The kettle is the first thing a Tonbridge check-out clerk picks up, tips on its side and looks into. Chalk water off the Medway crusts an element inside a few months, and a white ring nobody has descaled reads as neglect faster than almost anything else on the worktop.
We do end of tenancy cleaning across Tonbridge and the TN9 and TN10 postcodes around it, at a fixed price by bedroom count or £30 per cleaner per hour for a part property, worked to a 57-point agent-approved checklist with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind it. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated July 2026. We cover the TN9 and TN10 postcodes across Tonbridge, the market town on the Medway. That is not Tunbridge Wells, a separate town further down the line past High Brooms with its own postcodes and its own page; we work both and keep the two straight, which the post does not always manage. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Kent.
A Norman gatehouse at one end of town, a school older than the monarchy at the other
End of tenancy cleaning
from £176
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
Get your price0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
Tonbridge has a Norman castle at one end of town and a school founded in 1553 at the other, and the rental housing between them runs out in rings.
- Tonbridge Castle
- On the north bank of the Medway off the High Street. Richard Fitz Gilbert threw up the first motte and bailey here after the Conquest to hold the river crossing, and the twin-towered stone gatehouse that survives now took roughly thirty years to build, finished around 1260.
- The castle grounds
- A public park these days, open in daylight. The older rental terraces back onto the green stretch running down to the water beside it.
- Tonbridge School
- At the other end of town, founded by Andrew Judde and handed to the Skinners’ Company on his death. It has shaped the housing market here for longer than any inventory clerk has been working.
Walk out from the castle and the housing tells its own story:
- Nearest the centre and along Pembury Road: Georgian and Victorian townhouses, tall and narrow, with deep skirtings and picture rails that hide dust nobody looks for.
- Further out: the interwar semis start, the half-timbered gables along Hadlow Road and Shipbourne Road.
- Higham Wood and Cage Green: 1960s and 1970s estates of plain brick family houses, plenty of them extended with a single-storey kitchen across the back.
- The newest stock: along the riverside and in the closes on the edge of town, built to a covenant and inspected the hardest, because a newer flat is expected back close to the day it was first let.
Tonbridge School’s catchment does something specific to this last group. Families move here for the school, for the grammar streams, or simply for the run of good state primaries around Higham Wood.
That pulls a steady flow of three- and four-bed family lets rather than the studio-and-one-bed churn you would find nearer a station in a city. It is a genuinely different rental market to Tunbridge Wells, even though the two towns get confused constantly by anyone reading a postcode too fast.
Twenty-six licensed HMOs, and what that number actually tells a tenant
The number is small, and the shape of this rental market follows from it. This is not a bedsit town. It is a town of whole family houses let to households, which is exactly the property type most of this page is written for.
- The register
- Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council’s public register lists twenty-six licensed houses in multiple occupation for the whole borough, with roughly half of those sitting in Tonbridge itself.
- For comparison
- In Maidstone or Medway the count runs into the hundreds.
- Mandatory licensing
- Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council runs only the mandatory national HMO scheme, which catches a house let to five or more people from more than one household.
- Additional and selective licensing
- There is no additional HMO scheme layered on top, and the council has never brought in selective licensing, so an ordinary family let here needs no council licence at all.
- An Article 4 direction
- The council has been looking at one, which would remove a landlord’s automatic right to convert a family house into a small HMO without planning permission. In 2026 it set aside around £25,000 to bring in consultants and gather the evidence a direction needs. That is a proposal being tested against government requirements for robust evidence, not a rule in force.
None of that touches your deposit. A council licensing a property does not referee a dispute over it.
That job sits with the deposit scheme’s free adjudicator, who works from the signed check-in inventory and the check-out report and nothing else.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a Tonbridge move-out, and what stayed exactly the same
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. It changed the timing of a Tonbridge move-out and left the cleaning alone.
- Section 21
- No-fault evictions are gone.
- Existing tenancies
- Every assured shorthold tenancy still running converted to a periodic one.
- Notice
- A tenant can now give two months’ notice whenever they choose rather than waiting for a fixed term to end.
- The cleaning
- It did not move at all. A landlord still cannot charge for fair wear and tear under the deposit rules, only for cleaning that hands the property back below the standard recorded at check-in.
