End of tenancy cleaning in and around Stag Hill

The clerk doing a Stag Hill check-out opens the kitchen cupboards first, because in a house where six people cooked for a year there is always food nobody will claim. That habit tells you what this job actually is. End of tenancy cleaning around Stag Hill is built to satisfy the person writing the report rather than the person paying us: a 57-point agent-approved checklist, a dated photo set of every room, £30 per hour per cleaner, and a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover GU2 across the whole hill, meaning the campus, Manor Park, Onslow Village, Guildford Park and Park Barn, plus the GU1 and GU3 edges where the student houses spill over. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Surrey.

The check-in report is the only opinion that counts

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody in a student house does, and it decides everything that follows. On the day your group moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the words “clean” or “as new” against the kitchen and the bathroom. Those words were true that morning. The house had just been cleaned professionally, because the group before you had handed it back and the landlord had it turned around for you.

At the end of the tenancy a clerk walks the same house with that report open on a tablet and compares it line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. Read that again. You are not being marked against tidy. You are being marked against a professional clean that happened twelve months ago, and a Sunday with a mop and a borrowed hoover very rarely gets you back to it.

The clerks who work the streets below the hill do the same houses every summer. They are fast, they are unsentimental, and they know which cupboard the pasta is in. That is not unfairness. It is a person doing a job they have done four hundred times, so turn up with evidence rather than optimism.

Two bits of law sit underneath all of it. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means nobody can write a named cleaning company into your agreement as a condition, so no landlord can force you to book us. The same Act caps most deposits at five weeks’ rent. Neither of those lowers the cleanliness bar, and that is the part people miss.

One deposit, six names, one argument

Here is the structural problem with a student let, and it has nothing to do with cleaning. Six names on one joint agreement means one deposit, protected as one sum, released as one sum. A clawback comes off the whole group. If the check-out report says the oven failed and the hall carpet failed, it does not matter in the slightest that your room was spotless and you left in April.

So the deduction gets split across six people who are no longer in the same city, and the argument gets split across a group chat where two of them have muted notifications. I have watched that play out enough times to be blunt about it. The cleaning is the cheap part. The fallout is the expensive part.

The cleaning is the cheap part. The fallout is the expensive part.

A deduction is an opening position, not a verdict. Your deposit sits in one of the government-approved schemes, and if the figure is unfair you can push it to that scheme’s free adjudicator instead of accepting it. Shelter’s deposit guidance walks through how. What wins those adjudications is dull and documentary: a dated photo set, an itemised invoice on headed paper, and a professional clean that actually happened. Groups who have all three almost never need them.

What 1 May 2026 did to a calendar that never moved

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 now give two months’ notice at any point rather than sitting out a fixed term.

The cleaning side did not change. Not one line of it.

The check-in benchmark still applies, the Tenant Fees Act still applies, and what you owe your landlord on cleanliness at the end is exactly what it was in April 2026. What has changed is timing, and timing is the interesting bit around Stag Hill, because this was the one rental market in Surrey where the end date was set by an academic calendar rather than by anybody’s choice. Fixed dates in summer, a whole street emptying in the same week, a landlord who already knows next year’s group. Periodic tenancies loosen the edges of that, since people can now leave at odd points in the year, so the houses that used to move as a block are increasingly moving in pieces and the clean gets booked later by whoever is left holding the keys.

Guildford licenses the big shares and leaves the small ones alone

Guildford Borough Council runs mandatory HMO licensing and nothing beyond it. The threshold is the national one: five or more people forming two or more households, sharing a kitchen, a bathroom or a toilet. Hit that and the house needs a licence, and you can check the position for your own address in the council’s own HMO licence guidance. Fall under it, as a three or four-person share does, and there is no borough licence at all. Guildford has not brought in an additional licensing scheme over the smaller shares.

