Office and commercial cleaning in the UK runs £15 to £30 an hour in 2026, with £18 to £25 the band most quotes land in, and a monthly contract typically costing anywhere from £300 to £5,000+ depending on size, frequency and specification (The Clean Space).
Those ranges are too wide to budget against, because an office is not priced by its floor area. It is priced by how long someone is on site and how often. The table in what an office costs a month below turns any combination of those two into a figure, so you can price your own office rather than read someone else’s.
What an hour costs, and the floor no honest quote goes under
Hourly pricing is the planning benchmark, though most providers confirm a fixed monthly fee after a site survey rather than billing by the hour (The Clean Space).
| Service | Typical hourly rate |
|---|---|
| Standard office cleaning (UK-wide) | £15 to £30, core band £18 to £25 |
| London office cleaning | £20.50 to £26.80 (MNS, April 2026 average) |
| Regional cities (e.g. Manchester, Leeds) | roughly £11 to £20 |
| Deep cleaning | £30 to £45 |
| Medical and specialist cleaning | £30 to £100 |
| Commercial kitchen deep cleans | £15 to £40 plus VAT (full teams £100 to £200 per hour) |
| Out-of-hours premium | add roughly £5 to £10 per hour |
Figures are collated from the published 2025-26 price guides listed under Sources at the end, which is also where the ranges below come from. Rates are quoted excluding VAT, as the trade does; the kitchen row is the one the guides state VAT on explicitly.
Sources put the marketplace average for an office cleaner at about £18 an hour (Bark), London consistently above the rest of the country, by 10 to 20% on the sources’ own comparisons and by more against the regional city rates in the table above (Serna FM, Salem Cleaning Pro), and evening, early-morning and weekend slots dearer because they are harder to staff (MyBuilder, Cleaner Connect).
A floor worth knowing before you judge any of those numbers: the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026 (GOV.UK). Employer on-costs (National Insurance, pension and holiday cover) add roughly 12% to 28% on top, depending mainly on how many hours a week each person works, which puts the delivered cost of an hour of cleaning labour at £14.24 to £16.27 before the contractor has bought a cloth. That pair is our own calculation from the wage and the on-cost band, not a published rate. Add insurance, supervision, materials, travel and any margin at all, and our own read is that a charge-out rate below roughly £16.50 to £18 an hour has nothing left in it. Quotes below that are usually paying for themselves somewhere you cannot see. Our contract pricing guide works the on-cost arithmetic through case by case.
Cost per square foot and per square metre
For premises above a few thousand square feet, per-area pricing is the usual shorthand. It is also the figure most likely to mislead you, for a reason almost nobody states: the published rates circulate without a consistent period attached.
| Premises type | Per sq ft | Per sq m (converted) |
|---|---|---|
| Warehouse and industrial | £0.05 to £0.15 | £0.54 to £1.61 |
| Retail | £0.10 to £0.20 | £1.08 to £2.15 |
| Office | £0.10 to £0.30 | £1.08 to £3.23 |
| Medical and healthcare | £0.20 to £0.40 | £2.15 to £4.31 |
The per-square-foot column is the published one. The metric column is our conversion at the true 10.7639 sq ft to the square metre, not a second set of quoted rates. That matters more than it sounds: guides routinely convert these by multiplying by ten, which understates every figure by about 7%.
The ladder makes intuitive sense: warehouses are large, open and mostly floor; offices add desks, kitchens and toilets; medical premises carry hygiene standards that roughly double the office rate at the bottom of the band, though the gap narrows to about a third at the top (Salem Cleaning Pro). Within the office band, basic daily tasks (bins, dusting, vacuuming) sit at the £0.10 to £0.15 end, fuller specifications higher (Sentrex).
Pin the period before you compare anything
Take the worked example published alongside those office figures: a 2,000 sq ft office cleaned five times a week at £0.18 per square foot, given as about £360 a week, or £1,500 to £1,600 a month (Sentrex).
Check the arithmetic. 2,000 x £0.18 = £360. That is the whole week, covering all five cleans. Read the same £0.18 as a rate per visit, which is how per-square-foot figures are usually described, and the same office comes to £1,800 a week, or £7,800 a month. Nothing else on this page gets close: even at £25 an hour that buys more than fourteen hours of cleaning a day, every working day, in a 2,000 sq ft office. No benchmark in the next section reaches a third of it.
So at £0.18 a square foot, on an office of one to two thousand square feet, the weekly reading is the only one landing anywhere near the rest of the market. Scale it and even that goes: at £0.18 read weekly a 3,000 sq ft office implies six hours of cleaning a day and a 5,000 sq ft office ten hours, which is a full-time post rather than a contract. The top of the band fares no better, putting a 2,000 sq ft office at about £2,600 a month, past everything in the grid below.
So a figure quoted per square foot is close to meaningless until you know the period it covers and the size it was fitted to. Before comparing two quotes on that basis, make both parties state the period. Better still, do not compare on that basis at all. Compare hours on site, which is the thing you are actually buying.
What an office costs a month
An office contract is priced on two numbers you can settle in a minute: how long the cleaner is on site, and how many times a week. Everything else is a refinement. Multiply them out at the £18 to £25 core band, over the 4.33 weeks in an average month, and the monthly cost falls out.
| Hours per visit | 1 visit a week | 2 visits a week | 3 visits a week | 5 visits a week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | £78 to £108 | £156 to £217 | £234 to £325 | £390 to £541 |
| 1.5 hours | £117 to £162 | £234 to £325 | £351 to £487 | £585 to £812 |
| 2 hours | £156 to £217 | £312 to £433 | £468 to £650 | £779 to £1,083 |
| 3 hours | £234 to £325 | £468 to £650 | £701 to £974 | £1,169 to £1,624 |
| 4 hours | £312 to £433 | £624 to £866 | £935 to £1,299 | £1,559 to £2,165 |
These are our own calculations from the hourly band above, not quoted figures: hours per visit, times visits per week, times 4.33 weeks, times the rate. The arithmetic is deliberately visible so you can redo it with a quote in front of you, and our cleaning contract calculator uses the same 4.33, so the two agree.
