Decide what kind of cleaning business you are starting
This is the decision everything else follows from, and it is the one most people skip. "A cleaning business" is four or five genuinely different businesses with different customers, different cash flow and different equipment.
| Type | Who pays you | Cash flow | Startup cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domestic / regular | Households, weekly or fortnightly | Immediate, small, predictable | Low |
| End of tenancy | Tenants and letting agents | Immediate, lumpy, one-off | Low–medium |
| Commercial contract | Businesses on 30–60 day terms | Delayed, large, very predictable | Medium–high |
| Specialist (carpet, oven, jet wash) | Mixed | Immediate, high value per job | Medium |
| Facilities management sub-contract | FM providers | Delayed, contractual | High |
The honest recommendation for most people starting alone is domestic regular cleaning, adding end of tenancy work as capacity allows. It pays on the day, needs almost no equipment, and every client you win is recurring revenue rather than a job you have to replace next week.
Commercial contract cleaning pays better at scale but requires you to fund wages for 30 to 60 days before the client pays. Starting there without capital is the most common way new cleaning businesses fail while fully booked.
Register the business
You have two realistic options in the UK: sole trader or limited company.
Sole trader is free, takes ten minutes, and means registering for Self Assessment with HMRC. You and the business are legally the same, so you are personally liable for its debts. For a solo domestic cleaner with public liability insurance, this is usually the right starting point.
Limited company costs a small incorporation fee at Companies House, separates your personal assets from the business, and is often required, or at least strongly preferred: by commercial clients and letting agents. It brings more admin: annual accounts, a confirmation statement, corporation tax and payroll if you take a salary.
A reasonable path is to start as a sole trader, and incorporate when you either start employing people, start winning commercial work, or reach the point where an accountant tells you the tax position favours it.
- Register for Self Assessment with HMRC if you are a sole trader
- Or incorporate at Companies House if you are forming a limited company
- Open a separate business bank account: mandatory for a limited company, and sanity-preserving either way
- Register with the ICO if you hold client names, addresses and access details, which you will
- Monitor your rolling 12-month turnover against the VAT registration threshold from day one
Get insured before your first job
Not after your first job. Before. The cost of the cover is trivial next to the cost of one incident, and most clients worth having will ask to see the certificate.
- Public liability insurance: covers injury or property damage caused to third parties. Typically £60–£200 a year for a solo cleaner. Commercial clients and letting agents commonly require £2m or £5m of cover.
- Employers' liability insurance: legally required in the UK as soon as you employ anyone, including part-time and casual staff, with substantial daily penalties for trading without it.
- Treatment risk cover: covers damage to the item you are actually working on. Standard public liability often excludes this, which matters enormously when you have just marked a client's worktop.
- Key cover: covers the cost of replacing locks if you lose a client's keys. Frequently excluded as standard and frequently needed.
Read what is excluded, not just what is covered. Height restrictions, specific chemicals, and working in occupied commercial premises out of hours are common exclusions that catch cleaning businesses out.
Work out what to charge before you quote anyone
The most common pricing mistake in cleaning is picking a number that sounds reasonable, discovering it is too low eighteen months later, and then having to raise prices across a client base built on the wrong rate.
Work backwards instead. Decide the income you want, be honest about how many hours you can actually bill, add your overheads, and solve for the rate. Our hourly rate calculator does exactly this in about a minute.
Two adjustments matter more than any other. First, a 40-hour week is not 40 billable hours: most solo cleaners bill 25 to 30 once travel, quoting, buying supplies and admin are counted. Second, if you employ anyone, their true cost is roughly 1.25 to 1.32 times their wage once employer National Insurance, pension and holiday accrual are included.
| Work type | Typical UK rate 2026 | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Regular domestic | £18–£28 per hour | Higher in London and the South East |
| One-off deep clean | £25–£40 per hour | Specialist kit, longer job |
| End of tenancy | £165–£460 fixed | By property size, sold as a fixed price |
| Office / commercial | £16–£26 per hour | Or £1.20–£3.20 per m² per month |
| Carpet cleaning | £30–£60 per room | Equipment-led rate |
Buy the right equipment, and not the rest
You need less than the internet suggests. A solo domestic cleaner can start genuinely well-equipped for £300 to £500.
