Most pricing advice for cleaning businesses is the same recycled nonsense: “charge £15–£20 an hour” with no explanation of where that number comes from, whether it covers your costs, or why your local market might be completely different. It’s not your fault if your pricing is a guess. Almost nobody in this industry is taught to price properly.
This guide does it differently. Every figure below is grounded in current 2026 UK data: wage law, National Insurance, VAT thresholds, and real market rates, so you can build a price that actually protects your margin instead of one you copied off a competitor’s website.
Why pricing got harder in 2026, not easier
Three things changed this year that squeeze cleaning business margins more than most owners realise:
- The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026 for workers aged 21 and over (up from £12.21), with £10.85 for 18–20-year-olds and £8.00 for under-18s and first-year apprentices.
- Employer National Insurance sits at 15%, with the Employment Allowance offsetting the first £10,500 of it for eligible small employers, but once you’re running a team of any size, that allowance disappears fast.
- The VAT registration threshold has held at £90,000 of taxable turnover in a rolling 12-month period, unchanged since 2024. If inflation had tracked it since 2016 it would be over £111,000, so in real terms, the threshold has quietly got harder to stay under.
Put together: your wage bill per cleaner-hour is higher than it was 18 months ago, and more growing cleaning businesses are being pulled over the VAT line without adjusting prices to absorb it. If your rates haven’t moved since 2024, you’re not standing still, you’re going backwards.
Stop guessing: work out your real cost per hour first
Before you can price anything sensibly, you need to know what an hour of cleaning actually costs you to deliver. This is cost-plus pricing, and it’s the foundation everything else sits on. Most owners only account for wages and miss the rest.
Direct costs per cleaner-hour:
- Gross wages (£12.71+ per hour for staff 21+, more if you pay above NLW to retain good cleaners)
- Employer NI at 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold
- Pension auto-enrolment contribution (minimum 3% employer contribution on qualifying earnings)
- Holiday pay accrual (12.07% on top of hours worked for casual/part-time staff, or built into salary for permanent staff)
- Statutory sick pay exposure and cover costs when a cleaner is off
Overheads to spread across billable hours:
- Public liability and employer’s liability insurance (non-negotiable: a client won’t wait to find out you weren’t covered when something gets damaged)
- DBS checks, uniforms, and induction/training time
- Products and equipment (or a per-visit consumables charge if the client wants their own supplies used)
- Fuel, vehicle costs, and travel time between jobs: genuinely one of the most underpriced costs in the industry
- Admin, scheduling software, invoicing, marketing, and your own time managing the business
- A profit margin, not what’s left over, but a deliberate figure built in from the start (most healthy small cleaning operators target 15–25% net margin once fully staffed)
A worked example
Say you pay a cleaner £13.50/hour (slightly above NLW to reduce turnover). Add employer NI, pension, and 12.07% holiday accrual and your true wage cost is closer to £16–£17 per hour, before a penny of overhead, insurance, or profit is added. Add £2–£3/hour for overheads and a realistic margin, and you land somewhere around £20–£24/hour minimum just to run sustainably with employed staff, even before factoring in your local market’s ceiling.
This is exactly why the “average rate” figures floating around are so wide: a sole trader with no employees, no liability cover, and no premises has a genuinely different cost base to a small limited company running a team of four.
What UK cleaning businesses are actually charging in 2026
Current UK market data (2026) breaks down roughly like this:
| Service type | Typical UK rate (2026) | London/South East |
|---|---|---|
| Regular domestic cleaning | £14–£22/hour | £22–£28/hour |
| One-off / deep domestic clean | £18–£25/hour, sometimes £25–£35 with two cleaners | £25–£35+/hour |
| End-of-tenancy cleaning | £200–£450+ per property (flat rate) | Higher, property-size dependent |
| Standard commercial/office cleaning | £15–£30/hour, most quotes £18–£25 | £20–£27/hour |
| Specialist/medical/COSHH cleaning | £28–£55/hour, up to £100 for niche specialisms | Higher |
| Carpet cleaning | Roughly £3–£4 per m² | Higher |
Treat these as a sanity check, not a target. If your calculated cost-per-hour from the section above sits close to the top of your local band, that tells you something important: you’re either in a low-price area and need to lean on value positioning, or you’re running inefficiently and need to look at routing, team size, or job scoping before you look at your price list.
Choosing the right pricing model for the job
Different services suit different pricing structures, and using the wrong one is a common source of lost margin.
Hourly rate works well for regular domestic cleans where scope can vary week to week. Risk: efficient cleaners effectively “earn” you less per visit than slow ones, and clients sometimes fixate on the hourly number rather than the result.