One limit worth stating plainly: the grid is built on the £18 to £25 national core band, and regional quotes do come in below it. But note where the floor sits. The £11 bottom of the regional range in the table above is £1.71 below the National Living Wage before a penny of on-costs, so it cannot pay for compliant delivery at all; treat it as an advertised headline rather than a rate anyone can work to. Below roughly £16.50 an hour the same objection applies with less drama, wherever you are buying.
Two things to take from it. First, above about an hour and a half per visit, frequency costs more than duration: going from three visits a week to five then adds more than putting an hour on each of the three, which is worth knowing when a contractor proposes daily cleaning for premises that do not need it. Below an hour and a half it reverses, for no deeper reason than that two extra visits of h hours beat three extra hours exactly when 2h exceeds 3. Second, the spread within a cell is roughly a third, and that is only the rate moving between £18 and £25. A quote well outside its cell is usually a different specification rather than a different price, and worth asking about.
To place your own office in the grid, start from the fixed work rather than the floor area: count the toilets and the kitchen first, and treat the desks and floors as what is left. That is also why two hours is the sensible minimum per visit.
As a sense-check, published benchmarks for real contracts look like this:
| Setup | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Small office, light schedule | from £80 to £150 a month |
| Typical UK contract range | £300 to £5,000+ a month |
| London office, 1,000 to 2,000 sq ft, daily clean | £75 to £150 per visit (about £1,620 to £3,250 a month) |
| Manchester office, five visits a week | £1,200 to £2,400 a month |
| Leeds office, five visits a week | £1,000 to £2,200 a month |
| Larger warehouse or retail site | £1,000 to £3,000 a month |
All are ranges from published 2025-26 guides (The Clean Space, Serna FM, Salem Cleaning Pro), and the named city rows sit inside the grid once you fix a visit length. The 2,000 sq ft office earlier, at £1,500 to £1,600 a month, is a four-hour daily visit at £18 or a three-hour one nearer £24. Leeds at £1,000 a month is about two and a half hours a day at £18. A small office at £80 a month is roughly an hour a week, and at £150 roughly an hour and a half.
Two rows sit outside it. Manchester’s £2,400 top end needs four and a half hours every day at £25, more than the grid carries, and the open-ended “£300 to £5,000+” range runs past double its maximum, because at that end you are buying a team, a supervisor and a specification rather than one cleaner for a couple of hours. When a monthly figure will not sit in the grid, the question to ask is how many people, for how long.
What moves the number, in rough order of size
- Frequency. Daily cleaning costs less per visit than weekly, and far less than ad hoc: travel, set-up and admin get spread across more visits.
- Visit length. Budget at least two hours per visit, three or more for compliance-heavy sites. Fixed tasks take the same time however small the premises: 10 to 15 minutes per toilet cubicle, 20 to 40 for a kitchen (Urban Cleaning). One kitchen and two cubicles is 40 to 70 minutes on its own, so a 45-minute visit to a 3,000 sq ft office can be entirely consumed before the desks and floors start.
- Specification depth. Bins-and-vacuum is one price; kitchens, washroom consumables, internal glass and touchpoint sanitising all add hours.
- Who supplies what. Equipment and consumables are in the price somewhere. Agree upfront who provides them, or you are comparing quotes on different bases.
- Hours of access. Out-of-hours and weekend work carries a premium, and keyholding or alarm responsibility adds admin and trust requirements, which is why DBS-checked staff are standard practice for unsupervised office access.
- Staff density and footfall. A high-density open-plan office needs more cleaning than an executive suite of the same floor area; a busy shop more than a quiet showroom.
- Location. London and the South East run above the national average, by 10 to 20% on published comparisons and by more against the cheapest regional rates, pushed by the higher voluntary London Living Wage.
A contract beats ad hoc on everything except one-offs
A recurring contract wins on price per visit and on accountability: a fixed monthly fee, a set specification and someone to phone when standards slip. It is the right shape for any premises that customers or staff use daily. Ad hoc or one-off cleaning earns its premium for end-of-tenancy cleans, post-build sparkle cleans, annual kitchen deep cleans and genuine emergencies. If you find yourself booking ad hoc cleans monthly, you are paying the premium without the benefit: get contract quotes.
Demand for recurring contracts is climbing, too: commercial cleaning enquiries rose 11.3% month-on-month in our May UK SME Service Demand Index, driven by recurring-contract enquiries rather than one-off cleans.
If you run a cleaning business: pricing the job
Everything above describes the market you are quoting into, and the same figures cut the other way. Your floor is the delivered cost set out earlier, £14.24 to £16.27 an hour of labour, plus materials, travel and your time; our contract pricing guide works it through case by case. Your ceiling is the local going rate in the tables above. The margin lives between the two, and the most common mistake is quoting a market-looking hourly rate that quietly pays you less than employing yourself.
Run any contract through our commercial cleaning cost and contract calculator before you send the quote: it works back from a target net margin rather than a naive markup, shows your effective charge-out per hour to sense-check against this page, and flags when the pay rate underneath would dip below the legal minimum. And when the numbers say the contract only works at £13 an hour, walk away; price the job, not the day rate explains why the work you decline is part of the margin you keep.