How to Choose a Cleaning Company

Every cleaning company in Berkshire will tell you its teams are reliable, thorough, insured and vetted. None of that is checkable from a website, and the decision matters more than most household purchases, because you are handing over a key, an alarm code and several hours alone in your home. So the useful question is not which company sounds best. It is which of the claims you can verify before anyone arrives, and which parts of the arrangement are written down. Nearly all of it can be settled with one conversation and a handful of emails.

Step 1 — decide what kind of provider you want

Three quite different things are sold at broadly similar prices, and most of the frustration people have with cleaners comes from buying one while expecting another. The question underneath all of it is simple: when your cleaner is ill or on holiday, whose problem is that?

None of the three is the right answer in general. An independent cleaner at a lower rate is a genuinely good deal if you can live with no cover and carry the risk of damage yourself. What is not a good deal is paying a company's rate and discovering it has none of a company's structure behind it — which is exactly what the next three steps are for. For what each option tends to cost, see our guide to how much a cleaner costs in the UK.

Step 2 — ask for two insurance certificates, not one

"Fully insured" is the most common claim in this industry and the least informative, because there are two separate policies in play and only one of them is a legal requirement.

Public liability insurance covers injury to you or a visitor and damage to your property. No UK cleaning business is legally obliged to hold it, so a company can describe itself as insured while carrying very little, or nothing. Employers' liability is different. GOV.UK is unambiguous: "You must get Employers' Liability (EL) insurance as soon as you become an employer", it must "cover you for at least £5 million", and "you can be fined £2,500 every day you are not properly insured" — with a further "fine of £1,000" for failing to display the certificate where employees can read it. The only exemptions are where the business employs nobody but a family member, or nobody but someone based outside England, Scotland and Wales (GOV.UK).

Two conclusions follow. A company that sends employed cleaners and cannot produce an employers' liability certificate is not merely under-insured; it is breaking the law, and you would be letting its staff into your home with nothing behind them. A genuinely self-employed cleaner with no employees needs no such policy, and that is entirely legitimate — but it means public liability is the only cover in the arrangement, and if they do not hold that either, a cracked quartz worktop becomes your own insurance claim and your own excess.

Ask for both certificates by email as PDFs. It is one message, it costs nothing, and a reputable provider will have them to hand. Then check three things on the documents: the insured name matches the business that quoted you rather than a different company or an individual, the policy period covers your booking date, and the limit of indemnity is stated. One more question worth asking in writing — whether accidental damage to your contents is covered, and what the excess is — because that is the claim most likely to actually happen.

Step 3 — find out which DBS check was done, and when

"DBS-checked" is a sensible thing to ask about and a vague thing to be told, because there are levels and they show different amounts. A basic check "shows unspent convictions and conditional cautions". A standard check "shows spent and unspent convictions and cautions". An enhanced check "shows the same as a standard check plus any information held by local police that's considered relevant to the role" (GOV.UK).

Here is the part worth knowing before you ask: the more detailed checks are reserved for particular work, and GOV.UK gives "certain roles, for example in healthcare or childcare" as the examples. Cleaning a private home is not one of them, so the level normally available to a cleaning company is the basic check — and an individual can apply for their own basic check directly for £21.50 (GOV.UK). That makes it cheap to do, which is good, and cheap to claim, which is why you should ask for the detail rather than accept the phrase.

Four questions get you everything useful. Which level of check? What date was it issued — a check is a snapshot taken on one day, with no ongoing monitoring afterwards, so a certificate from 2019 is a statement about 2019. Does every person who will enter the property have one, including the relief cleaner who covers holidays, which is the gap most often left? And do you take up references, which in practice tells you more about how someone behaves in a home than a criminal record check does.

Step 4 — check who you are actually contracting with

A trading name is not a legal entity. Before you pay a deposit, find out whether the business is a limited company or a sole trader, because it changes who you would be dealing with if something went badly wrong. The Companies House register answers this for free, and holds more than most people realise: "company information, for example registered address and date of incorporation", "current and resigned officers", "document images", "previous company names" and "insolvency information" (GOV.UK).

