End of tenancy cleaning for Stevenage Old Town homes

Which fails first in a Stevenage Old Town check-out: the wall above the woodburner, or the shower screen? Nine times out of ten it is the wall, because smoke greying creeps up over a winter and nobody looks at it until the inventory clerk does. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, cleaning Hertfordshire hand-backs since 2014, and around the High Street we work to fixed prices, £30 per hour per cleaner on part-jobs, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 and you will have a price in about three minutes.

Last updated July 2026. We cover the Old Town’s SG1 postcodes: the SG1 3 core around the High Street and Middle Row, plus the older streets running off it along Letchmore Road, Walkern Road, Orchard Road and Rectory Lane. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Hertfordshire.

The check-in photos win every argument, so match them

Start with the mechanism. On the day you moved in, a clerk walked the property and recorded the state of every surface, usually with photographs, and on period stock the report gets granular: it names the beams, the hearth, the quarry tiles, the picture rails. At check-out a second walk-through is compared against the first, line by line, and anything materially worse than the check-in entry, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable against the deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, on surfaces that hold dirt far better than anything the New Town grid can manage, which is why a free Sunday and a mop so rarely gets an Old Town cottage over the line.

The clerk photographs everything anyway.

So the money is not abstract. On the DIY hand-backs we get called in to rescue around the High Street, the deductions repeat: £80 to £120 on the oven, £70 to £140 on scale and grout, £60 to £120 on hearths and the greyed paint above them, £120 to £300 on carpets. Most tenants run those sums only after the check-out has already gone wrong, and the first round was the cheap one to win.

One legal point worth having straight. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means your landlord cannot write a compulsory professional clean into the tenancy, so nobody can force you to book us. The deduction test is simpler and harsher: dirtier at check-out than at check-in, judged from the photos. Where we find structural damp, a cold-wall mould patch behind a wardrobe, say, we photograph and log it, because damp is a landlord repair obligation and the charge should sit on their side, not yours.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a High Street tenancy

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions went with it, every assured shorthold tenancy in England converted to a periodic one, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point in the year instead of waiting out a fixed term.

What did not change is the clean. The check-in benchmark holds, the deposit rules hold, and the deduction maths in June 2026 is what it was in April.

What did not change is the clean.

The Old Town angle is churn. These streets let quickly, to people who want the character end of Stevenage rather than the grid, and a good share of them work in London, because the fast trains out of Stevenage station reach King’s Cross in a little over 20 minutes and there are around 150 direct services a day. Put rolling notice on top of a commuter market and move-outs now land in every week of the month, while the old month-end pile-up has not gone anywhere. Book earlier than feels necessary. The slot you want is the one that goes first.

All 57 points, one list, no padding

Every booking here runs our 57-point agent-approved checklist, tuned over a decade of check-outs to what clerks actually flag, and on Old Town stock they flag the period detail. Rather than pad this page with a room-by-room essay, here is the working shape of the list. The full version comes with the job.

• Oven stripped, never wiped: racks tanked, door glass split, the browned film between the panes removed
• Behind and under the cooker, fridge and washing machine, then everything pushed back
• The washing machine door seal, which is the first thing most clerks open
• Taps, shower head, screen and toilet pan descaled, gently on original fittings
• Grout scrubbed back, and photographed first wherever it was already grey at check-in
• Hearth, surround and the smoke-greyed paint above any fireplace or woodburner
• Every cupboard and built-in, inside and out, including the under-stair and half-landing storage old conversions leave behind
• Skirtings, picture rails, beams and the tops of doors, where period dust actually sits
• Windows inside, with sills, reveals and frames; slow, careful work on older frames
• Radiators behind and under; cast iron takes longer and gets the time
• Hard floors washed to suit the material, quarry tile and old board included, never stripped
• Carpets hoovered through, every room
• A final photographed walk-through before we lock up, so you hold the evidence

Two items on that list often grow into their own job. If the tenancy demands a receipt for hot-water extraction, the carpet cleaning add-on covers it on the same visit. And if the oven is the only thing the agent flagged, standalone oven cleaning handles it without the full booking. Hard-used sofas in the furnished High Street lets sometimes want proper upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover, and we fold that in too.

