few minutes. Give us the postcode, the property size, the check-out date and anything you already know is a problem area.
- We book you in, ideally the day before check-out. Allow 5 to 7 days for an end-of-month slot, 2 to 4 days mid-month.
- Property empty when we arrive. Furniture, personal items and rubbish cleared out gives the most complete result.
- Photo proof at the end. Every room, before and after, on an itemised invoice.
- Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.
One practical note if you are near the town centre works: confirm with us how access and any temporary parking restriction affect the job, because a five-minute unload can turn into twenty if a road has been narrowed for the scheme that week.
Add-ons, and the three cleans people mix up
A Sittingbourne move-out often needs more than the core clean. Carpet cleaning is the common one, and where a tenancy has a specific hot-water-extraction clause written in, it is worth booking on the same visit rather than as an afterthought. Oven cleaning is already inside every end-of-tenancy job as standard, though it also stands alone if that is genuinely the only thing an agent has flagged. Removals help where the clean and the move need to happen on the same day, and upholstery or window cleaning cover furnished lets and the exterior glass an inventory sometimes calls for.
Three jobs get muddled constantly, and booking the wrong one wastes money.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document a clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out gets measured against, which is why we clean to the report and not to a general idea of tidy.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, judged against the letting-agent benchmark, with the property empty and the 48-hour guarantee attached, at £30 an hour if booked by the hour.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing maintenance for a home you are staying in, from £22 an hour weekly or £24 an hour fortnightly.
If you are handing keys back, it is the middle one. The other two will not be checked against the inventory and will not protect the deposit.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Sittingbourne?
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 oven is included in every fixed-price job and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee comes with all of them.
Do I have to book a professional cleaner to get my deposit back?
No. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 stops a landlord making it a contractual condition. What it does not change is the benchmark: the check-in report was written against a professionally cleaned property, and matching that standard without professional kit, particularly on the oven and the hard-water marks, is genuinely difficult.
What changed for Sittingbourne tenants on 1 May 2026?
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 abolished Section 21 evictions and converted every existing assured shorthold tenancy to a periodic one, so tenants can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning standard expected at check-out did not change. The practical effect is more spread-out, less predictable move-out dates, so book earlier than you might have before.
Why does hard water matter so much for a Sittingbourne deposit?
Sittingbourne sits over chalk and South East Water’s supply here is hard, so limescale builds on shower screens, taps and kettles faster than most tenants expect. A clerk comparing a scaled-up bathroom against clear check-in photos reads it as neglect, and it is one of the most common deductions we see in this area.
Do you cover Iwade, Kemsley, Murston and Grovehurst as well as the town centre?
Yes. Those are all standard rounds for us, along with Milton Regis, Bapchild and Tonge, on the same pricing as central Sittingbourne. Iwade in particular has grown fast, so we are out there often.
Is the oven really included in the price?
Yes, in every fixed-price job. It is the single biggest deduction risk in a Sittingbourne kitchen, whether the property is a new Iwade build or a Milton Regis terrace, so it is never treated as optional here.
Do you clean licensed HMOs and shared houses?
Yes, including licensed HMOs around the older streets near the High Street and Milton Regis. We can clean a single room plus the shared kitchen and bathroom, or the whole property, to the same 57-point standard.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the check-out report raises a cleaning issue within 48 hours of us finishing, we come back and fix it at no extra charge, provided the property is still in the state we left it.
How long before check-out should I book?
End-of-month dates want 5 to 7 days’ notice. Mid-month is usually fine on 2 to 4 days. Sittingbourne bunches its check-outs at month-end like most Kent towns, and those slots go first.
Does it matter if the property is a new Iwade build or an older Milton Regis terrace?
The price is set by bedroom count, not the age of the property. What changes is how long the job takes. A modern kitchen usually cleans up faster; an older terrace with years of scale built into the grout can take a full extra slot, which is why we ask what kind of property it is before quoting a time.
Can carpet cleaning be booked at the same time?
Yes. £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed booked together. Doing it on the same visit saves a second callout, and ground-in marks are a common deduction on their own.
What happens if the letting agent disputes the clean after a re-clean?
Escalate to the deposit scheme adjudication service, whether that is the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits or the Deposit Protection Service. Our invoice, dated photo report and re-clean record are admissible evidence, and Shelter’s guidance on tenancy deposits walks through the adjudication steps in plain terms.