Let’s Be Honest: How Much Does a Domestic Cleaner Cost Per Hour in London in 2025?
A woman in a garden flat on Elderfield Road in Clapton asked me last spring why our quote was £24 an hour when the card in the newsagent’s window on Chatsworth Road said £13. Fair question. Nobody in this trade answers it properly, because the honest answer involves telling you what we pay our cleaners, what we keep, and what the £13 card is quietly leaving out. So here is the whole thing, with the arithmetic showing.
What is the going rate for a domestic cleaner in London in 2025?
Two markets, two sets of numbers, and they barely overlap.
An independent cleaner working for herself, paid directly, is charging somewhere between £15 and £20 an hour across most of Greater London this year. An insured company with vetted staff sits between £20 and £28, with the middle of that band – call it £22 to £25 – doing most of the volume for regular weekly and fortnightly work. One-off cleans run higher than regular contracts at nearly every firm, usually by £2 to £5 an hour, because a first visit to an unknown property takes longer per room and carries no guarantee of a second booking.
Below £14 an hour in London you are looking at cash work with no insurance and no cover, and the person doing it is taking home less than the London Living Wage after their travel. Above about £35 for standard housekeeping, you are paying for a brand rather than a clean.
Why the independent looks cheaper than she is
The £15 an hour independent is a good deal when it works. She keeps every penny, you get the same person every week, and there is no office taking a cut. The failure modes are the problem. She gets flu, and your kitchen waits ten days. She drops a Le Creuset through a glass hob and there is no public liability policy behind her, which means the claim is a conversation between you and her, and neither of you wants that conversation. She goes back to Bucharest for a month in August. HMRC, meanwhile, takes the view that if you set her hours and supply the equipment, you may be her employer, with everything that follows.
Where does the money go when you pay £24 an hour?
This is the part firms leave vague, so let me lay a single hour out.
The London Living Wage went to £14.80 an hour from May 2025, and any company worth booking is paying at or above that – some pay £15 to £16 for experienced cleaners with a long client list. Employer National Insurance and pension contributions add roughly 15 to 18 per cent on top of gross pay for employed staff. Holiday pay is another 12 per cent of hours worked, and it is a legal entitlement, not a gesture. That is £19 to £20 of a £24 hour gone before anyone has bought a bottle of degreaser.
Then: public liability and employer’s liability insurance, DBS checks at around £20 a head plus admin time, uniforms, microfibre stock, machine servicing, cover cleaners for sickness, and the office hours spent rescheduling when a client cancels at 8pm on a Tuesday. That’s the arithmetic. A well-run domestic cleaning company in London operates on a net margin in the region of 5 to 10 per cent, which is thin enough that a single bad debt swallows a month.
Any firm quoting you £18 an hour inclusive of VAT, with insured, PAYE, Living Wage staff, is either subsidising your clean from somewhere else or is not doing one of those things. The sums do not permit a third option.
The hour nobody bills you for
Travel. A cleaner doing two three-hour jobs a day in Zone 3 spends between 60 and 90 minutes moving between them, unpaid in most self-employed arrangements and a real cost in employed ones. It is why cleaners cluster: once someone has four clients within a fifteen-minute walk in Stoke Newington, she will turn down a better-paid job in Uxbridge without hesitating. If you live somewhere awkward to reach – and there are large parts of outer south-east London where the bus is the only realistic option – you are competing against that convenience, and it shows up in your quote.
Why does the same clean cost more in Clerkenwell than in Hornchurch?
Zone 1 and inner-London jobs carry costs that outer-borough jobs do not, and they are stubbornly specific rather than vague “central premium” talk.
Parking. A permit-only bay in a Camden or Kensington street means either a visitor permit you supply or a meter at £4 to £7 an hour, which on a three-hour clean adds more than the hourly rate difference on its own. The Congestion Charge is £15 a day for anyone driving into the zone between 7am and 6pm on a weekday. Vans need ULEZ compliance, and a non-compliant older van is £12.50 daily on top.
Then there is the building. Fourth-floor Victorian conversion in Crouch End with no lift, and a cleaner is carrying a vacuum up 68 stairs twice a day. Mansion block in Marylebone with a porter who requires signing in, a service lift booked in advance, and a rule against using the front entrance with equipment. Twenty minutes gone before the first surface is touched.
What size of home buys what
A one-bedroom flat wants two hours for a proper regular clean, and two hours is the minimum booking at most London firms because anything shorter cannot absorb the travel. A two-bed flat sits at two and a half to three. A four-bed family house in Tooting or Ealing needs four to five hours weekly, and people routinely try to buy it in three, then wonder why the skirting boards never get done. Hours buy tasks. Squeeze the hours and you are choosing which tasks get dropped – you just are not choosing consciously.
When is paying by the hour the wrong way to buy cleaning?
For regular housekeeping, hourly is fine and fair. For everything else it is a poor deal for you, and I will say that knowing full well that hourly billing suits us better.
A deep clean, a post-builders clean, an end-of-tenancy – these should be quoted as a fixed price against a defined scope, viewed in person or by video where the job is big. Hourly billing on a one-off pays us for being slow. Fixed pricing pays us for being good, and it hands you the risk transfer: if the oven takes ninety minutes rather than forty because someone has been grilling in it since 2019, that is our problem, not an extra £30 on your invoice.
The trap in a “from £X” price
Advertised rates that begin with “from” are built around the easiest job on the books – a compact flat, ground floor, off-street parking, client supplies the products. Read three lines down and you find products at £5 a session, a two-hour minimum, and a different rate for one-off work. That’s the arithmetic that turns an advertised £17.90 into £24 by the time it lands on the card, and the firm has told you no lies at any point.
Ask for the scope in writing. Not “deep clean of kitchen” but a list – inside the oven, inside the fridge, inside cupboards, extractor filter degreased, limescale off the tap bases, tile grout treated. The gap between two quotes for the same-sounding job is nearly always a gap in what is included, and that is the gap that catches people out on end-of-tenancy work, where the difference between a £220 quote and a £380 quote is usually carpets and windows.
What does a £13 an hour rate cost you later?
Sometimes nothing. There are excellent cleaners charging under the market because they undervalue themselves, they work near home, and they have no overheads. If you have found one, keep her and give her a rise before someone else does.
More often the low rate is funded by something being absent. No insurance means you carry the loss on a scratched worktop or a flooded flat below. No cover means the weeks you go without. No employment status means an HMRC exposure that most households have never thought about. And the churn is punishing: a cleaner earning £13 in London is one bad month from leaving the trade, so you retrain a stranger on your house twice a year.
Here is the question I would ask any agency, including ours: what proportion of my hourly rate reaches the person doing the work? A firm charging £26 and paying £13 is running a 50 per cent margin on someone else’s labour, and there are several operating across London doing exactly that behind good websites. A firm charging £24 and paying £15.50 with holiday pay and NI on top is running a normal business. Both quote you a similar-looking number. Only one of them will still have your cleaner in six months. That’s the arithmetic, and anybody who deflects the question has answered it.
The questions worth asking before you book
Are the cleaners employed or self-employed, and what is the hourly rate they receive. Is public liability insurance in place and to what value. Is the quoted rate inclusive of VAT. Are products and equipment included or is it £5 a visit extra. What happens when my cleaner is ill – is there cover, and will she be briefed on my home. What is the minimum booking, and does the rate drop for weekly rather than fortnightly.
Five minutes of that on the phone will separate the firms who have thought about their pricing from the ones who picked a number that looked competitive on Google.
The woman on Elderfield Road went with us at £24. She also kept the newsagent’s card, and told me she rang the number twice and got no answer either time.
