The borough line runs down Stroud Green Road
End of tenancy cleaning in Stroud Green costs from £156 for a studio up to £425 for a four-bed, charged on the size of the flat rather than the hour, and it comes with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee if the inventory clerk challenges the work. That is the short answer. The longer answer starts with a quirk that catches out half the people who move here.
Most of Stroud Green sits in the London Borough of Haringey. The whole south-west side of Stroud Green Road, though, belongs to Islington, because the road itself traces an old parish boundary between Hornsey and Islington that nobody ever moved. So two near-identical terraces can face each other across the same street and answer to two different councils. There are even two separate conservation areas: a large one in Haringey east of the road, a small one in Islington to the west.
Why does a cleaning firm care about a parish line from the 1400s? Because it decides which licensing rules your landlord falls under, and that shapes how hard the check-out inspection bites. We will get to that. First, the map of what this page covers.
Which council licenses the flat you’re leaving
This is the part that genuinely differs from a flat a mile away. Stroud Green is split, so the licensing answer depends on which side of the road your front door is on.
Take the Haringey side first, east of Stroud Green Road. Haringey runs a selective licensing scheme that started on 17 November 2022 and runs to November 2027, but it only covers the eastern, mostly Tottenham wards: Harringay, Seven Sisters, South Tottenham, St Ann’s, Tottenham Hale, West Green and the rest. Stroud Green ward is not on that list. So a single household renting a whole flat on the Haringey side does not need a selective licence. What does apply is Haringey’s additional licensing scheme for houses in multiple occupation, which began on 17 June 2024 and covers every ward in the borough. If three or more unrelated people share your flat and share a kitchen or bathroom, the landlord needs an HMO licence. You can check the current position on Haringey’s selective licensing page.
Now cross to the Islington side, the south-west pavement. Islington runs selective licensing in the Finsbury Park, Hillrise and Tollington wards, in force since 20 May 2024, and the Stroud Green strip on the Islington side falls inside that. Here a landlord needs a selective licence even for a single family in a self-contained flat. Islington also runs a borough-wide additional HMO scheme, renewed from February 2026. The detail sits on Islington’s property licensing page.
Two near-identical terraces can face each other across the same street and answer to two different councils.
The upshot for a tenant is simple, even if the rules are not. A licensed property comes with conditions the landlord must keep, and a licensed landlord tends to commission a proper check-in inventory with photographs, because their own paperwork depends on it. That inventory is the document your deposit is judged against. A thorough inventory cuts both ways: it protects you from being blamed for old damage, and it pins you to the cleaning standard the flat was let at. Either way the cleaning bar at the end is the bar set at the start.
There is a second effect worth knowing. Licensing has pushed a lot of the local rental stock through agents rather than informal lettings, because a landlord juggling Islington or Haringey licence conditions usually wants a managing agent to keep them compliant. Agent-managed flats get clerked checkouts, and clerked checkouts are exactly where a half-done clean turns into a line on a deductions schedule. The flats most likely to be let on a handshake, with a casual end-of-tenancy look round, are getting rarer here year on year.
It also means the inventory you signed is probably more detailed than the one your friend signed five years ago. Modern check-in reports run to dozens of pages, room by room, with close-up photos of oven interiors, grout lines, window reveals and the tops of skirting boards. We have read enough of them to know what gets singled out. A clerk does not write “kitchen clean”; they write “oven interior: light baked-on residue to base and rear”, and that sentence is what you are cleaning against.
If you are not sure which side you are on, look at where you pay your council tax. It will say Haringey or Islington, and that settles it. The boundary is not signposted on the street, so plenty of long-term residents only find out which borough they are in when a parking permit or a licence renewal lands.
Where N4 deposits actually go
Your deposit is not your landlord’s money. Within 30 days of taking it, they must protect it in one of the three government-backed schemes and give you the prescribed information about where it sits. The rule is set out plainly on the government’s tenancy deposit protection guidance. If they never protected it, cleaning deductions become the least of their worries.
At the end, once you and the landlord agree a figure, the deposit must come back within 10 days. The sticking point is the word agree. When you disagree about a deduction, the disputed slice stays locked in the scheme until the matter is settled, and you can use the scheme’s free dispute resolution service instead of going to court. The way that works is described on the government’s deposit disputes page.
Here is the thing about those disputes. An adjudicator decides on evidence, and the strongest evidence is almost always the check-in inventory set against the check-out report. If the inventory says the oven was clean on day one and the check-out photo shows baked-on grease, the deduction usually stands. If you can show the flat was handed back to the same standard, the money is yours. Cleaning is the one variable in that whole process you fully control.
The reforms under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change a lot about how tenancies end, including the move to periodic tenancies, but they do not change the basic deal on deposits. You still hand the flat back clean, and the inventory is still the yardstick. We built the 57-point checklist around exactly the lines a clerk ticks, which is why our work clears the first inspection 97 times out of 100.