Why should a cleaner care about any of this? Because the licence is a decent proxy for who is watching. A licensed five-plus house usually comes with a landlord who is used to being inspected, an agent in the middle, and an inventory written to a standard. The check-out is stricter and more formal, and it is the sort of thing you win on paperwork. The unlicensed three and four-bed shares are the messier ones in practice. Nobody set a cleaning baseline at the start, the landlord’s expectation at the end is a feeling rather than a document, and a vague expectation is the hardest thing in the world to argue against once your money is already sitting in a scheme.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

Every booking on the hill runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of check-outs and tuned to what clerks in this town actually flag. You get the full list with the job, or we talk you through it first. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where a shared year shows up all at once

The oven comes out and gets stripped rather than wiped. Racks into a soaking tank, door glass split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, then the interior, fan, element and seals. In a six-person house that oven has done a year of nobody’s cooking in particular, which is precisely why nobody ever pulled it out. Hob rings and burners off. Extractor hood degreased inside and out, filter soaked or swapped.

Then the slow part. Every cupboard inside and out, including the one at the back with the forgotten rice. Fridge and freezer done through once you have defrosted them properly, and properly does not mean the morning of the move, because a wet fridge photographs badly. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under them get cleaned, then put back. The washing machine drum, drawer and door seal. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled. Tiles and grout scrubbed. Bins emptied and washed. Floor hoovered and mopped into the corners.

Bathrooms, where a year of five people is visible

Chalky film off the screen, tiles and grout first. Taps, shower head and basin taken back to metal. Toilet done inside, under the rim, at the base and behind the pedestal, where nobody looks except the clerk. Mirror and cabinet, and behind the cabinet where it stands off the wall. Extractor vent wiped, mould bloom in the silicone treated, and the sealant cleaned as far as cleaning honestly takes it, since re-sealing is a handyman’s bill. Floor last.

Bedrooms, including the one somebody left in June

Every room cleaned to the inventory, no exceptions and no discounts for early leavers. Inside wardrobes, drawers and shelves. Skirting, sockets, switches, door tops and frames. We move the bed and we move the wardrobe, because the dust line behind them is the most predictable deduction in a shared house and it is always worst in the room of whoever went home first. Windows inside, sills and reveals wiped. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped, with a realistic line drawn, since nail holes are a decorator’s job.

Stairs, hall and everything nobody owns

The hall, the stairs and the landing take a whole year of bags, bikes and deliveries, and they belong to nobody, so they are usually the worst rooms in the house. Banisters, light fittings, communal cupboards, the meter cupboard. Cobwebs out of the corners. Internal glass. Then a walk-through, photographed before and after, room by room. That photo set is what you keep.

A year of Thames Water chalk in one shared shower

GU2 is supplied by Thames Water, and the company is unusually direct about this: it says all the water in its region is hard, because most of what goes into the pipes has run through chalk before it reaches you. Fine for drinking. Less fine for a shower screen that five people have used every day since September.

The build-up is calcium, it sets into chrome, and a cloth does nothing to it. Clerks check for it in a very particular way. They run a thumbnail down the tap. They look at the screen edge-on against the light. They pull the shower head close and look at the holes. Limescale on a bathroom fitting is one of the first things photographed in a Guildford check-out and one of the easiest to charge for, because it shows in a picture and nobody can argue it was there at check-in.

Grout is the other one, and it is a slower job than anybody expects. We scrub it rather than wipe it. Where it is past saving, which happens in a house that has run five sharers hard for a year, we photograph the state before we start, so nobody gets billed for wear that was already in the check-in pictures.

Photographs taken before we start have settled more disputes than any argument ever has.

The hill has three kinds of home on it, and they fail differently

Stag Hill is the hill itself. Richard Onslow, the 5th Earl, gave the land at the top of it to the new Diocese of Guildford in 1933; Edward Maufe’s cathedral went up on the summit and was consecrated in 1961; the University of Surrey was chartered in 1966 and built its main campus around the slope below. What that history left behind is one hill carrying three completely different kinds of rented home, and one cleaning method does not pass all three.

Campus and Manor Park: modern, en-suite, low on detail

University rooms, court flats and the en-suite blocks at Manor Park down toward the Surrey Sports Park have almost no architectural detail to worry about. No coving, no picture rails, nothing original to be careful with. So the risk concentrates in two places: the shared flat kitchen, where five or nine people cooked and none of them owned it, and the en-suite shower, where the chalk sets in. Contracts here are set by the university rather than a landlord, and they are not the same length for everyone. An undergraduate contract runs 38 weeks and two days. A postgraduate one runs 50 to 51 weeks. That mismatch is why the hill does not empty on a single day.

