A decade of move-out data

Cleaning is the most common cause of deposit deductions in England and Wales, and has been for five years running on the deposit schemes’ own adjudication figures. Yet almost everything written about end of tenancy cleaning quotes a price range and stops there. So we went through a decade of our own London job records and pulled out the parts a tenant, a landlord or an agent would actually find useful: when people move, how long a clean really takes, how much the postcode changes the bill, and how big the gap usually is when someone books a cheaper quote.

End of tenancy cleaning is the full clean of a rented property at the end of a tenancy, priced on the size of the property rather than by the hour, and carried out so the place matches the condition recorded in the check-in inventory.

Five findings

• Friday

  is London’s move-out day. Friday runs about 22% above an average day, and roughly twice as busy as a Sunday.

• 44%

  of end of tenancy cleans also need the carpets doing. Carpets are where deposit arguments usually start.

• 6 hours

  of cleaner time is the middle of the range for a one-off or deep clean. Not three, which is what most people budget for.

• 5 in 6

  of the people who told us they booked a cheaper quote said it was at least 20% cheaper. In this market the gap is rarely small.

• ±13%

  either side of the London average covers every postcode area we can report. Postcode is almost never why one quote beats another.

When London moves out

Tenancies do not end evenly through the year. Pooling every job date across the decade and setting the average month to 100, July is the peak and December the floor. July runs about half again as busy as December.

Index: the average month = 100. Higher means more tenancies ending in that month.

The weekly pattern is sharper than the yearly one, and more useful if you are booking. Friday is the busiest day by a clear margin, because that is when most check-outs and inventory appointments land. Sunday is the quietest by a distance.

Index: the average day = 100. If your check-out is on a Friday, book earlier than you think you need to; that is the day every agent in London wants a clean finished.

How long does an end of tenancy clean take?

The honest answer is longer than most people expect, and it is measured in cleaner-hours rather than hours on the clock. A team of two working four hours is eight cleaner-hours. Here is how a decade of one-off and deep cleans splits by the total cleaner time booked.

Shares of all one-off and deep cleans in the period. The middle of the range is about 6 cleaner-hours, and close to three in ten jobs need eight or more.

Two things follow from that. A single cleaner for three hours covers under a third of jobs, so it is a tidy-up rather than a full clean in most flats. And if you are pricing a check-out clean against a deposit, the labour is the bill; a low quote almost always means fewer hours rather than a better rate.

Do you need the carpets cleaned as well?

About 44 in every 100 end of tenancy cleans we take on also include professional carpet cleaning. That is worth knowing before you accept a quote, for two reasons. It is the most common thing missing from a cheap quote, and soft furnishings and carpets are the part of a property a check-out report is most likely to flag.

A clause telling you to have the carpets professionally cleaned is not enforceable in England, under the Tenant Fees Act 2019. If you do pay for one, keep the receipt anyway: evidence is what settles deposit adjudications, rather than opinion about how clean something looked.

Does your postcode change the price?

Published cost guides put a London end of tenancy clean somewhere between about £170 and £500, and our own jobs sit inside that range. What a range that wide cannot tell you is where the spread actually comes from. Setting the London average to 100, every area with enough jobs behind it to report lands within about 13% either side. So the postcode is almost never the reason one quote comes in higher than another.

Index: the London average end of tenancy price = 100. Areas without enough jobs behind them to report are left out rather than estimated.

The reason is that end of tenancy cleaning is priced on the size of the property, not on the address. A two-bed flat is a two-bed flat whether it is in Hackney or Wimbledon, and it takes the same hours to clean. Where areas do differ, it is mostly the mix of homes: Kingston sits at the top because more of the work there is houses rather than flats, and Redhill sits at the bottom for the opposite reason.

So budget from the property rather than from the address: your bedrooms, your bathrooms and the state of the place, then check whether carpets are in or out of the quote. Our cleaning cost calculator works exactly that way.

When people book somewhere cheaper, how much cheaper?

Not every enquiry turns into a booking, and we record why. The reasons split like this.

Shares of the enquiries that did not become bookings. Reasons too small to report on their own sit inside Other.

The price group is the interesting one, because of how it splits. Take everyone who told us they had booked a cheaper quote elsewhere. Roughly 83 in every 100 of them, five in six, said the cheaper quote was at least 20% cheaper. Only the remainder were within about 10%.

That is worth sitting with if you are holding two quotes. A 10% difference is a negotiation. A 25% difference is usually a different job. The labour has to come from somewhere, and on a clean where the middle of the range is 6 cleaner-hours, the usual place it comes from is hours. After that it is the carpets left out of the quote, no insurance, or no re-clean if the check-out goes badly.

So the useful question is not which quote is lowest. It is what each quote actually contains: how many hours, whether carpets and the oven are in or out, whether they are insured, and what happens if the landlord is not happy. A quote that is a quarter cheaper is answering a different question from the one you asked.

For what it is worth, we are not the cheapest quote most people get, and we do not try to be.

How we did this

The figures come from our own job records for London and the surrounding commuter areas, part of the 40,000-plus properties we have cleaned since 2014. Job dates run from January 2016 to June 2026, pooled across the whole period rather than split year by year.

Everything is expressed as an index or a share. The monthly and weekday figures are set against the average for that dimension, and the price index against the London average. Postcode areas without enough jobs behind them to be meaningful are left out rather than estimated or merged. Read the shape of the findings rather than the decimal places.

Two limits worth stating. These are our jobs, not the whole market, so the price index reflects how we price rather than every cleaner in London. And the sample is weighted towards London and the south east, so we would not stretch the seasonal pattern to Manchester or Glasgow without saying so.

Use these figures

You are welcome to quote or reproduce anything on this page, including the charts, for editorial or research use. A link back is all we ask. If you want the same breakdown cut a different way, or a figure that is not here, ask us and we will see what we can pull together.