Introduction
We reviewed existing articles and conducted our own proprietary research to establish the cost of hiring a cleaner in London. We also compared London prices with other major UK cities and tracked how London prices have evolved in recent years.
Articles on house cleaning prices
We explored online to find data for the cost of a cleaner in London. We found only three articles that give price ranges for London cleaners.
The first article, written in April 2018, gives a broad price range of £10 to £20 per hour for domestic cleaning services. It notes that prices vary according to the source of the London cleaning services. For example, hiring a cleaner directly is cheaper than hiring through an agency or a cleaning company. This makes sense because the agency or cleaning company bears the cost of vetting cleaners and managing the service.
The article advises that hiring an independent cleaner directly costs between £10 and £12 per hour, hiring a cleaning agency costs £12 to £20 per hour and hiring uniformed staff from a cleaning company costs £20 to £30 per hour.
The second article, written in March 2020, suggests a price range of £8 to £20 per hour in the UK. The article states that prices vary according to location and source of the cleaning service.It states that prices tend to be higher in London and the South East than the rest of the UK.
According to the article, for independent cleaners the rate is around £10 to £15 hour with an average going rate of £12. By comparison, cleaning agencies charge between £12 and £20 per hour.
The third article written in November 2020 states that the average cost of a cleaner in the UK varies according to city, from £12 to £23 per hour. The average cost in London was £17 per hour.
None of the articles provided detailed sources for their information. The price guidance is broad and appears to be quite anecdotal. In addition, much has changed during 2020. We wanted to understand how prices have changed post-Covid by undertaking a robust analysis of cleaning agency prices.
Our house cleaning rate analysis
We focused our analysis on the leading cleaning service providers in London. As market share and revenue data is not readily available, we identified the leading players by their organic search engine ranking and by estimating their online marketing spend.
For the leading cleaning agencies in our survey, we obtained prices for weekly, fortnightly and one-off bookings. We standardised our approach to make prices comparable on an hourly basis.
Evolution of London domestic cleaning prices
We tracked the cleaning rates for the five largest cleaning companies in London over the past three years. Hourly rates were stable and averaged around £13.50 throughout 2018 and 2019. By January 2020, the average price for a weekly clean increased to £13.65 per hour as two players increased their rates by £1.00 and £0.30 respectively.
As Covid-19 adversely impacted the house cleaning industry, two further price increases of £1.00 and £0.20 brought the average price to £13.99 in July 2020 before one further £0.25 price increase moved the average to £14.04 per hour.
According to our analysis, over the course of the past 12 months, the average price for a weekly clean has risen by around £0.50 to over £14.00 per hour. As the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns reduced demand for domestic cleaning services, rates have increased to compensate in line with micro-economic conventions.