What the Act does change, quietly, is timing. Tonbridge tenancies already bunched around the school year and the summer, and rolling two-month notice periods loosen that pattern further rather than tightening it.
Slots near month-end were already tight here. They will not get easier to find.
The cleaning side did not move at all.
Two hundred and ninety parts per million, and why the kitchen shows it first
Tonbridge water is hard, and the kitchen is where a clerk sees it first.
- The ground
- Tonbridge sits on chalk and greensand, and the water coming out of the tap reflects it.
- The supplier
- South East Water draws it from the chalk aquifer and does not soften it.
- The hardness
- Around 290 parts per million across this stretch of Kent, well past the 200 mark where a water company’s own scale calls the supply hard.
It shows in three places, and a normal wipe will not shift any of them:
- a cloudy film across a shower screen
- a white crust on a kettle element
- a dull haze on chrome taps
Not neglect. Just the water.
A clerk reads that kind of build-up as months of neglect rather than a fortnight of a busy household skipping the wiping down, which is usually closer to the truth.
It hits the kitchen hardest, because the tap, the kettle and the splashback behind the hob sit together and form one general impression of the room in about ten seconds of looking.
We work a proper descaler into the fitting and rinse it off rather than spraying and moving on, so the room reads as kept up rather than let go.
The same water runs through the whole house, so the bathroom carries the same problem on the shower screen, the taps and the grout lines. Scale is the single most underestimated line item in a Tonbridge check-out.
The 57 checks, and the three rooms where a Tonbridge deposit actually goes
Every booking here runs to the same 57-point agent-approved checklist, tuned over a decade of check-outs to what letting agents in this town actually flag. Three rooms carry most of the weight.
The kitchen
The oven is cleaned right through, not wiped: racks soaked and the door glass split where the design allows to get the film out from between the panes. Then the rest of the room:
- Hob rings and control knobs off and washed
- Extractor hood degreased inside and out, filter soaked or swapped
- Every cupboard, inside and out, including the deep run of units common in the older High Street kitchens
- Fridge, freezer and washing machine pulled out so the gaps behind and under them are done, then put back
- Sink, taps and drainer descaled
- Tiles and grout scrubbed
- Floor lifted where it needs it, hoovered and mopped
The bathroom
Shower screen, tiles and taps are descaled first, because a family bathroom used daily by a household with children carries the heaviest build-up of anything in the house. Then:
- Toilet cleaned inside, under the rim, base, cistern and hinges
- Extractor vent wiped and the sealant brought back to a usable state
- Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they lift off the wall
The carpets, wherever the house is let carpeted
Most of the family stock across Higham Wood and Cage Green is let carpeted throughout, and plenty of households here keep a dog or a cat. So these get worked over on their own pass:
- the edges
- the doorways
- the patches where furniture stood
A carpet that looks fine to the people living on it reads very differently to a clerk down on their knees with a check-in photo held next to it.
- End of tenancy clean
- The hand-back clean, judged against the check-in inventory, with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind it, at a fixed price by bedroom count (£30 per cleaner per hour for a part property).
- Deep clean
- A one-off reset for a home you are staying in, with no inventory report to satisfy, from £206: two cleaners for at least three hours, kit included.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing maintenance on a home that is already lived in, from £23 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.
What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until the report lands
Prices are fixed by property size, from £176 for a studio to £445 for a four-bed family let.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (riverside developments) | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £176 |
| 1-bed flat | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £227 |
| 2-bed terrace or interwar semi | 5-6 hours, 2 cleaners | From £263 |
| 3-bed house, Higham Wood or Cage Green | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £359 |
| 4-bed house, school-catchment family let | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £445 |
Hourly work, for a part job or an unusual property, is £30 per cleaner.
- Carpet shampoo
- The add-on most Tonbridge tenants ask for, given how much of the stock is let carpeted: £29 a bedroom, £36 a living room, or £94 for two bedrooms and a living room.
- Oven, added to the end of tenancy clean
- £31 (£62 for a double or a 90cm range)
- Oven, booked on its own
- £97 for a single oven, £130 for a double and £163 for a 90cm range
- Larger houses
- Larger four-bed houses and the older villas with an extra reception room are quoted after a short walk-through rather than guessed at, because the scope genuinely changes with the extra room.