Onslow Village, Guildford Park and Park Barn: interwar and post-war family houses, let to sharers

West of the A3 sits Onslow Village, and it is a genuine garden suburb rather than an estate that borrowed the name. Onslow Village Ltd bought 646 acres from the Earl of Onslow in 1920 at roughly a quarter of its market value, laid it out on Ebenezer Howard’s garden-city model, and got about 600 houses built before the money ran out. Those semi-detached cottages are now heavily let to sharers, and part of the area is a designated conservation area. Picture rails, deep skirting, airing cupboards, older bathrooms where the scale really sets: they hold a year of dust in places a modern flat does not have. Guildford Park and Park Barn, between the campus and the station, are the later story: post-war stock, prefabs in the fifties, then the estate proper, and now three and four-bed shares within a walk of town.

The Cathedral Close: quiet, single-household, handed back to the diocese

Above the campus, the staff and clergy houses in the Close are a different world again. Single households, longer tenancies, no six-person kitchen, and a hand-back that looks like an ordinary residential check-out. We size the job to which of these three you are in, because a Manor Park en-suite flat and an Onslow Village four-bed are not the same work.

What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until the group chat starts

Stag Hill sits at our standard Surrey pricing. Nothing loaded on for the postcode, nothing added because it is a student house. Fixed by property size, quoted before we start.

Those figures assume a house in normal lived-in shape. A five-person share that has never had a deep clean, or a pet somebody did not declare, costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than on the invoice. Kit, products and travel around Guildford are in the price.

Now run the maths the way the deposit makes you run it. A four-bed clean is £425. Divided between six people that is a shade over £70 each, and it buys the one thing a joint deposit needs, which is a house that passes the first time. Set it against a deposit share capped at five weeks’ rent per head and a check-out report that can clip the whole group for an oven and a hall carpet. Most people only do this sum after they have tried it themselves, failed the check-out and lost the first round, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: anything the landlord or agent flags inside 48 hours, we come back and redo free, as long as the house is still as we left it. Our 97% first-time pass rate is the reason that guarantee costs us very little, and being on the books of 300+ letting agents across the South East is the reason we usually know what the report will say before it is written. Across the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

A five-bed off Guildford Park Road, last July

“Five of us, one agreement, a fifty-one week contract that ended on a Saturday in July, and by the Monday before it there were two of us left in the house. The bathroom was the thing I was actually scared of. One shower, five people, a year of it, and the screen had gone cloudy no matter what we bought for it. Monster came on the Thursday, two cleaners, most of the day, took the screen and the shower head back to clear and pulled the oven out while they were at it. Check-out came back with nothing against cleaning. Deposit released whole, split five ways, and I did not have to argue with anybody about it in August.”
Tomas, Guildford GU2, July 2025

That is a fair example of the pattern here. A joint tenancy, a fixed summer date, most of the group already gone, one person left carrying it, and one cleaning problem that had quietly built up over twelve months while everybody assumed somebody else would deal with it. What turned it was not the scrubbing on its own. It was the dated photographs that went out with the invoice.

Booking it, and why May is not early

Stag Hill has the worst clustering of any patch we work, and it is not close. Most of Surrey spreads its check-outs across the month. This hill hands back in a fortnight, because the houses below it are already let to next year’s group. Every clerk in Guildford is booked. Every van is booked. So are we, if you leave it.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Postcode, bedroom count, hand-back date, and anything you already know is a problem. One person from the group is plenty. You do not all need to call, and please do not all call.
2. We quote a fixed price off the table above, with carpet or oven add-ons confirmed up front. No hourly creep, no lines that appear later.
3. Lock the date. For a July hand-back, book in May. Mid-year moves want a week’s notice, but July is its own animal and we will not pretend otherwise.
4. We clean and photograph. The team works the 57-point agent-approved checklist, then sends a dated photo set of every room with the invoice.
5. Hand back. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we return and redo it at no charge.

One practical note about access, because it catches groups out every summer. Tell us at booking who holds the keys and where they will be, since the honest answer is often “the agent, and I will be in Manchester”. Campus hand-backs go through the university and have their own arrangements.

Three jobs that get muddled up

People ring and ask for the wrong one about once a week, so it is worth being clear about which is which.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass an inventory and release a deposit, done with the house empty, measured against the letting-agent benchmark, £30 per hour per cleaner with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee attached to it. This is the one a July hand-back needs.

