commercial
Gym and leisure cleaning
Gym cleaning costs £35 to £70 a visit for a small studio and £80 to £200 for a large facility, or £17 to £24 an hour. The complication is that many gyms never close: a twenty-four hour site has no empty window at all, so the cleaning happens around members rather than after them.
What this covers
What it costs. Gym cleaning costs £35 to £70 a visit for a small studio and £80 to £200 for a large facility, or £17 to £24 an hour. Full cost breakdown.
What the job covers
- Equipment, handles and touch points sanitised daily
- Rubber and vinyl gym flooring cleaned without degrading it
- Changing rooms, showers and lockers
- Studio floors, mats and free weights
- Shower heads descaled as part of the water hygiene regime
What is involved
Rubber flooring is the surface that gets ruined most often. It is porous, it holds sweat and it is degraded by solvent-based and strongly alkaline products, so a contractor using a general purpose degreaser will leave a floor that looks fine for a year and then goes tacky and starts to break up. It wants a neutral cleaner and a machine that lifts rather than floods.
Showers are a water hygiene matter rather than a cleaning one. A shower head on an intermittently used outlet is a classic place for bacteria to establish in the warm standing water inside it, and descaling and flushing usually sits in the cleaning specification while the risk assessment behind it sits with the operator. Both parties need to know which of them holds which.
Odour is the honest measure of whether it is working. Sweat soaks into mats, upholstery seams and the underside of benches, none of which a surface wipe reaches, and a gym that smells at eight in the morning is telling you what is not being done rather than what is.
Choosing someone for the job
Ask what they use on rubber flooring. A neutral cleaner is the right answer and a strong degreaser is how a floor gets destroyed slowly.
Ask how they work around a site that does not close, and at what hours. Members and machines occupy the same floor and somebody has to have thought about it.
Ask whether shower descaling is in the specification, and make sure the water hygiene risk assessment says the same thing.
Common questions
Can it be done while the gym is open?
It has to be, on a twenty-four hour site. The work is split into zones and moved around members, which takes longer than an empty building and is reflected in the hours.
How often should equipment be sanitised?
Touch points daily at minimum, and more often in a busy facility. Members wiping down a machine after use is a supplement to that rather than a replacement for it.