A London house is cleaned by the hour: £23 an hour for a weekly cleaner, or £26 per cleaner an hour plus £30 for a one-off team. A three-bed house over two floors usually takes one regular cleaner four hours.
Houses take longer than flats with the same number of bedrooms. Every extra floor brings a flight of stairs, a landing and often another bathroom or WC, and the cleaner carries the kit up and down each time. Use the hours on this page as a starting point, then adjust for the way your household lives: a house with three teenagers and a dog is a different job from the same house with two adults out at work all week.
Hours a house needs, by size
One cleaner handles a regular visit. A one-off clean of a whole house goes faster with a team, so that column shows cleaners and hours together.
| House | Regular visit, one cleaner | One-off clean, team |
|---|---|---|
| Two-bed terrace, one bathroom | 3 hours | 2 cleaners, 3 to 4 hours |
| Three-bed on two floors, bathroom and WC | 4 hours | 2 cleaners, 5 hours |
| Four-bed, two bathrooms | 5 to 6 hours | 3 cleaners, 5 hours |
| Five-bed on three floors | 6 to 8 hours | 4 cleaners, 5 to 6 hours |
A fortnightly regular visit normally runs one hour longer than the weekly figure. Allow extra time for a basement kitchen, a loft conversion with its own shower room or a through lounge full of ornaments. The one-off column assumes a house that gets cleaned now and then; one left untouched since the previous owners moved out needs the longer hours set out on the deep cleaning page.
Regular cleaner or a one-off team
Weekly regular visits are charged at £23 an hour and fortnightly ones at £24, with a 3-hour minimum and nothing extra for products. It suits a house kept reasonably tidy that needs its bathrooms, kitchen and floors done on a fixed day. The domestic cleaning page explains how regular visits, holidays and changes of day work.
A one-off team is £26 per cleaner per hour plus a single £30 charge for machines and products; the smallest team booking, two cleaners for three hours, starts from £186. Houses are where a team pays off. One cleaner starts in the top-floor bathroom while the other takes the kitchen, so nobody waits for a room to come free. People book one before a regular rota starts, after moving in or when a busy year has let things slide. Both kinds of visit add street parking at cost up to £40, and half the price is paid upfront to fix the date. Every rate is on the prices page.
Room by room, from the top floor down
A house visit begins in the highest room and ends in the hall by the front door. Dust knocked off a landing shelf or a banister lands on the stairs, so each flight is cleaned after the floor above it.
- Top-floor bathroom or shower room, then the bedrooms on that floor
- The landing and the flight below it, with the handrail and spindles wiped on the way down
- Middle-floor bedrooms and the main bathroom
- Living rooms on the ground floor and the downstairs WC
- The kitchen, with its floor mopped last so it dries while the cleaner packs up
The hallway comes at the very end, because it gets walked through all visit. Door mats are shaken outside and the front step swept if you ask.
Stairs, extra bathrooms and loft rooms
Stairs take longer than most people expect. The cleaner goes along the edge of each tread with a hand tool, and on a carpeted flight the front lip of each step holds most of the grit. Painted spindles collect dust on all four sides. A long flight with a runner and stair rods can take twenty minutes on its own.
Each extra bathroom adds about 30 to 45 minutes and a downstairs WC about 15. Loft rooms under a sloping ceiling are slower to dust than square rooms. Windows high above a stairwell are cleaned only where the cleaner can reach them safely from the floor or the stairs. Washing the stair carpet itself is a separate job with an extraction machine and can be booked for the same visit; carpet and rug cleaning can price every carpet, stair and rug in the house as one booking.
Questions about house cleaning
How many cleaners come to clean a house?
For a regular house clean, one cleaner comes for the hours you book, up to eight in a day. For a one-off house clean, two to four cleaners come together, the number set by the size of the house and the state it is in.
Can a regular house clean leave out some rooms?
Yes. A spare bedroom or a loft room nobody uses can go on a rota and be cleaned every second or third visit, which keeps a large house within fewer hours each week.
Should furniture be moved before the house cleaner arrives?
You do not need to move furniture, and the cleaner will not shift wardrobes, pianos or full bookcases. Picking toys, laundry and paperwork up off the floors and worktops before the visit leaves more of the booked hours for cleaning.