domestic
Carpet cleaning
Carpet cleaning costs £35 to £60 a room and £120 to £220 for a three-bedroom house. Hot water extraction cleans deepest and takes four to twelve hours to dry; low moisture methods dry in one to two hours and clean less deeply, which is why offices tend to use them and most households are better served by extraction.
What this covers
What it costs. Carpet cleaning costs £35 to £60 a room, £120 to £220 for a three-bedroom house and £30 to £50 for a staircase. Full cost breakdown.
What the job covers
- Hot water extraction of carpets in an occupied house
- Low moisture cleaning where the room is needed again the same day
- Stain and spot treatment, and pet odour work
- Sofas, armchairs, mattresses and rugs
- Stairs and landings, which are priced separately from rooms
What is involved
The method should follow the fibre, not the price list. Wool can be wet cleaned but shrinks if it is over-wetted and dislikes alkaline detergents. Polypropylene takes extraction well and is nearly indestructible. Natural fibre coverings such as sisal, seagrass and jute should usually not be wet cleaned at all, because they can shrink, discolour or rot. A good quote starts with a question about what the carpet is made of.
A proper job has four stages before the machine and one after: dry vacuuming, a pre-spray with time to dwell, agitation, then the extraction pass, then grooming the pile. A great deal of what is in a carpet is dry particulate, and taking it out first is what stops it becoming mud. Those earlier stages do most of the work, and a thorough visit leaves time for each of them.
Drying is the part people underestimate. Ventilation and air movement matter more than the machine, and a cold room with the windows shut can still be damp the next morning.
What the evidence says
Standards and published measurements, cited so they can be checked.
The standard says identify the fibre first
There is a published standard for professional carpet cleaning, and the order it sets out begins with identifying the fibre and the construction before choosing a method or a chemical. That is not procedure for its own sake. Wool is a protein and alkali damages it; polypropylene tolerates what wool will not; a jute backing browns if it stays wet. Which is why the useful question when booking is what the carpet is made of, and why a company that asks it is working to the standard.
ANSI/IICRC S100-2021. The American National Standard for professional cleaning of textile floor coverings, covering fibre identification, cleaning chemistry, method selection and spot removal.
Choosing someone for the job
Ask what method they propose and why, then ask what the carpet is made of. The method should follow from what the carpet is made of.
Ask whether the price includes pre-vacuuming and pre-spray, because those are the stages that loosen the soil before extraction.
The National Carpet Cleaners Association keeps a public member list, which means membership can be checked directly rather than taken on trust. It is not compulsory and plenty of good cleaners are not members, but a number you can verify is worth asking for.
Worth reading first:
Common questions
How long will the carpet take to dry?
Four to twelve hours after hot water extraction, one to two after low moisture cleaning, and effectively none after dry compound. Ventilation and airflow change that figure more than anything else.
Will the carpet get dirty again faster?
Only if detergent residue is left in it, which is what a proper rinse and extraction pass prevents. It is the usual explanation when a carpet re-soils within weeks of being cleaned.