A regular clean, room by room.
The task list most cleaning companies keep in a training folder, written out in full — what happens in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedrooms and the hall, and roughly how many minutes each of them takes.
- The full task list
- Minutes per room
- And what it does not cover
- Kitchen45 min
- Bathroom40 min
- Bedroom30 min
- Living room30 min
- Hallway15 min
- Balcony10 min
The maintenance clean, and nothing more than that.
A regular clean — standard clean, maintenance clean, the words are used interchangeably across the market — is the visit that keeps a lived-in home level. Surfaces, floors, the bathroom, the kitchen, the bins. It assumes the last clean was recent and the next one is coming.
It is not a rescue, and it is not a reset. Those are deep-clean jobs and they take about 1.6 times as long, room for room.
Every task, in every room.
We compared 143 rows of published checklists from more than fifteen UK companies and platforms. This is what they agree on. Nobody in this market publishes it at this resolution, which is odd, because it is the only thing a customer actually wants to know.
Kitchen
45 min- Wipe the countertops and surfaces
- Clean the sink and taps
- Clean the hob
- Wipe cupboard fronts and handles
- Wipe appliance exteriors — fridge, microwave, kettle
- Empty the bin, replace the bag
- Vacuum and mop the floor
Bathroom
40 min- Clean the toilet, inside and out
- Clean the sink and taps
- Clean the shower or bath
- Wipe the tiles in the wet zones
- Polish the mirror
- Empty the bin
- Vacuum and mop the floor
Bedroom
30 min- Dust every surface and all the furniture
- Make the bed, or change the linen if it has been left out
- Tidy and straighten
- Polish the mirrors
- Empty the bin, if there is one
- Vacuum the floor — mop it if it is hard
Living room
30 min- Dust the surfaces, the shelves and the TV stand
- Straighten the cushions and tidy
- Polish the mirrors and the glass
- Empty the bins
- Vacuum the floor and the rugs — mop a hard floor
Hallway
15 min- Dust the surfaces and the mirror
- Wipe the front door from the inside, and the handles
- Vacuum and mop the floor
Balcony
10 min- Sweep or vacuum the floor
What a regular clean is not.
Every operator that draws the line publicly draws it in the same place — Poppies, Fantastic and Housekeep all publish it, and all three publish the same list. It is worth reading as a feature rather than a disclaimer: it is exactly what a deep clean is for.
Inside the oven and the appliances
A cooked-on oven is twenty minutes of soaking and scrubbing before anything gets wiped. It does not fit inside a forty-five-minute kitchen, and pretending otherwise is how a visit runs long.
Inside cupboards and drawers
Fronts and handles, yes. Emptying a cupboard to wipe it out is deep-clean work — and it needs the cupboard emptied first, which is a job for whoever knows where things go.
Limescale and grout
Descaling a showerhead and scrubbing grout are chemical jobs on a timer, not a wipe. They are also the two things most often mistaken for a bad clean when they were never in the brief.
Skirting boards, frames and switches
Low, fiddly and slow. The floor gets vacuumed every visit; the six inches of painted wood above it does not.
High dust and cobwebs
The tops of wardrobes, light fittings, the corners of the ceiling. Reached with a ladder rather than a cloth, and rarely urgent — which is why the market puts them on a twice-a-year job.
Under and behind the furniture
Moving the sofa and pulling out the fridge is the difference between cleaning the room and cleaning the visible half of it. It is also most of why a deep clean takes half again as long.
Windows
Interior glass is a deep-clean item. Exterior glass is a different trade with different equipment, and no cleaning visit of any type includes it.
The minutes add up faster than people expect.
Add the rooms and you get the visit. These are the market's own whole-property norms for a regular clean, and they are the anchor our per-room minutes are calibrated against.
2.6 h
A one-bed
About 46 m² of floor, on the English Housing Survey's typical areas.
2.5–3.5 h
A two-bed
Around 67 m². The band is wide because the second bathroom is the variable.
4 h
A three-bed
Around 94 m², and the point at which people usually move to a fortnightly rhythm.
5.6 h
A four-bed
Around 138 m² — most of a working day for one person.
Divide it out and a real cleaner covers 20 to 30 square metres an hour. That number is the reason a quote that promises a four-bed house in two hours is either a different job or a shorter one.
The market's own floor is two hours: every provider we checked has a two-hour minimum visit, and we found no counter-example anywhere.
The kit question, answered plainly.
Your vacuum, your mop
For a regular clean the market assumes the home's own vacuum and mop. They live where the dirt is, and nobody carries a vacuum up three flights for a two-hour visit.
Products, often theirs
Most cleaners carry their own products and prefer to — the ones they know, on the surfaces they know. A deep clean is where the whole kit comes as standard.
Say it when you book
Whatever you have and whatever you would rather they brought, put it in the booking. It is a thirty-second note that removes the single most common misunderstanding of the first visit.
The minutes are ours, and worth reading with the caveat attached: most of the room-level time data we could find is American — three of twenty sources are British — so the totals are pinned to UK whole-property benchmarks and reproduce them within 7%. That rescales the American minutes to a British home. What it does not settle is how the time splits between the rooms, and we say so on the cost page.
Questions, answered.
Yes. Regular, standard and maintenance all name the same visit, and the market uses them interchangeably. The only distinction that carries any real meaning is regular against deep — the second one costs more per hour, not less, because it is slower work.
Because of the clock. The kitchen is about forty-five minutes on a regular clean and an oven alone is twenty of them, most of it waiting for a degreaser to work. Putting it in the standard visit would either double the kitchen or halve everything else in it. It is in every deep clean instead.
The useful test is not the calendar, it is whether the kitchen and the bathroom get past a wipe-down before the next visit. Weekly and fortnightly are the two rhythms the market is built around; monthly tends to drift towards needing a deep clean instead.
Put it in the booking note. If it is on the deep-clean list — the oven, the inside of the cupboards, the skirting — book a deep clean, because it needs the time, not the goodwill.
Not usually. Most cleaners bring their own and would rather use them. The vacuum and the mop are the ones a regular clean expects to find in the house.
The minutes are per room, so the arithmetic just carries on: another bedroom is about thirty minutes, another bathroom about forty. The floor to remember is two hours, which is the minimum visit right across the market.
Get a price for your own rooms.
The app works the total out from your address and what needs doing, and shows it before anything is charged. iPhone and Android.