What the inventory clerk checks at check-out
It helps to picture the inspection before you book the clean. A check-out clerk walks the flat with the check-in report open, room by room, and grades each item against how it was logged on day one. They are not judging whether the place looks tidy. They are judging whether it has been returned to the recorded condition, fair wear and tear aside.
They carry a torch, and they use it. Light raked across a worktop shows smears a casual glance misses. They open the oven and photograph the base and the inside of the glass. They run a finger along the top edge of a door and the back of a tap. They pull the fridge salad drawer out. They check the extractor fan in the bathroom and the seal at the bottom of the shower screen. In a conversion flat they look at the window reveals and the runners, because that is where dust collects in an old terrace.
Fair wear and tear is the phrase that decides the close calls. A landlord cannot charge you to repaint a wall that has simply aged through a two-year tenancy, and they cannot bill you for a carpet that is worn from ordinary use. They can charge for dirt, because dirt is not wear. A scuffed skirting board is wear; a skirting board furred with grey dust is a cleaning issue, and the clerk grades it as one. Knowing where that line sits is half of getting a deposit back whole.
The other half is documentation. We do not issue a formal inventory, that is the clerk’s job, but a professional clean leaves a clear before-and-after, and many tenants photograph the finished flat themselves on the day. If a deduction is later disputed, those photos and the booking record sit alongside the scheme’s evidence. Adjudicators weigh a documented professional clean heavily, because it answers the one question they always ask: was the flat returned to the standard it was let at?
None of this is meant to alarm you. Most check-outs go fine. But the clerk is methodical, so the clean has to be methodical too, and that is the whole reason we work to a fixed list rather than cleaning by feel.
Cleaning a terrace that’s been carved into flats
Stroud Green is largely late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces, and a lot of them were long ago divided into flats. The conservation area appraisal calls this some of Haringey’s most varied Victorian housing in one place: artisans’ cottages, Gothic-revival and Italianate terraces, Queen Anne semis up around Stapleton Hall Road. Mixed in are post-war council blocks and houses, put up to replace terraces that took bomb damage. Each type cleans differently.
The converted-flat jobs are the bulk of our N4 work, and they carry their own snags. Original sash windows with deep glazing bars and painted-over cords. Picture rails and ceiling roses that hold dust you cannot see from standing height. Cast-iron or tiled fireplaces, often decorative now, that shed soot grit onto a mantel. Stripped or limed floorboards with gaps that swallow crumbs and grey fluff. None of that shows up in a quick wipe-round, and all of it shows up in a clerk’s torchlight.
Then there is the kitchen. A flat conversion usually means a kitchen squeezed into a back addition or a former bedroom, with a cooker jammed against a wall and a splashback that has been quietly collecting grease for a tenancy or two. Ovens are where most cleaning deductions are won or lost, so we strip the door, take out the glass and the runners, and degrease the cavity by hand. Extractor filters, hob trim, the gap the cooker slides into: all of it.
Bathrooms in these flats are often small and windowless, which means extractor fans and tiles that breed black mould in the grout. We clear limescale off the taps and showerhead, scrub the grout lines, and treat any sealant mould rather than smearing over it. A clerk checks behind the taps and along the bottom of the screen. We clean there because that is where they look.
One honest note about the area. Parking on the side streets off Stroud Green Road is permit-controlled and tight, and a van does not always land outside the door. It does not change the price or the clean. We just allow for the walk with the kit.
Sharers, HMOs and who pays for the clean
Stroud Green runs on sharers. The terraces split into flats, the proximity to Finsbury Park station, and the price gap against Highbury and Crouch End make it a classic landing spot for young professionals two or three to a flat. Rooms turn over often, sometimes mid-tenancy, and a household at check-out is rarely the household that signed at check-in.
That creates a specific headache the day the keys go back. Whose deposit covers the cleaning? In a joint tenancy the liability is shared, so one flatmate’s grimy oven becomes everyone’s deduction. We get a fair number of calls from a sharer who has chased the others, given up, and just wants the flat cleaned properly so the whole group passes. A single professional clean against the inventory is usually cheaper per head than the deductions three people would otherwise split.
If the flat is a licensed HMO, there is an extra wrinkle. The landlord’s licence carries conditions on the condition of communal areas, and an HMO check-out can be stricter about shared kitchens and bathrooms because those are the rooms the licence cares about most. A kitchen used by four people for two years takes a proper degrease, not a wipe. We treat the communal rooms in an HMO as the centre of the job, because that is where an HMO inspection lands hardest.