A sole trader does not appear there at all, and that is perfectly lawful — plenty of excellent cleaners operate that way. What you are looking for is a mismatch: a business presenting itself as an established company with no registration behind the name, or a company incorporated six weeks ago describing a decade of experience, or a string of previous names and insolvency entries attached to the same directors. You can also set up free email alerts, so you are told if a company later changes its directors or registered address.

While you are on the subject of the entity, settle VAT. A business must register once "your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000" (GOV.UK), so a smaller local operator may add nothing while a larger provider adds the standard 20% (GOV.UK). Ask whether the quoted figure includes it. On a weekly clean, a 20% difference is not a detail.

Step 5 — read the reviews as evidence, not as a score

The law on reviews changed recently, and in your favour. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, from April 2025 it became a banned practice to obtain and post fake reviews, or to publish paid-for reviews "that are not clearly marked as incentivised" — and the ban also catches hiding negative reviews and presenting inaccurate star ratings. The Competition and Markets Authority swept more than 100 review publishers and issued advisory letters to 54 firms, after which "90% made changes in response". The same release gives the reason it matters: "89% of UK adults said they use online customer reviews when researching a product or service", and reviews influenced an estimated £217 billion of online retail spending in 2023 (CMA, GOV.UK).

That is the backdrop. In practice, a star average tells you very little about a local cleaning company with forty reviews, and four things tell you a lot:

• Specificity. A real review names the service, the property and the circumstances — the end of tenancy clean booked at two days' notice, the oven, the move-out date. "Great service, highly recommend" is content, not evidence.
• The replies to the bad ones. How a company answers a two-star review is the closest you will get to seeing how it behaves when something goes wrong at your house.
• The dates. Reviews spread across years read differently from twenty arriving in a fortnight, and a long gap followed by a cluster usually marks a push rather than a trend.
• Whether the reviewers exist elsewhere. Accounts with one review and no history are worth less than accounts with a visible record.

Then ask for something reviews cannot give you: a reference from a current customer in your own town, who you may contact. A company that has genuinely been cleaning in your area for years can produce one. A company that cannot has either not been working locally or has nobody willing to vouch for it.

Step 6 — test the rate against what an hour of cleaning costs

You do not need to guess whether a price is too good to be true. The floor is published. From April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, and £10.85 for 18 to 20-year-olds (GOV.UK). Almost all workers are also entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year (GOV.UK), so an employed cleaner is paid for 52 weeks and works roughly 46 — which adds about 12% to every hour actually worked, taking the wage and holiday cost of one productive hour to around £14.24 before employer National Insurance.

Everything else a company does comes out of whatever sits above that figure: public and employers' liability cover, DBS checks, training, uniform, products, equipment and its servicing, travel between jobs, cover for absence, supervision, scheduling and invoicing. So a quote materially below the mid-teens per cleaner-hour, from a business that employs its cleaners, is not a bargain — it describes an operation that is not paying for one of the things on that list, and insurance and holiday are the usual casualties. A self-employed cleaner with no staff, no cover obligation and almost no overheads can charge less quite legitimately. That is the trade-off set out in Step 1, not a discount on the same product.

For the ranges this actually produces locally, our Berkshire domestic cleaning price guide breaks it down by property size and frequency, and how much a cleaner costs in the UK gives the national picture to sanity-check any figure against. If you are buying for a business rather than a home, how to compare office cleaning quotes covers the same arithmetic for per-hour, per-square-metre and fixed monthly commercial quotes.

Step 7 — get these in writing before you pay anything

Most disputes about cleaning are not about standards. They are about scope — someone assumed the oven was included and someone else assumed it was not. A short written scope prevents nearly all of it, and you are entitled to ask for one before any money changes hands.

