How to Compare Office Cleaning Quotes

A price you can compare is not the same thing as a price. Three office cleaning quotes for the same building usually arrive in three different units — per cleaner-hour, as a fixed monthly fee, per square metre — over three different numbers of hours, with different things quietly left out. Ranking them by the number at the bottom is how a business ends up paying more for less cleaning. Our office cleaning prices guide covers what the going UK rates are; this one is the separate job of choosing between the quotes already in front of you.

Why office cleaning quotes are so hard to line up

Providers pick whichever of the three pricing models suits their business, not your comparison. That alone would be manageable. What makes it genuinely difficult is that four other things move at the same time:

• The hours. A fixed monthly fee does not tell you how long anyone is in the building. Two quotes can be 40% apart on hours and 5% apart on price.
• The scope. One quote includes washrooms daily and internal glass monthly; another leaves both to be agreed later.
• The exclusions. Consumables, periodic deep cleans, carpet extraction and VAT are the four that most often sit outside the headline figure.
• The delivery model. Whether there is a named cleaner, a supervisor, a guaranteed replacement when that cleaner is off, and anyone auditing the result.

None of these appear in the price. All of them appear in the bill, or in the complaint, eighteen months later.

Step 1 — put every quote in the same unit

Convert every quote to cost per week, hours per week and effective cost per cleaner-hour. If a quote does not state the hours, ask — a provider who cannot say how many cleaner-hours a week their fee buys has not planned the work. Monthly figures convert to weekly by multiplying by 12 and dividing by 52, not by dividing by four; the four-week assumption overstates the weekly cost by about 8%.

Read down the converted rows and the ranking inverts. Quote B is the cheapest monthly fee and the most expensive cleaning on the page — £24.23 an hour, a third less time in the building, nothing stated on consumables or cover. Quote A is honest and mid-priced. Quote C buys the most for the least per hour, which is not automatically good news: £17.69 sits close enough to the labour floor to be the one you interrogate, not the one you sign.

Step 2 — test the effective rate against what the labour costs

Office cleaning is a labour business. If you know the statutory cost of an hour of a cleaner's time, you know how much of a quoted rate is left for everything else — and a rate that leaves nothing is either subsidised by something you would rather not know about, or it will not survive the first year of the contract.

Two figures set the floor, and both are published. The National Living Wage from April 2026 is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over (GOV.UK). And almost all workers are "legally entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year" — 28 days for a five-day week (GOV.UK) — which means a cleaner is paid for 52 weeks but works about 46.4, so every hour actually worked on your premises carries about 12% of holiday cost with it.

Two honest caveats. The National Insurance line is not universal — Employment Allowance for 2026 to 2027 is £10,500 (GOV.UK), enough to absorb a small employer's whole NI bill, so a genuinely small local firm may sit nearer £14.24. And the table assumes the minimum wage: a provider committed to the real Living Wage — £13.45 an hour outside London, calculated on "what people need to live" (Living Wage Foundation) — starts about 6% higher again, which matters if your own business has a Living Wage commitment its supply chain is supposed to reflect.

Everything else comes out of what is left: employers' and public liability insurance, DBS checks, training, uniform, products, machines and their servicing, travel between sites, supervision, scheduling, invoicing and margin. Against a floor near £16, a quote at £18 an hour runs all of that on under £2 and is a keen price from an efficient operator. A quote at £14 is not a bargain — it describes a business that is either not paying the statutory cost of the labour or not carrying the insurance and cover it claims, and in the second case the exposure moves to you.

Step 3 — compare specifications, not prices

Once the quotes are in the same unit and the rate makes sense, the decision is about scope. A specification can be written two ways. An input specification lists tasks by area and frequency — reception floors mopped daily, internal glass monthly — so you are buying defined work. An output specification defines the standard the building must reach and leaves the method to the contractor, usually referencing the British Institute of Cleaning Science outcome criteria; larger organisations favour it because it shifts the risk of how long the work takes onto the provider.

There is a European standard behind the measurement side — BS EN 13549:2001, "Cleaning services. Basic requirements and recommendations for quality measuring systems", published 15 July 2001, which sets out "basic requirements and recommendations for quality measurement systems for cleaning performance" (BSI). Most offices of this size do not need a formal audit regime. They do need what the standard exists to make possible: an agreed, written definition of what "clean" means here, so a shortfall is a fact rather than an argument. Whichever form it takes, a specification you can compare states all of this:

• Every area of the building, named — including the ones people forget: stairwells, lift interiors, store cupboards, the space behind reception.
• Each task against each area, with a frequency — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. "Regular cleaning" is not a frequency.
• What is periodic rather than routine (carpet extraction, hard floors, high-level dust, washroom descaling), and whether it sits inside the fee.
• The cleaner-hours a week and when they happen, since out-of-hours access may need keys, alarm codes or a fob per operative.
• Who supplies and pays for consumables, and who checks the work and how often.

The most effective thing a buyer can do is stop collecting quotes against three different specifications and issue one of their own. Write the area-and-frequency list once, send the same document to every bidder, require them to price it — and note which of them ask sensible questions about the building before they do.