Deep clean

A full reset of a home you are staying in. Furnished, lived-in, no formal standard to hit and no clerk at the end of it. Useful mid-tenancy when a shared kitchen has got away from everybody. Also £30 per hour per cleaner, with no guarantee, because there is nothing to guarantee it against.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing upkeep on a rota with the same cleaner kept on the house, £22 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly. Some shared houses run one all year and split it. It will not pass a check-out on its own.

One-off team clean

A standalone visit by a team, £26 per cleaner an hour with a £186 minimum, which is two cleaners for three hours plus the £30 kit charge. Handy after a party or before a viewing. Not an end of tenancy clean and not sold as one.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning for a student house near Stag Hill?

It goes by size, not by how many of you signed. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Carpet shampoo, which most shared houses want after a year, is £36 a bedroom or £43 for a living room. Split six ways, a £425 four-bed clean is about £71 each against a deposit share worth several weeks of rent.

Six of us signed one tenancy. Do we book one clean or six?

One. The house is handed back as one property against one inventory, so it gets one clean. Give us a single point of contact and one hand-back date. Whether you split the bill six ways or one person pays and chases the rest is your business.

One housemate moved out in June and left their room. Is that room covered?

Yes. Every room goes on the checklist regardless of when the person in it left, and that includes the wardrobe nobody could shift and the dust line behind it. The abandoned room is one of the most common student-house deductions in Guildford, so it is exactly the thing the price is buying.

Why do you want the date booked in May for a July hand-back?

Because the houses below the hill hand back in a bunch, not spread across the year. When most of a street ends in the same fortnight, every clerk, van and cleaner in Guildford is committed for it. We hold July capacity for these houses. It runs out. May is not early, it is sensible.

Do you clean rooms on the campus itself, or only the houses below it?

Both. Court rooms and shared flats handed back through the university get the same checklist as a private house, and so do the en-suite flats at Manor Park down by the Surrey Sports Park. The standard is whatever the inventory says, and on campus that usually means the shared flat kitchen carries the risk rather than your own room.

Is Guildford water hard enough to matter over one year?

Yes. Thames Water supplies GU2 and says plainly that all the water in its region is hard. Over a year of five or six people showering, that shows up as a chalky film on the screen and a furred shower head. A clerk looks at the screen edge-on against the light. We descale it back to metal rather than wiping it.

What exactly does the 48-hour re-clean guarantee cover?

If your landlord or agent flags anything from our checklist within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and redo that work at no charge, provided the property is still as we left it and nobody has moved in. That is the deal, in full. Our 97% first-time pass rate is why it rarely gets used.

Will a professional clean guarantee the whole deposit back?

No, and anyone promising that is selling you something. Deductions can be for damage, for rent arrears, for a missing key. What we guarantee is that cleaning will not be the reason for one, and we hand you dated photographs of every room to prove it. That evidence is how we have helped tenants recover £1.2m deposits over the years.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 mean we can skip the professional clean?

No. The Act went live on 1 May 2026 and abolished Section 21, and it converted existing assured shorthold tenancies to periodic ones. It did not touch what you owe on cleanliness. You still hand the house back at its check-in standard, measured against the inventory, and in a student let that inventory was written after a professional clean.

Is our house an HMO, and does that change what you do?

Guildford Borough Council licenses HMOs under the mandatory scheme: five or more people from two or more households sharing a kitchen, bathroom or toilet. Three and four-person shares are not licensable here. The clean is identical either way. What changes is who is watching, and a licensed house tends to come with an agent and a proper inventory behind it.

Can you do just the oven and the carpets?

Yes, if that is genuinely all that got flagged. A standalone oven deep-clean is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range. Carpet shampoo runs £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted area.

Do we need to be there while you clean?

No. Most groups have already gone home by hand-back week, which is the normal state of affairs here in July. We work from keys left with the agent, the landlord or whichever housemate drew the short straw. Then we photograph the lot and send you the set.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we will price it in about three minutes. Postcode, bedroom count, hand-back date, anything you already know is bad. Out of hours, email [email protected] and somebody rings you back. A couple of photos of the kitchen and the bathroom sharpen the quote more than any description will. Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, cleaning rented homes across Surrey and London since 2014. And if your hand-back is in three days and you have only just thought about it, ring anyway.