• The scope, room by room, naming what is excluded as well as what is included. Interior oven cleaning, interior windows, inside cupboards and wardrobes, and carpets are the four most commonly assumed in and quoted out.
• The length of the visit, any minimum, and whether the price is per hour or for the job — along with what happens if the work takes longer than expected.
• Who supplies products and equipment, and whether anything is charged for them.
• What happens if something is damaged: who to tell, within what period, and whether a claim goes through their insurance or is settled directly.
• What happens if the clean is below standard. Section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that "every contract to supply a service is to be treated as including a term that the trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill" (legislation.gov.uk), so the right exists whatever the terms say. What you want in writing is the practical route to it — a window to report a missed point, and a free return visit.
• Cancellation on both sides: the notice you must give, the notice you will get, and any charge. Note your statutory position too. For a contract agreed at a distance or away from the trader's premises — which covers almost every domestic cleaning booking, made by phone, online or at your own kitchen table — the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give a cancellation period that "ends at the end of 14 days after the day on which the contract is entered into" (legislation.gov.uk). The catch people get caught by: if you ask for the service to begin inside those 14 days, you can be charged for what has already been carried out.
• Key handling and alarm codes — how keys are labelled and stored, who else can access them, and what happens to yours when the arrangement ends.
• Who holds your address, access details and card information, and for how long.

Accreditation and membership — what it is actually worth

No licence or accreditation is legally required to clean domestic properties in the UK. So the absence of a logo on a website is not a warning sign, and its presence is not a credential — what matters is whether the claim can be traced back to the body that supposedly issued it. Some can. The British Institute of Cleaning Science, the main training and standards body in the sector, publishes a searchable membership directory, so a BICSc claim takes a minute to confirm rather than being taken on trust. Treat any badge you cannot find on an issuing body's own register as decoration, and ask which specific training the people cleaning your home have had instead.

Three reasons to walk away

• No paperwork at all. Cash only, no written quote, no scope, no certificates, nothing with a company or trading name on it. The problem is not informality; it is that you would have nothing to point at if a visit went wrong.
• Pressure. A price that expires today, a deposit wanted before any scope is agreed, or a deep clean you did not ask for added to the first visit. Good cleaning companies are usually booked and rarely urgent.
• A guarantee of something nobody controls — that you will definitely get your whole deposit back, or that a clean will cure an allergy or stop damp returning. A guarantee worth having is narrow and specific: a defined checklist, and a free return visit inside a stated window if a point on it was missed.

How we answer these questions

It would be odd to publish this and not answer it ourselves. Berkshire EcoClean operates as part of I and A Cleaning Limited, so the Companies House check in Step 4 is one you can run on us. Our teams are fully insured under public liability cover and DBS-checked before working in any client home or premises, and we will send the certificates on request rather than asking you to take the website's word for it. Every clean finishes with a quality check.

On continuity: regular cleaning is weekly, fortnightly or monthly with the same assigned cleaner wherever possible, with no contract and no minimum term — so if we stop being the right fit, nothing holds you. Plant-based products and reusable colour-coded microfibre are standard on every service at no premium, and we bring them with us. End of tenancy cleaning carries a 72-hour re-clean guarantee against a defined checklist, which is the narrow kind of guarantee described above — we will not tell you it guarantees a deposit decision, because that also turns on damage, wear and rent, none of which cleaning touches.

Quotes are given in writing after a walk-round or a proper conversation about the property, not as a number over the phone from a bedroom count. If you want to see the other side of the arithmetic first — what a professional clean does and does not achieve — the benefits of professional cleaning sets out which claims the evidence actually supports, and how often to have your house professionally cleaned covers frequency before you commit to one.

Once you have picked someone, the next job is the visit itself: how to prepare for your first cleaner visit covers what to clear, where a standard visit's scope stops, and what to flag before anyone starts.

We cover Reading, Slough, Bracknell, Maidenhead, Windsor, Ascot, Sunninghill, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, Wentworth and Egham, plus Newbury and Wokingham — see every area we cover. Request a fixed written quote or book online.

Written by the Berkshire EcoClean team from hands-on operational experience across Berkshire & Surrey. Pricing figures cite published UK sources and are reviewed every six months.