Upholstery cleaning in London, Liverpool & Manchester

Upholstery cleaning starts at £35 for a mattress or a curtain drop, £57 for a two-seater sofa and £83 for a three-seater, with armchairs from £33. Most fabrics are cleaned by hot-water extraction; leather is hand-cleaned and conditioned, and pieces are usually dry within a few hours. That is the short answer; the detail is below.

Upholstery cleaning is what we do to sofas, armchairs, dining chairs, headboards, curtains and mattresses. Anything soft, absorbent, and attached to your furniture rather than your floor. The method is hot-water extraction for most things, dry compound for the bits that cannot take moisture, and a different bit of chemistry for every fibre we are likely to meet. We have done this across London, Liverpool and Manchester since 2014. Sofas from £57, mattresses from £35, curtains per drop from £35. Ring 0333 555 2076 and we will quote on the phone after a couple of quick questions about what you have and what has happened to it. The rest of this page is the detail.

Last updated April 2026. Covering Greater London (all boroughs, Zones 1 to 6 and most of the M25 catchment), Greater Liverpool and Greater Manchester.

What people do not realise about their sofa

Your sofa is where you, your partner, the dog, the kids, your mates and every takeaway of the last five years have spent serious time. It is also, because of how fabric weave works, one of the most absorbent things in the house. A typical three-seater holds several kilos of accumulated everything: skin cells, hair (yours and the dog’s), food particles, drink, sweat salts, household dust, pollen, and whatever else bodies leave behind doing what bodies do. You are not meant to think about it. It explains why a sofa that looked fine when you bought it starts to feel tired after eighteen months and you cannot quite work out why. The sofa is not dirty exactly. It is saturated.

The vacuuming-on-Sundays approach gets the top two or three millimetres. Everything else is down in the fibre, where a vacuum cannot reach it, bound in by the weave and by its own accumulated weight. What fixes that is water hot enough to dissolve the soil and suction strong enough to pull the dissolved soil straight back out. That is the whole principle of what we do. Not glamorous, but genuinely transformative. Customers message us all the time along the lines of “I cannot believe that is the same sofa”, and the honest answer is that it is not, really. It is the sofa you actually bought, before life started soaking into it.

What is included

Every upholstery booking gets the same steps, whatever the piece:

• Pre-inspection. We identify the fabric, check the care label if there is one (the tag usually reads W, S, WS or X, which tells us what can go near the piece and what must not), and flag any obvious issues such as dye-bleed risk, previous cleaning damage, or a weak frame. Some sofas from certain brands have notoriously unstable dyes. We know which ones, and we test before we commit.
• Pre-vacuum with a commercial upholstery attachment. Same logic as carpet cleaning: dry soil has to come out dry, or it turns to mud the moment water hits it and you get tide marks.
• Pre-spray matched to the fibre. Enzyme on biological mess (pets, food, bodily), alkaline on general soiling where the fabric can take it, neutral on anything delicate, solvent-based on oil and grease spots. Around ten minutes of dwell time on most pieces.
• Hot-water extraction with an upholstery wand. It is smaller and gentler than the carpet wand, lower pressure, controlled moisture. Two passes on a moderately dirty piece, three on a problem area. We do not saturate. The single biggest mistake unskilled cleaners make is treating upholstery like a carpet, soaking the fabric, then leaving the foam backing to dry for three days and go mouldy.
• Spot-treatment on specific stains that did not lift in the general pass.
• Grooming and setting. Pile brushed in direction, cushions turned, any removable covers dealt with in place where we can.
• Airflow. Fans on anything thick or slow-drying. Most sofas are usable again within four hours. Some take longer.

Sofas and armchairs

This is the bulk of what we do. Pricing is by seat: a two-seater, a three-seater, a corner sofa, a recliner, an armchair. We lift every cushion, clean the sides nobody sees, get under the skirt where the biscuits and remote controls have been gathering, and deal with the arm rests. The arms are the single dirtiest part of any sofa in any home, because of skin contact and hand oils, and they are the part most often missed by anyone cleaning it themselves.

Fabrics we handle

• Cotton, cotton blends, polyester, nylon, acrylic, microfibre. The bread and butter, all straightforward with extraction.
• Wool and wool-blend upholstery. Neutral chemistry, lower moisture, treated like a wool carpet.
• Linen. Delicate and prone to watermarking if done wrong, but doable with the right technique.
• Chenille. The pile matters, so we groom these carefully.
• Velvet and velveteen. Usually cleanable, but dye stability varies, so we always test first.
• Leather. A different process entirely, covered below.

What we will think twice about

• Anything labelled X on the care tag. That means no water, no solvent, professional dry only, and realistically a vacuum-only piece. We will be honest if we cannot do it properly.
• Very old antique pieces with original horsehair or hessian construction. Cleaning can destabilise the structure, so we refer these to specialist upholstery restorers.
• Certain budget-range sofas from particular chain retailers where the dye is notoriously unstable. We know which ones, and we will tell you.

