House cleaning checklist
This is the sheet a two-person crew works from on a standard clean: nineteen tasks, grouped by room, in the order that stops you cleaning the same surface twice. The minutes are our own working estimates for an average three-bed home — print it, adjust the numbers to your crew, and it becomes a route plan rather than a wish list.
Before the visit
- Confirm access, alarm code and parking
- Ask which rooms are out of bounds today
- Check whether pets are shut away
- Agree what counts as 'tidy' for cluttered surfaces
After the visit
- Walk the job from each doorway at eye level
- Photograph anything you could be blamed for
- Note what the standard clean could not reach
- Leave the sheet, signed, where the client will see it
Whole home
- Pick up and reset surfaces, clear the floor for vacuuming8 min
- Dust high to low: frames, ledges, sills, skirting10 min
- Wipe switches, handles, door edges4 min
- Vacuum carpets and rugs, edges included14 min
- Mop hard floors, last room to the door10 min
- Empty bins, replace liners4 min
Kitchen
- Counters and splashback wiped, appliances moved where they slide8 min
- Hob and control knobs degreased6 min
- Microwave inside and out4 min
- Appliance fronts, handles and seals5 min
- Sink scoured, taps descaled, drain flushed5 min
Bathrooms (each)
- Shower and screen, grout line included10 min
- Bath and taps6 min
- Basin, counter, mirror5 min
- Toilet: bowl, seat, base, behind the pan6 min
- Floor mopped last, out of the room4 min
Bedrooms (each)
- Beds made or linen changed if left out5 min
- Surfaces dusted, under-bed reachable areas vacuumed7 min
- Mirrors and glass3 min
Why the order matters
Every task on this sheet is placed so that nothing you clean gets dirtied again by the next job. Dust falls, so you dust before you vacuum. Wet work spreads, so you mop out of a room rather than into it. Chemicals need time, so anything with a dwell time is sprayed early and dealt with later in the pass.
Crews that skip this order do not clean badly — they clean twice. On a three-bed house that is easily twenty minutes of unpaid work a visit, which over a weekly route is most of a working day a month.
Reading the minutes column
The minutes are per task, for one cleaner, on a home that is used but not neglected. They are our numbers, not an industry standard: no trade body publishes a per-task table anyone can check, so we publish ours and tell you what they assume.
A first visit to a home that has not been cleaned in months runs 40–60% over these times. Quote it as a one-off deep clean and put the recurring rate in writing separately — see the deep cleaning checklist and what a deep clean costs.
Halve the totals for a two-person crew only where the tasks are genuinely parallel. Two people cannot both mop the same floor.
Adapting the sheet to a client
Add rooms rather than tasks. A fourth bedroom is another copy of the bedroom block; a second bathroom is another copy of the bathroom block. That keeps the arithmetic honest when you price it.
Cross out what the client does not want and write it on the sheet, initialled. The commonest deposit dispute in domestic cleaning is not a bad clean — it is a task the client assumed was included and the cleaner assumed was not.