Set any of those figures against a deposit sitting near £1,500 for a Higham Wood three-bed and the maths is not really a decision.
Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags anything on the 57-point list within 48 hours, we go back and put it right at no charge.
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across the county, and that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
Booking around a Charing Cross commute, and the weeks that fill first
A lot of our Tonbridge clients commute, so keys and access come first. The town runs north to south along the Medway, and most of our jobs are a short run off the High Street or up towards Higham Wood and Cage Green.
The fast Southeastern service reaches Charing Cross in around forty minutes at its quickest, so tenants are often at their desk in London, or already moved on, by the time we arrive. Keys and access matter more here than anyone being in.
Book early if your move falls across July and August, or near the end of any month. That is when the family lets tied to the school year turn over, the diary fills, and weekend slots go first.
Give us the check-out date as soon as you have it and we hold the slot rather than promise one on the day.
Booking itself is short:
- Send us the property size, whether the carpets need shampoo, and the check-out date, by phone or by office@monstercleaning.com.
- We give you a fixed price for flats and houses up to four beds, or a quick walk-through for anything bigger.
- Two cleaners turn up with the kit and work the 57-point list.
- If the clerk flags anything inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Tonbridge?
£176 for a studio, £227 for a one-bed, £263 for a two-bed, £359 for a three-bed and £445 for a four-bed. A part property or an unusual layout is £30 per cleaner per hour. Larger houses and period villas are quoted after a short walk-through.
Is Tonbridge the same as Tunbridge Wells?
No. Tonbridge is the older market town on the Medway, north of Tunbridge Wells, with its own TN9 and TN10 postcodes and its own page on this site. We work both towns and keep the coverage and the pricing separate.
Do I need an HMO or selective licence to rent in Tonbridge?
Most tenants do not. Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council runs only the mandatory HMO scheme, for a house let to five or more people from more than one household. There is no selective licensing scheme, and an Article 4 direction on HMO conversions is being investigated but is not yet in force.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change what I need to clean?
No. From 1 May 2026 Section 21 evictions ended and existing tenancies became periodic, so tenants can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning standard you are held to at check-out did not change; only the timing of move-outs did.
Is the oven included in the end of tenancy price?
It is not. A full oven clean is an add-on to any end of tenancy booking at £31 for a single oven and £62 for a double or a 90cm range; booked on its own it is £97, £130 and £163.
Can you shift limescale from taps and shower screens?
Yes. Tonbridge sits on a chalk aquifer and South East Water supplies it hard, around 290 parts per million, so scale on glass, taps and kettles is normal here. We work a proper descaler into the fitting rather than a quick spray.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If your inventory clerk flags anything on our 57-point checklist within 48 hours of the clean, we return and put it right at no extra charge. It covers the cleaning standard, not damage or wear that already existed.
Do you guarantee I get my deposit back?
No honest cleaner can. The adjudicator weighs the whole inventory, not the cleaning alone. What we guarantee is the clean itself, plus a dated invoice you can put in front of the deposit scheme if a dispute happens.
Can you get pet hair and stains out of carpets?
Usually, yes. A lot of the family stock here is let carpeted and plenty of households keep a dog or cat, so this comes up constantly. Carpet shampoo is £29 a bedroom and £36 a living room, and we will tell you honestly at the quote whether a mark will lift fully or only improve.
Do you cover Higham Wood and Cage Green as well as the town centre?
Yes. We cover the High Street and town centre, Higham Wood, Cage Green, the riverside developments and the villages just outside the town, including Hildenborough and Hadlow.
How long does a Tonbridge clean take?
A one or two-bed flat is usually a half day for two cleaners. A three-bed Higham Wood or Cage Green house often takes most of a day, depending on the carpets and the state of the oven.
Do I need to be at the property?
No. Most of our Tonbridge clients commute and leave keys with the letting agent or in a key safe. Tell us the access plan when you book and we work around it.
Should the property be empty before you clean?
Ideally yes. An empty property lets us reach every surface and every carpet edge a clerk checks. If furniture is staying we work around it, but flag that when you book.
How do I book a Tonbridge clean?
Call 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com with the property size, the check-out date and whether the carpets need shampoo. We confirm a price and a slot, usually the same day.
Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, property size, check-out date, any known problem areas, that is the lot. If your Tonbridge check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will tell you honestly what we can fit in.