Water at 320 mg/l, and what it does to old brass

Stevenage is supplied by Affinity Water, and the company’s own hardness data puts the town around 320 mg/l calcium carbonate, which it classes as very hard. Scale builds on taps, screens, kettle elements and the inside of toilet pans faster than tenants expect, and clerks check for it the same way every time: a thumbnail down the tap, the shower screen viewed edge-on against the light.

Limescale that has set into old chrome is slow work. A lot of Old Town bathrooms still carry original chrome or brass, sometimes on a roll-top bath with clawed feet, and the brute-force descalers a new-build shrugs off will pit and dull that metal for good. We descale by hand with product matched to the fitting, work the chips and the feet where scale hides, and where sealant or grout was already tired in the check-in photos we record it before we start, so the wear stays on the landlord’s side of the ledger where it belongs.

One town, two housing stocks, a mile apart

The High Street was a coaching stop on the Great North Road, feeding and stabling for 21 stagecoaches a day by 1800, and the inns that did the work still stand in a line between the bus stops and the letting-agent windows. The Swan Inn, dated 1530, is Grade II listed and lives on as homes. This is the end of Stevenage renters pick for character. It also cleans differently.

Behind the High Street

Off the frontage the stock runs to period cottages down Church Lane, Victorian terraces along Letchmore Road, and solid three- and four-bed houses on Walkern Road and Orchard Road, with the conservation streets around Rectory Lane running up towards St Nicholas Church. South along London Road you pass the six Roman barrows that gave Six Hills its name. Some of the bigger houses have been split into rooms over the years, and a shared house hands back hardest in the shared parts, the kitchen, the stair carpet, the hall floor, because that is where the wear concentrates and where the clerk lingers.

The lettings desks sit on the doorstep: Putterills on the High Street, Own Homes with its lettings office round the corner on Middle Row, Homes and Mortgages trading on the High Street since 1999. Their clerks have inventoried these exact cottages before and know where the last tenant fell short. A clean that only looks right from the doorway will not pass here.

The mile south

Walk a mile south and the housing changes century. The New Town, begun in 1946 as Britain’s first, is flat-fronted terraces, maisonettes and newer blocks around the station: a faster, flatter brief, covered on our Stevenage page. Up and down the line we also cover Hitchin, Knebworth and Letchworth Garden City, which matters when the next flat is one stop away and both ends of the move need doing in the same week.

The money, set against a deposit north of £1,600

Those are full prices with kit, products and travel included, for a property in normal lived-in shape. By the hour it is £30 per cleaner, which suits part-jobs and odd layouts, though on a full hand-back the fixed price is usually the better deal and it is what the guarantee attaches to. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a smoker’s house or a woodburner run hard for five winters takes longer, and we say so on the phone rather than on the invoice.

Now the sum that matters. The ONS put the average private rent in Stevenage at £1,412 a month in February 2026, up 5.0% in a year, and five weeks of that, the legal cap on most deposits, is a little over £1,600. That is what the clean is defending.

A £243 clean guarding a £1,600 deposit is not a hard sum.

Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we return and redo it free, provided the property is still empty and as we left it. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate, we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and across those years the work adds up to £1.2m deposits recovered for tenants who would otherwise have lost them. The guarantee matters most on exactly this housing stock, because a listed cottage gives a clerk more places to look than a plain modern flat ever will.

A converted-inn flat on the High Street, from March

“Two years in a one-bed carved out of one of the old inns on the High Street, all beams and odd steps. The beam over the kitchen doorway had a film of grease I could not shift with anything, and the oven was honestly worse. Monster sent two cleaners on a Thursday, degreased the beam by hand, stripped the oven right down and left me a photo of every room. Own Homes signed the check-out off the next morning and the full deposit was back nine days later.”
Daniel, Stevenage Old Town SG1, March 2026

A fair sample of the High Street pattern: a conversion with surfaces no checklist written for a new-build would mention, one problem the tenant already knew about and one they did not. The grease went, the oven went, and the photo set did the arguing. It usually does.

Booking it, and getting a van down the lanes

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. A price takes about three minutes: postcode, property size, check-out date, and anything the check-in report marked “new” or “as new”.
2. We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow 7 to 10 days for an end-of-month slot, 3 to 5 days mid-month.
3. Property empty when we arrive. If the move itself is still to do, we run removals too, and putting the van and the clean on one booking spares you two rounds of manoeuvring in the lanes.
4. Photo proof at the end, every room, with an itemised invoice on company paper. That is your evidence pack.
5. Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix free.

