What home cleaning costs in the UK.
Every figure on this page is somebody else's published number, named and dated. None of them is a leestly price — and the section below explains, plainly, why we are not going to print one of those here.
- Named sources
- Both sides of the booking
- No teaser price
We are not going to put a price on this page.
Not out of coyness. The UK advertising code is specific about prices in two ways that matter here: a price in an advert has to be the total you will actually pay, with every unavoidable fee already in it, and a “from £X” must not advertise a rate that is barely available. A marketplace that quotes its cheapest theoretical booking as a headline is breaking the second rule to look good against the first.
And there is a simpler problem underneath the legal one. Our price is worked out from the address, the rooms, the type of clean and the time it will take. There is no single number to print, so any number we printed would be either a guess or a teaser.
What we do instead is show you the total in the app, before you confirm and before anything is charged. In the meantime, the rest of this page is the market you are comparing us against — with its sources attached, so you can check it.
£20.00
An hour, in London
The median rate organised providers publish for a regular clean. Median of seven, teasers and discount tiers stripped out.
£12.64
An hour, earned
The UK median wage for the occupation, from official statistics — a sample of about 512,000 people.
2 hours
The minimum visit
Everywhere. Five or more independent confirmations and not one counter-example below it.
The rates providers publish for themselves.
All of these are the companies' own published figures, collected in August 2026. Where a median is given, it is a median of published rates with “from £X” teasers and discount club tiers removed — those are not prices, they are advertisements for prices.
- £20.00 / hCompanies, agencies and platforms, London — median of 7leestly market research, August 2026
- £18.75 / hThe same providers across large UK cities — median of 11; the UK as a whole sits nearer £17leestly market research, August 2026
- £19.50 / hLondon, booked through an agency — and £17.50 for an independentHousekeep's own cost guide, May 2026
- £16.00 / hOutside London, agency — and £14.00 for an independent. Housekeep publishes its own London premium of 20–30%Housekeep's own cost guide, May 2026
- £17.95–20.95 / hBy city, VAT included: Liverpool £17.95, Cardiff £18.75, Manchester £18.95, Leeds £19.50, Birmingham £20.95Well Polished, published rates
- £20–30 / hA deep clean, across the market — dearer per hour than a regular clean, not cheaperleestly market research, August 2026
- +£1–2 / hWhat a one-off costs over a repeating booking (eMop £16 to £17, TidyChoice £17 to £19)Both operators' published rates
The other half of the same booking.
Worth reading next to the rates above, because the gap between the two is the part of this market nobody advertises. Again: none of these is a leestly figure.
- £12.64 / hUK median for “cleaners and domestics” (SOC 9223), sample of about 512,000ONS ASHE 2025
- £13.85 / hThe same official measure for London — a premium of under 10%ONS ASHE 2025
- £12.71 / hThe legal floor: National Living Wage, 21 and over, from 1 April 2026gov.uk
- £12.27–14.49 / hWhat named operators publish for their own cleaners: Molly Maid £12.27, Bright & Beautiful £12.97, Merry Maids £13.00, Poppies £14.49Each company's own site
- £12.50 → £13.00 / hHousekeep, rising after a yearHousekeep, published
- ~£15 / hAn independent working directly for a household — £19–21.50 in Londonleestly market research, August 2026
Set the first and the third row side by side and the shape of the trade appears at once: the national median for the occupation sits a few pence below the legal minimum that arrives this April. And the same person doing the same work clears half as much again when there is nobody in the middle.
An hourly rate is not a price until you know the hours.
This is the real reason a cost guide cannot end with a figure. Every quote in the tables above is per hour, and the hours are the variable nobody publishes.
How long the home takes
A one-bed runs about 2.6 hours on a regular clean, a two-bed 2.5 to 3.5, a three-bed about 4 and a four-bed about 5.6. That is roughly 20 to 30 square metres an hour of real working speed.
Which rooms, not just how many
Wet rooms are the slow ones. A kitchen is about 45 minutes and a bathroom about 40, against 30 for a bedroom — so two bathrooms move a price more than an extra bedroom does.
Regular or deep
A deep clean is about 1.6 times the time, room for room, and the market charges more per hour for it on top of that. It is the single largest lever on any quote.
One-off or repeating
A one-off costs more. The market adds about £1 to £2 an hour for it, and a first visit to a new home is slower than the ones after it whatever the booking says.
Where you are
London is dearer, and the providers say so themselves — Housekeep publishes a London premium of 20 to 30% against its own out-of-London rate.
The two-hour floor
Every provider we found holds a two-hour minimum visit. Below that the travel and the setup stop being worth anyone's while, which is why nobody sells a one-hour clean.
How the numbers were collected, and what was thrown away.
Twenty-one research passes across eleven domains produced 517 rows. 202 survived — the rule was two independent sources, or one official one. About sixty load-bearing figures were then re-checked against live pages by a separate adversarial pass, and the ONS archives were downloaded again and compared by checksum against the first pull.
The discards say more than the survivors. Glassdoor, talent.com and Payscale were all rejected: their “hourly” figures are an annual salary divided by 2,080, which for this occupation produces numbers below the legal minimum wage — they are not measurements of what anybody is paid per hour. Adjacent official occupations went too, because caretakers and cleaning managers are not domestic cleaners and including them moves the median. So did “from £X” teasers, one discount club tier, and a single template national price grid that had been counted five separate times as though it were five different cities.
Any anchor with fewer than three rows behind it is marked a fallback rather than a finding.
The weak spot, named
The room-by-room minutes are the least British part of this. Only three of twenty sources for them are UK ones; most of the underlying time data is American. The totals are pinned to UK whole-property benchmarks and reproduce them within 7%, which rescales those minutes to a British home — but an anchor fixes the sum, not the split between the rooms. Our living-room figure in particular may be low against the one directly comparable UK source. It is the number we would most like to replace with our own measurements.
Collected August 2026Questions, answered.
The app works it out from your address, your rooms and the type of clean, and shows you the total before you confirm — and before anything is charged. We have not put a number on this page because there is not one number: the price depends on the home, and a headline figure would be a guess dressed up as a quote.
Because a “from” price is only honest if that price is genuinely available, and the cheapest theoretical booking is not what most people will pay. The UK advertising code takes the same view. We would rather show you the market with its sources and let you check our total against it.
No. Every figure on this page belongs to somebody else — the Office for National Statistics, gov.uk, or a named company's own published price list. They are here as the market you are comparing against, nothing more.
The opposite. Deep cleaning runs at £20 to £30 an hour across the market against roughly £17 to £20 for a regular clean. It is slower, heavier work — scrubbing an oven is not wiping a worktop — and the published rates reflect that.
The market's floor is two hours, everywhere we looked, and we found no counter-example. Below that the travel and setup swallow the visit.
They were collected in August 2026. The official wage figures are ONS ASHE 2025; the National Living Wage figure is the rate that applies from 1 April 2026; the Housekeep guide is its May 2026 edition. Rates move, so treat the page as a snapshot with its date attached rather than a live feed.
Get the number for your own home.
Enter the address and the rooms, and the app shows the total before anything is charged. iPhone and Android.
