How much a deep clean costs
/ 9 min read
A deep clean is priced on hours, and the hours are not a mystery: our deep cleaning checklist runs to 315 minutes of task time on a three-bed home — a long day for one person, on top of the standard clean, not instead of it.
Before you quote
- Establish that the client wants a deep clean, not a first visit
- Confirm the oven and fridge can be emptied
- Agree what is damage and what is dirt, in advance
Before you leave
- Show the oven and the fridge before leaving
- Quote the recurring rate separately, in writing
- Book the follow-up while the home looks its best
What a deep clean actually adds
A standard clean is surfaces you can see and touch. A deep clean is everything behind, inside and above them: the oven interior, the extractor filter, inside the cupboards, behind the appliances that move, the grout, the limescale, the skirting, the light fittings, the window tracks.
Almost all of it is chemistry rather than effort. Oven cleaner, descaler and mould treatment work on contact time, so a deep clean that is sequenced properly — apply everything that soaks, then do the dry work — finishes about ninety minutes earlier than the same list done one item at a time.
The hours, honestly
Our own task-minute model, published in full on the deep cleaning checklist, puts the additional work at roughly five hours for a three-bed home in ordinary condition, split about evenly between the kitchen, the bathrooms and everything else.
| Block | Task minutes | What dominates it |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen | 135 | Oven interior, extractor filter, inside cupboards |
| Bathrooms | 63 | Grout, limescale, behind the pan |
| Whole home | 117 | Windows, skirting, light fittings, upholstery |
| Total additional | 315 |
Those are our numbers, timed against our own checklist, not an industry standard — no trade body publishes a per-task table anyone can check. Time your own crew and replace them.
Turning hours into a price
At a business charge rate between $45 and $60 a cleaner-hour, five and a quarter hours of additional work lands roughly between $235 and $315 on top of a standard visit, before the standard visit itself.
Two cleaners do not halve that. They halve the time on site, which is worth something to the client and worth a great deal to your day's scheduling, but the cleaner-hours — and therefore the wage cost — are identical.
Quote a deep clean as a fixed price against a written scope, never as an open-ended hourly job. Hourly deep cleans are the work most likely to end in an argument about why it took so long.
What moves the number most
Three things, in order. How long it has been since the last one — a home that has never had a deep clean can run 40 to 60 per cent over. How many bathrooms, because bathrooms carry the dwell times. And whether the oven has been left, because a badly neglected oven alone can absorb an hour.
Pets, smokers and hard-water areas each add a predictable block. Ask about all three on the phone.
Deep clean, first clean, end-of-lease
These three get quoted as if they were the same job. They are not. A first clean is a standard clean that takes longer because nothing has been maintained. A deep clean is a different list. An end-of-lease clean is a deep clean judged against an inventory, in an empty property, with a deposit riding on it.
Price them separately and name which one you are quoting. It is the single clearest thing you can do to look like a professional operator rather than a van.