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A plain-English 2026 guide to how workplace cleaning is costed: the hours you are actually buying, what pushes the number up, what belongs inside the price, and how to get a fixed quote you can compare.
S/01Pricing
Nobody publishes a rate card for office cleaning, and there is a good reason for it: two buildings with the same floor area can differ by half again in cost because one has four washrooms and a shower block and the other has a single WC. What every quote in London and Hertfordshire does share is its ingredients. Understand those and three quotes stop being three unrelated numbers.
Almost every commercial cleaning price is built from operative hours. A surveyor works out how long your building genuinely takes to clean to the standard in your specification, multiplies that by the number of visits, and loads the rest on top: equipment, machinery, COSHH-compliant materials, supervision, cover for holiday and sickness, insurance and margin. Consumables — soap, paper, bin liners — sit either inside that figure or outside it, and that single decision is the most common reason two quotes look miles apart when they are not.
Contractors then present the same figure in one of five ways.
| Pricing basis | What it means | Typically used for |
|---|---|---|
| Per operative hour | You pay an agreed hourly rate per cleaner on site. Simple and transparent, but it puts the risk of “how long does it take?” on you. | Ad-hoc work, holiday cover, extra shifts, small one-offs |
| Per visit | A fixed price per clean, calculated from the hours the survey says the visit needs. | Small and medium offices on a fixed weekly schedule |
| Monthly contract | The annual cost of all visits divided into twelve equal invoices, so August and a five-Monday month cost the same. | Daily cleaning, multi-site work, anything with a budget line |
| Per square metre | A rate per square metre per year. Common in formal tenders because it compares buildings quickly. | Large open-plan floors, framework tenders |
| Per project | A one-off fixed price for a defined piece of work. | Deep cleans, carpets, builders cleans, end of lease |
Every band and example on this page is a typical figure taken from our own site surveys across London and Hertfordshire. They are here so you can sanity-check a quote you have been given; they are not a quotation. We do not publish a fixed rate card because we have never surveyed two buildings that deserved the same one. We survey, then give you a fixed price.
S/02Worked example
Because the number starts life as hours, you can estimate your own cost before anyone visits. Work out the operative hours your building needs each week, then multiply by whatever hourly rate you have been quoted. The bands below are what we typically scope for a standard office clean — desks and surfaces, floors, bins, kitchen and washrooms — with no periodic work included.
| Office size | Typical scope per visit | Operative hours per visit | Visits per week | Operative hours per week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–6 desks | One WC, small kitchen point, single floor | 1–1.5 | 2 | 2–3 |
| 10–25 desks | Two washrooms, kitchen, one meeting room | 1.5–2 | 3 | 4.5–6 |
| 25–60 desks | Washroom block, kitchen, breakout, meeting rooms | 2–3 | 5 | 10–15 |
| 60–150 desks | Multi-floor, washroom blocks, reception, supervision | 4–6 | 5 | 20–30 |
So a twenty-desk office cleaned three evenings a week is a five-hour-a-week job, or roughly twenty-two operative hours a month. Take the hourly rate you have been quoted, multiply it out, and you should land within a few pounds of the monthly figure on the quote. If the monthly figure is much lower than that sum, hours have been taken out of the specification somewhere — and in our experience it is usually the washrooms, usually on a Friday.
S/03Inclusions
Two quotes at the same number can buy very different things. Before you compare, check that every one of these sits inside the price rather than beside it:
There is a floor under the cost of cleaning your office, and it is set by law and arithmetic: the National Living Wage, employer’s National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday pay and the cost of actually turning up. A quote priced below that floor has not discovered an efficiency. It has made a decision, and it is nearly always one of three. The hours get cut, so the job is attempted in two-thirds of the time it needs. The staff get pushed onto self-employed terms, so vetting, training and cover quietly disappear. Or the contract is priced as a loss-leader and the price rises at the first review.
The visible symptom is staff churn. If a different person cleans your office every fortnight, nobody ever learns that the third meeting room is used for client lunches, or that the dishwasher needs emptying on Mondays, and you end up managing the cleaning yourself. That is the real cost of a cheap contract, and it never appears on the quote.
The other thing worth checking is what happens when standards slip. A contract with no evidence trail turns every complaint into an argument about what happened. A contract with one turns it into a two-minute look at the record.
S/04Getting a quote
A quote you can genuinely compare takes about forty-five minutes of someone’s time on site. Here is how ours works.
The survey. We walk the floor plan with you: access hours, alarm procedure, key handling, washrooms, kitchens, flooring types, waste and recycling — and what genuinely bothers your team most. That last question changes more specifications than the floor area does.
The fixed quote. Price and RAMS follow within twenty-four hours, with the specification written out room by room and the frequency against each line, so you can see exactly which hours you are buying. Consumables appear as a separate, clearly labelled option rather than buried in the total.
Mobilisation. From survey to first shift is usually around seven working days: key transfer and alarm codes logged, consumable stock audited, and your named crew and supervisor introduced on site.
We reply to every enquiry the same day, seven days a week, and our head office is in Watford, so a surveyor can usually be at a London or Hertfordshire building within a day or two. If you want to see the evidence trail before you commit, ask for a platform walkthrough. It takes ten minutes, and it is the part of a quote that actually distinguishes one contractor from another.
If you also let short-term rentals or serviced apartments, our short-let division publishes its rates openly — turnover cleans from £49 per changeover and deep cleans from £79 per property — because that work is standardised in a way office cleaning never is.
S/05Questions
No, and we would be cautious about any contractor who does. The honest answer depends on your access hours, your washroom count and the standard you need. We survey the building, then give you a fixed price and a RAMS within twenty-four hours, with the hours written out line by line so you can see exactly what you are paying for.
Both are normal. One-off and ad-hoc work is usually charged per operative hour. Regular contracts are almost always presented as a fixed monthly figure, which is the annual cost of all the visits divided by twelve, so your budget line does not move when a month happens to have five Mondays.
They can be either way, and it should be stated plainly on the quote. Managed consumables mean we audit the stock, order it and carry it in, and you never run out of soap or paper. We show it as a separate labelled line so you can compare quotes fairly.
Evening and early-morning rounds are our standard working pattern and carry no premium. Genuine overnight work, weekend-only access and a daytime housekeeping presence do cost more, because they need different staffing and different shift arrangements.
Deep cleans, carpet and upholstery cleaning, kitchen strip-downs and post-refurbishment cleans are quoted per project, against the actual areas and their condition. Most sites schedule one or two a year, either inside the contract or as separate visits, whichever suits the budget cycle better.
Yes. Our head office is in Watford and we cover London and the Home Counties, including St Albans, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfield, Welwyn Garden City, Borehamwood, Rickmansworth, Harrow and Enfield.
S/06Get in touch
Same-day reply on every enquiry, seven days a week. Tell us the building, the floor area and your access hours and a quote comes back the same day.
More areas, services & guides: Office Cleaning London · Office Cleaning Watford · Office Cleaning Hertfordshire · Commercial Cleaning London · End of Tenancy Cleaning London · How We Prove Every Visit · Office cleaning home · Airbnb & short-let cleaning