One honest note on access. The High Street itself is workable, but the lanes and yards behind it are narrow, some of the inn conversions load through a shared arch or a rear court, and a couple of the cottages have no frontage a van can hold. Tell us the arrangement when you book, key safe, agent drop-off or you on the doorstep, and we plan around it rather than discovering it at 8am.

Four jobs people muddle

Check-in inventory report

The document written on day one, describing every surface with photographs. It is the benchmark the check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it rather than to a general idea of tidy.

End of tenancy clean

The hand-back clean, built to match that report, done with the property empty, carrying the 48-hour guarantee, at fixed prices or £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping. Same thoroughness, no inventory to answer to, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing upkeep. A weekly domestic visit runs from £22 an hour per cleaner.

For a hand-back you want the first pairing: the report, and the clean built against it. Booking a deep clean for a check-out is the polite way to lose £200.

Questions we get asked

How much does an end of tenancy clean cost in Stevenage Old Town?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425, fixed. Plenty of the houses behind the High Street are three and four beds, so Old Town quotes often land between £339 and £425 before any carpet add-on.

Do you clean the flats inside the converted coaching inns?

Yes. The inn conversions on the High Street come with beams, odd floor levels and listed detail, and we clean them by hand with products that suit old timber and soft plaster. It is slower work. The fixed price stands.

Is an Old Town clean different from a New Town clean?

In practice, yes. The New Town, built from 1946 a mile south, is mostly flat modern surfaces that clean fast. The Old Town cottages and conversions carry hearths, period floors, picture rails and older bathrooms, so there is more for the clerk to check and more for us to do.

Why does scale build so fast on Old Town taps?

Stevenage water comes from Affinity Water at roughly 320 mg/l calcium carbonate, which is classed as very hard. Limescale sets on chrome and brass quickly, and a clerk reads heavy scale as a cleaning failure rather than wear. Descaling is part of the standard clean, not an extra.

Can my landlord insist I pay for a professional clean?

No. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 stops a landlord making a professional clean a condition of the tenancy. What they can still do is deduct where the property is dirtier at check-out than the check-in report shows, which in effect sets a professional standard anyway.

Did the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change what I owe at check-out?

No. Since 1 May 2026, Section 21 is gone and tenancies run periodic with two months’ notice at any time, but the cleaning obligations are exactly what they were. The change is timing: move-outs are less predictable now, so the good slots go earlier.

Do you clean woodburners, hearths and the wall above them?

Yes, in any room that has one. Hearth soot and smoke greying photograph badly and are among the most reliably deducted items in the Old Town, so they sit inside the standard clean, not on a surcharge list.

How far ahead should I book?

For the last three days of a month, 7 to 10 days ahead. Mid-month, 3 to 5 days usually works. If your date has just moved, ring anyway and we will tell you honestly what is free.

What happens if the agent still is not satisfied?

Flag it inside 48 hours and we come back and redo the disputed items free. Past that, the deposit schemes, TDS, DPS and mydeposits, run adjudication, and our dated photo set and itemised invoice are exactly the evidence a tenant needs there.

Does the property need to be empty?

Empty is best. Furniture blocks access and muddies the check-out. One agreed piece left for the next tenant can be worked around; a half-moved house cannot.

Do you work with the letting agents on the High Street?

We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and around the Old Town that means our reports land with the desks tenants actually rent through, Putterills, Own Homes and Homes and Mortgages among them. We clean to the inventory format the agent uses.

Is carpet cleaning included in the price?

Hoovering is included. Hot-water extraction is an add-on at £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room or £115 across a whole two-bed. If your check-in report shows professionally cleaned carpets, the agent will expect the same back.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 with the postcode, the property size and the check-out date, and the price takes about three minutes. Out of hours, email [email protected] and someone rings you back first thing. A couple of phone photos of the kitchen and the hearth sharpen the quote, which helps most on the older places. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, working since 2014. If you want the tenancy rules straight from the authority, Stevenage Borough Council’s private sector housing pages cover deposits and standards. And if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway. We will do what we can.