How Much Should a Cleaner Charge in the UK?

TL;DR: Most UK cleaners pick an hourly rate off a local Facebook group, then quietly fund their own products, travel and dead time out of it. Your price should start from your real costs and the hours you can actually bill, not from whoever undercut the group this week. This guide covers hourly versus per-job pricing, domestic versus commercial, a worked example with real numbers, and the supplies-and-travel cost that decides whether the round pays.

Ask a room of UK cleaners what they charge and you will hear "£15 an hour" more than any other number, usually because that is what the last person in the group said. Few have worked out what an hour actually has to earn once products, travel and unpaid time come out of it.

The honest answer is: enough to cover your real costs, pay yourself properly, and leave something over. Copy a rate off a flyer and you copy someone else's thin margin without ever seeing their books.

The biggest pricing choice in cleaning is not the number. It is whether you sell time or sell a result.

Hourly is simple and feels safe, but it punishes you for getting faster. Clean a house brilliantly in two hours instead of three and an hourly rate pays you less for being better. It suits irregular or open-ended work where nobody can predict the scope.

Per-job (fixed) prices the outcome: "a three-bed end-of-tenancy clean, £140". You carry the risk on time, so you price in a buffer, but every minute of skill you have built stays with you. For regular domestic rounds and one-off deep cleans, per-job is usually the more profitable model once you know your own pace.

Most established cleaners use both: per-job for the regular round, hourly for the awkward one-off where the scope is genuinely unknown.

Whichever model you sell, you still need to know what an hour of your time must earn, because a per-job price is only a costed hour wearing a different hat.

Your costed hour covers more than your wage:

• Unbillable time. Travel between jobs, quoting, buying products, the books. A full day rarely holds more than five or six billable hours.
• Supplies and kit. Cloths, chemicals, machine wear, bin bags, your vacuum's slow death. These come out of every job whether you itemise them or not.
• The slot you cannot resell. A cancelled morning is gone, and a cleaning diary is full of last-minute cancellations.

Price the time honestly first, then sense-check it against the area. Market-first, costs-second is exactly how cleaning rates got driven into the ground.

Say you want to take home £24,000 a year before tax from solo domestic cleaning.

Add the costs the turnover has to cover: car and fuel for travel between jobs at roughly £3,000, products and equipment at £1,200, insurance at £300, phone and admin at £500. That is around £5,000 of standing cost, so the business needs to bill about £29,000.

Now the hours. You will not bill 1,600 hours cleaning. Between travel, cancellations and admin, a realistic solo figure is closer to 1,000 billable hours a year. Divide £29,000 by 1,000 and your costed hour is roughly £29.

That number surprises people who advertise at £15. It does not mean you charge £29 an hour to a domestic client; it means a "£15 an hour" round, after travel and products, can leave you on little more than minimum wage with none of the security of employment. A defensible domestic figure, framed as a per-job price, reflects that real cost rather than the group's race to the bottom.

These figures are illustrative; your travel, your products and your billable hours will differ, which is exactly why a borrowed rate misleads. To run the sum on your own numbers, a cleaning pricing calculator (P05 Pricing Calculator Premium, £14.99) is an 8-sheet Excel workbook that costs in travel, products, dead time and a target margin so the quote reflects what the work actually needs.

Pricing one like the other is a common mistake.

Domestic clients buy trust and consistency, often weekly or fortnightly, and compare you to other local cleaners. Per-job pricing on a regular slot works well.

Commercial clients (offices, lets, communal areas) buy reliability and a clean audit trail, usually on a contract with set frequencies and an invoice each month. Margins can be steadier, but you will be expected to handle late payment professionally. Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts rules, a business customer who pays late can be charged statutory interest, but only if your terms were agreed in writing first.

If you take on any commercial work, your records and invoicing matter more, not less. A cleaning financial forms bundle (P07 Financial Forms Bundle Standard, £11.99) gives you the invoice, expense and income forms that keep a mixed domestic-and-commercial round straight at year end.

A calculator gives you a floor, not a magic number a client will always accept. In a competitive area you may sit slightly below your ideal margin to win the regular slots that pay the bills, and that is a legitimate different decision if you make it on purpose with a date to review it.

What is not legitimate is undercutting by accident, year after year, because the group said £15 and you never costed the hour. The worst position is not a low rate chosen deliberately. It is a low rate you never realised you were on.

If you do nothing else, work out your real costed hour once. Every per-job quote afterwards is built on a number you can defend.

If you are still building the business around the pricing, the rate is one of several decisions that land together: registration, insurance, your first regular clients. Our guide on how to start a cleaning business in the UK sequences those, and a cleaning startup guide (P10 Startup Guide, £4.99) lays the 12 launch sections out in order as a print-ready PDF.

And once a client says yes, the price needs to sit inside terms they sign: our cleaning company contract template guide covers the key-holding, cancellation and scope clauses that protect the rate you just worked out.

Cost the hour first, choose hourly or per-job to fit the work second, and price from your own numbers rather than the group's. That is the difference between a cleaner who is busy and one who is paid.

This article is general guidance, not tax advice or legal advice, written for UK cleaning businesses. Verify current VAT thresholds and HMRC rules on GOV.UK before making registration or pricing decisions.