- Buy now: a decent vacuum, a caddy, colour-coded microfibre cloths, mop and bucket system, quality glass cleaner, degreaser, bathroom cleaner and a descaler, gloves and eye protection.
- Buy soon: a second vacuum so one failure does not cancel a day of work, a steam cleaner, an extendable duster and a small stepladder.
- Hire before you buy: carpet extraction machines, scrubber-driers, jet washers. If you hire the same machine more than twice a month, buy it.
- Skip for now: a van, branded uniforms, vehicle wraps and premises. All good at month six. None of them win you a first client.
Colour-coded cloths are not a nicety. Red for washrooms, blue for general surfaces, green for kitchens, yellow for glass and infrequent-touch surfaces is the standard UK system, and commercial clients will ask about it.
Where the first ten clients actually come from
Not from a website. A new cleaning business ranks nowhere for months, and paid search for cleaning terms is expensive. The first ten clients come from proximity and proof.
- Google Business Profile. Free, and the single highest-return thing you can do. Local map results drive most domestic cleaning enquiries. Complete every field and get reviews from your first clients immediately.
- Local Facebook groups. Community and "recommendations" groups in your target postcodes convert extremely well for domestic cleaning. Answer requests properly rather than posting adverts.
- Letting agents. Walk into every independent letting agent within ten miles with a price list and your insurance certificate. They need reliable end of tenancy cleaners constantly and they will test you with one job.
- Existing cleaners with full books. Established local cleaners turn work away every week. A referral arrangement costs you nothing and is the fastest source of pre-qualified clients.
- Leaflets, but targeted. Blanket leafleting is close to worthless. Leafleting three streets you already clean on, where your van or car is visibly present weekly, is not.
Aim for a tight geographic cluster rather than a scattered round. Ten clients in one postcode is a far better business than twenty spread across a county: travel is unpaid time, and it is the biggest hidden cost in domestic cleaning.
The numbers that decide whether it works
Three figures tell you almost everything about whether a cleaning business is going to succeed, and none of them are turnover.
- Billable hours per week. If this is under 20, you do not have a business yet, you have a side income. Track it weekly.
- Travel time as a share of paid time. Above 20% and your effective rate is collapsing regardless of what you charge. Fix it with geography, not price.
- Annual client churn. Domestic cleaning runs at 25–40%. If you are above 45%, something operational is wrong: usually inconsistency of cleaner or missed visits, and no amount of new client acquisition will outrun it.
Our client lifetime value calculator shows why the third one matters so much: cutting churn from 40% to 25% increases the value of your entire client base by around 60% without winning a single new client.
When to hire your first cleaner
The trigger is not "I am busy". It is "I am turning work away consistently and I have four to six weeks of wages in the bank".
Employing someone changes the business fundamentally. You now need employers' liability insurance, PAYE payroll, an employment contract, holiday tracking and a way of maintaining quality when you are not the one cleaning. Your true cost per hour rises by 25–32% over the wage, which means your pricing has to have room for it. This is why quoting off your own sole-trader rate stops working the moment you have staff.
The alternative many take: engaging cleaners as self-employed subcontractors, carries real risk. If you set the hours, supply the equipment, require a uniform and prevent substitution, HMRC is likely to treat that as employment whatever the contract says, and the unpaid PAYE and penalties land on you. Take advice before going down that route.
The admin that will eat your evenings
Every cleaning business owner underestimates this. At ten clients it is an hour a week. At forty clients with two staff it is ten hours a week, and it is all unpaid.
The recurring work is: building next week's rota around availability and holidays, telling clients about changes, raising and sending invoices, chasing the ones that have not been paid, tracking who owes what, keeping COSHH and risk assessment documents current, and pulling numbers together for your accountant.
You can run all of it on a spreadsheet and a shared calendar for a while: plenty do. The point at which that stops working is usually somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five recurring clients, and the symptom is almost always the same: a missed visit that nobody noticed until the client rang.
That is the problem CleanFlo exists to solve: jobs, rotas, staff, invoices and compliance in one place, with the cleaning team on a mobile app that works offline. It is £9.99 a month with a 14-day free trial. But the general principle stands regardless of what you use: the admin needs a system before it needs your evenings.