Room-only tenants ask whether they can book a clean for just their room. Yes, on the hourly rate, though most check-outs are judged on the whole flat, so it is worth checking the tenancy before you split the job up. We will tell you honestly whether a room clean alone protects you or whether the communal areas will sink the deposit anyway.
The churn has one upside for booking. Because flats here turn over so often, agents around Finsbury Park book end of tenancy cleans constantly, and we are in N4 most weeks. A short-notice slot is more often possible here than in a quieter, slower-moving area.
What the 57-point clean covers
An end of tenancy clean is not a tidy-up. It is a deep clean against a checklist, top to bottom, the kind of job a flat gets maybe twice in its life. We bring our own supplies and equipment, and we stay until every line is done.
Across the flat that means dusting and wiping all surfaces, doors and frames, skirting boards, switches and sockets; clearing cobwebs; cleaning inside and out of every cupboard and wardrobe; descaling and polishing taps; degreasing the kitchen end to end; scrubbing and sanitising the bathroom; and cleaning the inside of the windows along with sills and any reachable frames. Carpets get hoovered through. Hard floors get washed.
The checklist exists because letting agents asked for it. When you clean for 300+ letting agents, you learn the exact lines their clerks tick, and you build the list to match. There is no point cleaning to your own idea of clean if the inspection runs to someone else’s.
Two practical conditions, because they affect the guarantee. The flat needs electricity and running hot water for us to work and to stand behind the result. And it needs to be empty of your belongings, with the fridge defrosted, before we arrive, so we can reach every surface the inventory mentions. Clear the flat, and we clear the checklist.
What it costs in Stroud Green
We price on the size of the flat, not by the hour, so the figure you are quoted is the figure you pay and the team stays until the job is finished. No clock-watching.
- Studio flat: £156
- One-bed: £207
- Two-bed: £243
- Three-bed: £339
- Four-bed: £425
Those are the full end of tenancy rates, nothing stripped out to make the headline look cheaper. If you would rather pay for a set number of hours, for instance a part-clean where you are doing some of it yourself, that runs at £30 per cleaner per hour. For most outgoing tenants the fixed property price is the safer bet, because it ties the cost to the result the inventory demands rather than to how long the work happens to take.
It is worth weighing that figure against what is at stake. A typical Stroud Green deposit is five weeks’ rent, often well over a thousand pounds, and a single cleaning deduction can run to a few hundred on its own once an oven, carpets and a general clean are itemised. Spending £243 to protect a two-bed deposit, or £207 on a one-bed, is the cheap end of the sum. The flats where tenants try to save the fee and clean it themselves are the flats we most often get called back to after a failed inspection, by which point there is a re-clean to arrange and a check-out to rebook, and the timing is tighter than anyone wants.
Add-on services sit on top. A clean covers the inside of the flat; carpets that need hot-water extraction, a heavily used oven, sofas, or the outside of the windows are separate jobs, and we will talk through what your check-out actually needs before you commit to any of them.
The Parkland Walk and the grime it brings in
The Parkland Walk starts at the back of Finsbury Park and runs along an old railway line up towards Highgate and Alexandra Palace, the longest local nature reserve in London. The trains stopped in 1954; the path opened in 1984; the green man, the Spriggan sculpture by Marilyn Collins, has watched over the old Crouch End platform alcove since 1993. It is one of the best things about living here.
It is also a steady source of the dirt that ends up in your flat. A walk that doubles as a wildlife corridor means tree pollen in spring, leaf mulch in autumn, and a fine path dust that drifts in through open sash windows all summer. Flats backing onto the cutting near Stapleton Hall Road and Mount View Road get the most of it. Ground-floor and garden flats track it in on shoes and paws.
None of that is a problem you can sweep away the week before you leave. It builds up on window frames, in the runners, along skirting boards, on the tops of doors. The end of tenancy clean is where it all comes off, and it is one more reason the inside-window and frame detail matters more in N4 than an inventory clerk a few streets south might bother with.
Crouch Hill station sits at the top of the hill on the Suffragette line, the renamed Gospel Oak to Barking route, and a lot of our Stroud Green jobs are reachable from there or from the buses up Stroud Green Road. Handy, given the parking.
Add-ons most Stroud Green tenants book
Four extras come up again and again at check-out, usually because the inventory singles them out by name. Here is what each one is and when it is worth booking.
Carpet cleaning. If the inventory logged the carpets as professionally cleaned at check-in, you are expected to return them the same way, and a domestic vacuum will not satisfy a clerk. We use hot-water extraction, which lifts ground-in dirt and the path dust the Parkland Walk brings in. Carpets run at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat. See the full detail on our carpet cleaning service.
Oven cleaning. This is the single most common deduction line in N4, because cooker cavities in these small conversion kitchens get little attention during a tenancy. A full strip-down clean is £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double, and £114 for a range cooker. The oven cleaning service page lists what is included.