Flat per-visit pricing suits recurring domestic and small commercial contracts. You quote based on an estimated time plus your minimum acceptable margin, then you keep the upside if the job runs quicker than expected. Clients generally prefer the certainty.
Per-property or per-room pricing works for end-of-tenancy and one-off deep cleans, where scope is predictable from photos or a walk-through.
Per square foot / per square metre is standard for larger commercial contracts, where facilities managers expect to compare providers on a like-for-like basis.
Monthly retainer contracts suit ongoing commercial cleaning, quoted after a site survey rather than a bare hourly rate, and usually the most stable revenue in the business once secured.
For most small-to-medium UK cleaning businesses, a mix works best: hourly or flat-rate for domestic, square-footage or retainer for commercial, and clearly separated one-off pricing for deep cleans and end-of-tenancy work, which should never be priced the same as a routine maintenance clean.
Watch the VAT threshold when you set your growth pricing
At £90,000 of rolling 12-month taxable turnover, VAT registration becomes mandatory within 30 days of crossing it. For a cleaning business quoting to domestic clients (who can’t reclaim VAT), suddenly having to add 20%, or absorb it into your margin, is a real cliff edge, not a technicality.
If you’re approaching that threshold, this needs to be part of your pricing plan, not a scramble afterwards:
- Decide in advance whether new client pricing will be VAT-inclusive or VAT-exclusive once you register, and communicate any change clearly
- Model what your margin looks like post-VAT-registration before you get there, not after
- For commercial clients who can reclaim VAT, registration is far less painful. It’s domestic pricing where it bites hardest
Pricing higher without losing the client
Undercutting on price is the easiest way to win a quote and the fastest way to burn out a cleaning business. A few things that let you charge realistically without just being “the cheap one”:
- Sell the outcome, not the hour. A flat “3-bed house, weekly clean, £75” is easier for a client to say yes to than an hourly rate they have to do maths on.
- Tier your service. Offer a standard clean and a premium/deep-clean add-on (inside oven, inside fridge, windows) rather than negotiating on your base rate.
- Charge properly for one-offs and first cleans. A first visit to a neglected property takes longer than the ongoing maintenance clean, so price it as its own job, not at your regular rate.
- Build insurance, vetting, and reliability into your pitch. Clients comparing you to an unvetted individual on a booking app are often willing to pay the premium if you make the difference in risk and reliability obvious.
- Review prices annually, minimum. Wage costs move every April with the NLW uplift, so your prices should move with them, not stay frozen for two or three years while your margin quietly erodes.
Common pricing mistakes to avoid
- Pricing purely off what competitors charge, without knowing your own cost base
- Never separating one-off/deep cleans from recurring maintenance pricing
- Forgetting travel time and mileage between jobs when costing a round
- Ignoring the coming VAT cliff edge until it’s already been crossed
- Not building in holiday cover, sickness cover, or replacement staff costs
- Leaving prices unchanged for years while the National Living Wage keeps rising
Quick pricing checklist
- Calculate your true cost per cleaner-hour (wages + employer NI + pension + holiday accrual)
- Add overheads per hour (insurance, products, admin, marketing, vehicle costs)
- Add your target margin, don’t treat profit as whatever’s left over
- Benchmark the result against your local market, not the national average
- Choose the pricing model that fits the service (hourly, flat, per m², retainer)
- Price one-off and deep cleans separately from recurring maintenance visits
- Model your VAT position if you’re approaching £90,000 turnover
- Set a date to review pricing every year, tied to the April NLW change
Get your pricing right from day one
Working all this out on a spreadsheet every time you quote a job doesn’t scale. ProCleaner UK helps you build accurate, cost-based quotes in minutes, keep your pricing consistent across every client, and stay on top of margins as your wage and overhead costs change.
Start your 28-day free trial at procleaneruk.co.uk/pricing →
Frequently asked questions
What’s a realistic hourly rate for a UK cleaning business in 2026? Domestic cleaning generally runs £14–£22/hour outside London and £22–£28/hour in London and the South East, with one-off and deep cleans priced higher. Commercial rates typically sit at £18–£25/hour for standard office cleaning. Your actual price should still be built from your own cost base first and checked against these ranges second.
Should I charge by the hour or a flat rate? Flat rates give clients certainty and let you keep the upside on efficient jobs; hourly rates are more flexible for variable-scope work. Most established cleaning businesses use flat or per-visit pricing for regular domestic work and hourly or per-square-foot pricing for commercial contracts.
When do I need to register for VAT? When your taxable turnover exceeds £90,000 in any rolling 12-month period, you must register within 30 days. Plan your pricing strategy for this before you approach the threshold, not after.
How often should I review my prices? At least annually, ideally shortly after the National Living Wage increase each April, since that’s the point your direct labour costs change regardless of what you decide to do about pricing.