Leather

Leather is a completely different job. Extraction ruins it: water swells the pores, strips the top coat, and leaves a stiff, patchy result that no amount of conditioning fully fixes. What leather actually needs is a gentle pH-neutral cleaner applied by hand, agitation with a soft brush, clean cloth recovery, then a conditioner to put back the oils the cleaning pulls out.

We clean:

• Protected or finished leather, the common kind on most modern sofas. Clean and condition.
• Semi-aniline. More delicate, so careful product choice.
• Nubuck and suede. Very specific kit and chemistry, and honestly we only do these on pieces that are genuinely dirty rather than for general maintenance. Nubuck does not forgive mistakes.

Leather cleaning from £98 for an armchair, £169 for a three-seater, £234 for a corner piece. Conditioning included.

Dining chairs

Dining chairs are the most underrated upholstery job in most homes. They get sat on for an hour a day, have food dropped on them, soak up spilt wine and sauces, and nobody ever cleans them. Six to eight chairs around a dining table add up to a full sofa’s worth of fabric. We do these by the chair, from £13 a seat depending on fabric and size, and they come out dramatically improved. Often it is the difference between a tired dining room and one that looks properly looked after.

Mattresses

The facts on mattresses are grim enough that most people would rather not know, but briefly: every mattress grows a dust-mite population within a few months of use, and it keeps growing. This is no reflection on your housekeeping. It is simply what warm, humid, skin-adjacent environments do. Dust-mite waste is the primary trigger for one of the most common allergies in the UK, and regular mattress cleaning keeps the population manageable.

What we do:

• UV-assisted vacuum. The light kills a good proportion of mites during the vacuum pass.
• Enzyme pre-treatment on biological stains: sweat, urine incidents (babies, pet accidents, rough nights), body oils.
• Low-moisture hot-water extraction. A mattress must not be saturated. Drying a wet mattress right through is almost impossible, and you end up with mildew inside the foam.
• Sanitising treatment, dwell, extraction.
• Deodorise and finish.

Mattress cleaning from £35 for a single or double, £104 king, £124 super king. Worth doing annually if you are allergy-prone, every two years otherwise. It is particularly worth doing after any significant event involving a mattress: a newborn in the bedroom, pet incidents, illness, a long stretch bed-bound, or after buying a second-hand mattress (please clean a second-hand mattress).

Curtains

Curtains collect more airborne dust than almost anything else in the average home, because they hang in the draught from the windows and the rising heat from the radiators at the same time. Most people never clean them. There are two approaches.

In-situ clean. Curtains stay on the rail and we steam-clean and vacuum them in place. Good for light freshening of thick curtains in reasonable nick. Not enough for anything heavily soiled.

Take-down clean. We take them down, launder or dry-clean depending on the fabric, press where needed, then rehang. Turnaround is typically 5 to 7 working days.

Pricing is per drop, meaning one panel of curtain from rail to floor: in-situ cleaning is £35 for a short drop and £42 for a long, floor-length drop, and take-down cleaning is from £72 depending on fabric. Lined and interlined curtains take longer to dry and cost slightly more.

Stains: what comes out, what usually does not

Specific to upholstery, from years of testing:

What it costs

All prices include kit, products, and travel within our standard coverage area. Minimum booking is £95, because below that we cannot get the van out economically, and we would rather say so than bolt invented charges onto a small job. Payment on completion, card or bank transfer, receipt on company-headed paper. Full pricing across our services is on the prices page.

When upholstery cleaning matters most

Pets, particularly shedding breeds

Dog and cat hair works its way into the fibre structure and a vacuum will never get it all. Dander builds. Odour builds. An annual professional extraction plus fabric protection genuinely makes a difference, and it is the only reliable way to keep a fabric sofa decent in a pet home.

Young children

Food, drink, unidentified sticky substances. We recommend fabric protection on any new sofa going into a family home. The money you spend protecting it in year one pays for itself by year three in stain damage you did not get.

Allergies or asthma in the household

Upholstery and mattresses are the main reservoirs for dust mites and the allergens that come with them. Regular cleaning, mattress annually and sofa every 12 to 18 months, often produces a noticeable improvement in symptoms within days.

Pre-sale or pre-rental

A clean sofa and a clean mattress photograph far better than tired ones, and they shape buyer or tenant perception in ways nobody quite articulates but everyone reacts to. The cost of a refresh before listing is trivial next to the effect on offers.

Second-hand purchase

A sofa off Marketplace, a mattress from a friend moving house, an estate-sale armchair. Clean it before you live with it. You have no idea what it has been through.

Moving in or moving out

Any furnished tenancy where the inventory noted upholstery condition specifically. If the report says “cleaned at check-in”, that is your benchmark for check-out. See end of tenancy cleaning for the full picture.

