commercial
Office cleaning
Office cleaning costs £17 to £25 an hour on a contract, and a small office cleaned two hours a day, five days a week, runs roughly £700 to £1,100 a month. It is bought on a specification rather than on a rate: what the price actually turns on is which tasks are daily, which are weekly, and who supplies the hand towels.
What this covers
What it costs. Office cleaning costs £17 to £25 an hour on a contract and £24 to £36 ad hoc. Full cost breakdown.
What the job covers
- Daily or several-times-weekly cleaning outside working hours
- Desks, meeting rooms, kitchens and washrooms
- Vacuuming, hard floor maintenance and periodic machine scrubbing
- Consumables: hand towels, soap, bin liners and washroom supplies
- Periodic deep work: carpets, windows and high level dusting
What is involved
The specification is the contract. Daily, weekly and monthly tasks should be listed separately, because the periodic tasks are the easiest to lose track of: high level dusting, under the desks, behind the fridge, the washroom grouting. Listing each one is what makes sure it is done.
Desks are the part worth being explicit about. Most office contracts wipe only what is visible, and do not move papers, keyboards or personal items. A specification that says "desks cleaned" means something different to the cleaner and to the person whose desk it is, and clear-desk expectations are better set with the staff than with the contractor.
Washrooms drive the price more than floor area does. They are the slowest rooms, the most complained about and where most of the consumables go, so the number of them, and how often they are done, moves a quote further than a few hundred square feet either way.
What the evidence says
Standards and published measurements, cited so they can be checked.
A cloth is equipment, and it wears out
Microfibre lifts soil because the filaments are split, giving a cloth many times the surface area of a cotton one, and in controlled tests on hospital surfaces it removed more organisms than cotton, sponge or paper. The same work found the advantage is largest when the cloth is new and falls away as it is laundered and reused. Asking a company how it launders and replaces its cloths sounds like a strange question and tells you more than asking what it sprays.
Dancer and others, Journal of Hospital Infection, 2011; Diab-Elschahawi and others, American Journal of Infection Control, 2010. Two controlled comparisons of microfibre against cotton, sponge and paper on hospital surfaces, the second of which tested reprocessed cloths against new ones.
Choosing someone for the job
Ask for a written specification before any price, and compare specifications rather than monthly figures.
Ask who supplies hand towels, soap and bin liners, and whether it is included or billed on. For a small office that is £40 to £90 a month, which is enough to make two quotes look different when they are not.
Ask what happens when the regular cleaner is off, and who holds the keys or the alarm code. Those are the two things you will actually have to deal with.
Worth reading first:
Common questions
How is office cleaning priced?
Per visit, worked out from floor area, the number of washrooms and the frequency, then expressed monthly. Hourly pricing is more common for very small offices and for ad hoc work.
Will they clean our desks?
Whatever the specification says, and it usually means visible surfaces rather than moving papers and keyboards. Worth agreeing a clear-desk expectation with staff rather than with the contractor.