Upholstery cleaning. Sofas and fabric chairs that came with a furnished let are inventory items too, and they hold dust, marks and odours. We extraction-clean them on the same visit so everything is logged as done together.
Exterior window cleaning. The clean covers the inside of the glass. If the check-out wants the outside done as well, on a terrace upper floor that needs reach poles or access, we cover that separately.
You do not have to decide on the phone. We would rather match the add-ons to your actual inventory than sell you a job you do not need.
How booking works
Booking is quick. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with three things: your postcode, the number of bedrooms, and your move-out date. We work seven days a week, so a weekend or a last-day-of-the-tenancy slot is usually doable if you give us a little notice.
Tell us about anything unusual at the same time. Is it a top-floor conversion with no lift? Carpets logged as professionally cleaned at check-in? A range cooker rather than a slot-in oven? The more we know, the tighter the quote and the smoother the day.
On the day, the team arrives with all supplies and works through the 57-point list. If you can be there for the handover, useful; if you have already moved out and left keys with the agent, that works too, as long as the power and hot water are on. After we finish, the 48-hour guarantee runs from the clean: if the clerk or agent flags anything on our list, we return and put it right at no cost.
For a sense of how the wider area joins up, this page sits under our Haringey end of tenancy hub, and we cover the neighbours too, including end of tenancy cleaning in Finsbury Park and Crouch End.
Questions Stroud Green tenants ask
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos made when you moved in, recording the condition and cleanliness of the flat. Your check-out is judged against it.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme requiring a licence for any privately rented home in a designated ward, whatever the number of tenants. It applies on the Islington side of Stroud Green Road, not on the Haringey side.
- Additional HMO licensing
- A licence a landlord needs when three or more unrelated people share a flat and share facilities. Both Haringey and Islington run such schemes covering Stroud Green.
- 48-hour re-clean
- If an inventory clerk or agent challenges our work within 48 hours of the clean, we return and redo the flagged items free.
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Stroud Green?
It is priced by flat size, not by the hour: £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 quoted figure is the figure you pay, and the team stays until the checklist is complete.
Does the borough boundary on Stroud Green Road affect my clean?
Not the clean itself, which is the same high standard either side. It affects your landlord’s licensing and how detailed your inventory is likely to be. Islington selective licensing covers the south-west side of the road, while the Haringey side only needs a licence if the flat is an HMO.
How do I know if I’m in Haringey or Islington?
Check your council tax bill. The whole south-west side of Stroud Green Road is Islington; most of the rest of Stroud Green, to the east and north, is Haringey. The split follows an old parish boundary that runs along the road.
Do I need an end of tenancy clean to get my deposit back?
You are not legally required to use a professional cleaner, but you are required to return the flat as clean as it was at check-in. Cleaning is the deduction most adjudicators uphold, so a documented professional clean is the most reliable way to protect the money.
What is your first-time pass rate?
97% of our end of tenancy cleans pass the first inspection. For the small share that get a query, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee covers a free return visit to fix whatever was flagged.
Is the price really fixed, or charged by the hour?
Fixed, based on the number of bedrooms. We work by property size so the team can stay as long as the flat needs without the cost climbing. An hourly option at £30 per cleaner exists if you only want a part-clean.
What does the 57-point checklist include?
Every surface a clerk inspects: dusting and wiping throughout, skirting boards, doors and frames, switches, inside and outside of cupboards, descaled taps, a degreased kitchen, a sanitised bathroom, hoovered carpets, washed hard floors, and the inside of the windows with sills and frames.
Do you clean the oven as part of it?
A standard end of tenancy clean covers cleaning the oven, but a heavily used or neglected oven is often booked as a dedicated strip-down: £77 single, £110 double, £114 range. Ovens are the most common deduction line, so it is worth getting right.
Can you clean carpets and upholstery at the same time?
Yes. We bring hot-water extraction equipment and do carpets and upholstery on the same visit. Carpets are £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed; upholstery is quoted by the piece.
Do you clean flats backing onto the Parkland Walk?
Often. Those flats collect tree pollen, leaf mulch and path dust through the windows, which settles on frames, runners and skirting boards. The end of tenancy clean is built to remove exactly that build-up.
How quickly can you come, and do you work weekends?
We clean seven days a week and can usually fit a weekend or end-of-tenancy slot with a little notice. Ring 0333 555 2076 with your postcode, bedroom count and move-out date.
What do you need from me before the clean?
The flat empty of your belongings, the fridge defrosted, and electricity and running hot water on. Those let us reach every surface the inventory lists and let us stand behind the 48-hour guarantee.
Do you cover the rest of the area around Stroud Green?
Yes. We work right across the borough through our Haringey hub, and we clean neighbouring areas including Finsbury Park and Crouch End. Tell us your postcode and we will confirm.