How booking works

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Tell us what you have: sofa size, fabric if you know it, leather or not, anything else to clean at the same time. Pet situation, allergy situation, known stains. We quote on the phone.
2. Book. Most upholstery jobs go in within a week. Same-day slots come up regularly, especially midweek.
3. Clear the area. We need about a metre around the piece to work. Move ornaments, lamps, and any rug underneath that could get damp at the edges.
4. We arrive with everything. Machine, chemistry, fans, cloths, the lot. Fully self-contained.
5. Dry time. Most sofas are usable again in 3 to 4 hours. Mattresses 4 to 6. Leather dries within an hour. Curtains in situ, around 3 hours. We leave fans running on request.

Other services upholstery customers book

• Carpet cleaning. Same chemistry, same logic, same visit. The most efficient thing you can do is book the whole room at once.
• Deep clean. If you are resetting a whole home, do not skip the soft furnishings. Deep clean plus carpets plus upholstery is a proper job.
• End of tenancy. Furnished rentals nearly always want upholstery-cleaning evidence at check-out.
• Regular domestic cleaning. An annual upholstery add-on for customers on regular domestic contracts genuinely changes how the home feels.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I get my sofa professionally cleaned?

Every 12 to 18 months for most households. Every 9 to 12 months if you have pets, young children, or anyone in the home with allergies or asthma. Every two years is usually enough for tidy couples or single-occupant homes with light traffic. A sofa that has never had a professional clean has usually held soil for years, so it responds dramatically to the first proper extraction.

How long will my sofa take to dry?

Usually three to four hours before you can sit on it, a bit longer to go fully dry. Hot-water extraction done correctly does not saturate the fabric, and the machine recovers most of the water on the same pass. Thick pieces such as deep-cushioned feather-filled sofas dry slower. Leave a window open or run a fan and you roughly halve the drying time.

Will cleaning damage my fabric or shrink my covers?

Not with the right process. Damage on upholstery comes from the wrong chemistry for the fibre, oversaturation, or too much heat. We test fabric type and colour fastness before we start, match the chemistry to the material, and do not over-wet. Cotton covers designed to come off and go in the wash should not be cleaned in situ with extraction. They should be taken off and laundered, and we flag that on inspection.

Can you clean leather sofas?

Yes, with a completely different process to fabric. Extraction is wrong for leather, because water damages the finish and strips the natural oils. We use a pH-neutral leather cleaner applied by hand, work it in with manual agitation, then condition the leather afterwards to replace the oils the cleaning pulls out. Leather takes less time than fabric and dries within an hour.

What about delicate or vintage pieces?

It depends on the piece. Most modern upholstery in reasonable condition is fine for professional cleaning. Genuine antiques with original horsehair stuffing, fragile silk coverings, or structurally compromised frames we usually refer to specialist upholstery restorers. That is not because we cannot do the clean. It is because cleaning can destabilise the construction, and a conservator is better placed to manage that risk.

Does cleaning a mattress actually do anything?

Yes, measurably. A proper mattress clean cuts dust-mite populations significantly (the UV pass kills a large proportion during vacuuming), removes biological stains and odours that build up over years, and breaks down the body oils and sweat salts that make old mattresses uncomfortable. Households with allergies or asthma report the most noticeable benefit. For everyone else it is comfort and hygiene maintenance rather than a health necessity.

What happens if a stain does not come out?

We tell you. Before we start, we give you a realistic expectation based on what we see, and we flag the unlikely ones (old curry, set ink, fibre damage) before we commit. If something unexpectedly does not respond, we will not hide it. We note it in your walk-through and give you the options: further treatment, a referral to a specialist, or honest acceptance that the stain is permanent. You are not charged extra for follow-up work on the same piece.

Is fabric protection worth it?

On new or newly-cleaned fabric in a home with kids or pets, yes. It buys you time to deal with spills before they bind to the fibre, and it improves how the fabric responds to future cleaning. On an older piece with staining already in it, it is less useful, because you are protecting against future stains while the old ones are still sitting there.

Are the products safe for children, pets, and allergy sufferers?

Yes, once dry. Our products are EU Ecolabel certified and low-VOC, and they neutralise fully as they dry. We ask you to keep kids and pets off the furniture until it is dry, roughly four hours on most pieces. If anyone in the home has specific sensitivities, mention it at booking and we will use our hypoallergenic range, which is fragrance-free and suitable for eczema, asthma, and chemical-sensitivity households.

Do you move furniture and replace cushions?

We shift the piece enough to clean under it, lift every cushion, clean the sides and undersides, then put everything back as we found it. We take a quick phone photo of the arrangement when we arrive, so cushions go back the right way round. Not all cushions are symmetrical, and customers notice.

Is Monster Cleaning insured?

Yes. We carry £5 million public liability and £10 million employer’s liability. Accidental damage is covered up to the policy limit. Documents on request.

What areas do you cover?

All London boroughs (Zones 1 to 6 and most of the M25 catchment), Greater Liverpool, and Greater Manchester. Ring 0333 555 2076 with your postcode and we will confirm.

Ready to book?

Call 0333 555 2076 and we will price it on the phone. What pieces, what fabric, any specific problems, that is all we need. Out of hours, send us a message and we will ring back first thing. A couple of photos over WhatsApp of the piece and any specific stains helps enormously with quote accuracy.