Step 4 — find what the cheaper quote has left out

When one quote is materially cheaper on a like-for-like specification, the difference is almost always one of these six. Ask about each explicitly, in writing:

• Consumables. Hand towels, toilet rolls, soap and bin liners are a real monthly line for a busy office. Some contracts include them, some charge cost plus a margin, some leave you to buy them — all three legitimate, not saying which is not.
• Products and equipment. Whether vacuums, mops, machines and chemicals come with the contractor or are expected to be yours, and who services and replaces them.
• Cover for absence — the most common gap and the one you notice fastest. Ask what happens when your cleaner is ill or taking their 28 days of statutory leave: a named relief cleaner, a supervisor covering, or nobody. "Best efforts" means nobody.
• Supervision. Whether anyone other than the cleaner ever looks at the result, how often, and whether you get it in writing.
• Insurance. Employers' liability cover is a legal requirement — "at least £5 million", with a fine of "£2,500 every day" a business is not properly insured (GOV.UK). Ask for that certificate and the public liability certificate and check the dates. One email, and the cheapest due diligence available.
• Periodic work. Carpet extraction, hard-floor treatment and washroom descaling are not routine cleaning and belong on their own line. A monthly fee that silently includes "deep cleans as required" is either padded or will be argued about.

VAT: the line that can flip the ranking

Check whether each quote is inclusive or exclusive of VAT, because it can change which is actually cheapest. A cleaning 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 not be registered and has no VAT to add, while a larger provider adds the standard rate of 20% (GOV.UK).

What that means depends on your own position. If your business is VAT-registered and makes taxable supplies you recover the VAT, so compare every quote excluding it and the difference disappears. If you are not registered, or are partly exempt — which catches a good many healthcare, education, insurance and financial-services premises — the VAT is a real cost you carry, and a 20% gap dwarfs anything argued over in the preceding steps. Establish this before you shortlist, not after.

If you already have a cleaning contractor, check whether TUPE applies

Changing provider is not the same commercial decision as appointing one for the first time. TUPE protects employees in a "service provision change", which expressly covers "a contract ends and is given to a new contractor" and "the work is transferred in-house by the former customer". Where it applies, "their employment terms and conditions transfer" to the incoming employer and "continuity of employment is maintained". It does not apply to a "single event or short-term task" (GOV.UK).

The consequence for your comparison is straightforward. If the incumbent's cleaners are likely to transfer, every bidder needs their pay, hours, holiday and length of service to price the work honestly, and a bid far below the others may simply not have priced them in. Tell all bidders that TUPE may apply, supply the employee information, and treat anyone who waves it away as someone who will reopen the price later. This is specialist ground — for a contract of any size, take employment advice before serving notice on the incumbent.

The contract terms worth reading before the price

• Notice period, both ways. One month either side is normal for a small office; twelve months with automatic renewal is not, and is the term most regretted.
• Price review — when the fee can rise, by how much and on what notice. An annual review tracking the minimum wage is predictable; "subject to change" is not.
• Minimum term and any early-exit charge, including anything owed for equipment placed on site.
• What happens if the standard is missed: a stated period to put it right, and a route out if it is not.
• Key holding, alarm responsibility and access, and who is liable if a key is lost or an alarm triggered.
• Data protection and confidentiality, for offices where cleaners work around desks, files and screens after hours.

A comparison checklist to send to every bidder

Send the same ten questions to everyone who has quoted. The answers, side by side, decide it far better than the prices do.

1. How many cleaner-hours a week does this fee buy, and on which days and at what times?
2. Please price against the attached area-and-frequency specification, not your own.
3. Is the fee inclusive or exclusive of VAT, and are you VAT-registered?
4. Are washroom and kitchen consumables included, charged separately, or ours to buy?
5. Are products, equipment and machine servicing included?
6. What exactly happens when our regular cleaner is ill or on holiday?
7. Who supervises and audits the work, how often, and do we get it in writing?
8. Please attach your employers' liability and public liability certificates.
9. Which periodic tasks — carpet extraction, hard floors, high-level dust, washroom descaling — are inside this fee, and what do the rest cost?
10. What are the notice period, the minimum term and the price-review terms?

One more that is not a question: get every bidder into the building. A quote given over the phone from a floor area is a guess, and a guess is what gets revised upwards once the work starts. A provider who has walked the building has seen the awkward stairwell and the kitchen that takes twenty minutes on a Monday, and has priced them.

How we quote office cleaning in Berkshire & Surrey

Berkshire EcoClean prices every office cleaning and commercial cleaning contract from a free walk-round, not from a floor area over the phone. What comes back is a written scope and schedule — tasks by area by frequency — against a fixed monthly fee, with a named contact, DBS-checked and insured operatives and periodic supervisor checks. We will say at the walk-round which work belongs in the contract and which is better bought as a separate periodic job, and the specification is reviewed as your headcount changes rather than locked for a term. Eco-friendly products and reusable microfibre systems are standard at no premium — see sustainable office cleaning if that matters to your ESG or tender responses.

If you are still deciding what the contract should contain rather than which quote to accept, how often an office should be cleaned sets frequency by area and footfall, and the office cleaning prices guide gives the UK ranges to sanity-check any figure against. The same method works for retail premises and school contracts, where periodic and holiday work is a larger share of the year. It also works for communal area cleaning in a block of flats, with one extra step: a block quote needs an annual figure and a figure per unit, because an agreement over twelve months costing any one leaseholder more than £100 a year is a qualifying long-term agreement and has to be consulted on.

We work across Bracknell, Maidenhead, Windsor, Ascot, Sunninghill, Sunningdale, Virginia Water and Wentworth, plus Reading, Slough, Newbury, Wokingham and Egham — see every area we cover. Request a free site survey and written proposal.

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.