Do I Need a Professional Clean Before the Check-Out Inventory, or Will My Own Do?
Read the check-in report before you book anything. The answer is in there, usually on page one or two, and about eighty per cent of the people who ring me asking this question have never opened the file the agent emailed them on the day they got the keys.
Most tenants who pay me for an end of tenancy clean are buying nothing. I’d rather say that in writing than keep taking the money quietly.
The other twenty per cent genuinely need it, and they’re almost never the ones who call.
What actually decides this – the standard of your clean, or the check-in report?
The report. Every time, and it isn’t close.
A deposit dispute is not an assessment of whether the flat is clean. It’s a comparison of two documents – the condition recorded at the start against the condition recorded at the end, with fair wear and tear taken off. If your check-in inventory has a photograph of an oven with baked-on residue on the door glass, and your check-out photograph shows the same oven in the same state, there is no deduction to make. You have returned the property as you found it. That’s the whole test.
Which means a tenant who moved into a mediocre flat and kept it at exactly mediocre has nothing to fear, and a tenant who moved into a genuinely spotless flat and hands back something merely tidy is exposed no matter how many hours they put in on the Saturday.
I cleaned a two-bed in Walthamstow last spring where the outgoing tenant had spent nearly four hundred pounds with me and would have won her deposit back with a hoover and a cloth, because the check-in report described the property as “clean to a domestic standard, some marking to kitchen units noted” and had eleven photographs to prove it. She’d never read it. She read it in front of me, in the hallway, while I was packing the machine away.
The line to look for on page one
Somewhere near the top of a decent inventory there’s a general condition statement about cleanliness. It’ll say something like “property professionally cleaned throughout prior to occupation” or “clean and tidy throughout” or, in the honest ones, “generally clean, see individual room notes.”
If it says professionally cleaned, your bar is high and you should think seriously about paying somebody. If it says clean to a domestic standard, your bar is a good domestic clean and you can meet it yourself with a weekend and a scraper. If there’s no statement at all and no photographs – which happens more than agents like to admit, particularly on smaller landlords’ own inventories – then the landlord has almost nothing to argue with and the burden of proving a deduction sits with them.
Check the individual room notes too. “Oven clean” is a sentence that will cost you two hundred pounds if you ignore it.
Can a landlord require you to pay for a professional clean?
In England, no, and this is the bit that still gets misrepresented on the doorstep.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 bans landlords and letting agents from requiring a tenant to make a payment to a third party as a condition of the tenancy. A clause obliging you to hire a professional cleaning company, or to produce a receipt proving you did, falls inside that ban. It applied to new tenancies in England from 1 June 2019 and to all existing tenancies from 1 June 2020. Any such clause in your agreement is unenforceable and always has been for anyone signing since then.
What survives is the underlying obligation – return the property in the condition it was let in, allowing for fair wear and tear. A landlord can absolutely claim against your deposit for cleaning if the flat comes back dirtier than it went out. They can’t dictate who does the work or demand paperwork.
Agents in London still say it. I’ve heard it repeated on a landing in Bethnal Green by a lettings negotiator who genuinely believed it, not one who was chancing it, which is somehow worse.
What the invoice is actually worth in an adjudication
Very little on its own, and this surprises people who’ve paid for it specifically as insurance.
Deposit scheme adjudicators decide on evidence of condition. An invoice proves you spent money. It doesn’t prove the extractor hood filters were degreased or that anybody went behind the fridge. If the check-out photographs show grease on the hood and the adjudicator has a check-in photograph showing it clean, your receipt loses.
The photographs win. Yours, dated, taken on the day you hand the keys over, room by room from the doorway plus close-ups of every surface the inventory singled out. That’s the evidence that decides it, and it costs nothing.
There’s one narrow exception where the invoice does work, and it’s a guarantee rather than a receipt – some firms will return free of charge if the agent raises a cleaning point within a set window. That’s worth something real. Ask whether it exists before you book, because plenty of companies advertising an end-of-tenancy service don’t offer it.
Which jobs do adjudicators actually deduct for?
The same short list, over and over, and it barely varies across London.
Oven, hob and extractor. Fridge and freezer, including the seals and the drip channel at the back. Limescale on taps, shower heads and screens. Grout and silicone in the bathroom. Internal window glass and the sills. Behind and underneath anything that moves – cooker, fridge, washing machine, sofa. Wardrobe and cupboard interiors. Skirtings and radiator backs. The bins. The garden, if you’ve got one and it’s now a jungle.
What doesn’t get deducted: carpet that’s evenly worn and greyed after three years, scuffs on paint at picture height, a bit of tired-looking sealant, general dulling of anything. Fair wear and tear covers all of that and adjudicators apply it fairly generously. Betterment is a real principle – a landlord can’t use your deposit to get a property back in better condition than they let it, and they can’t charge you the full price of a new carpet for a four-year-old one.
The oven, and why it’s always the oven
More deposit deductions in this city come from ovens than from every other item combined, and the reason is that it’s the one job that can’t be faked in a morning.
A properly done oven means the shelves and runners out and soaking, the door split and both faces of the inner glass cleaned, the fan cover unscrewed where it comes off, and caustic paste left to work rather than wiped round hopefully. Three hours if you’ve never done it, and you’ll get maybe seventy per cent of the way there.
That single item is the argument for paying somebody, and it’s a decent argument. A specialist oven clean on its own runs sixty to ninety pounds in most of London and does more for your deposit than a whole-flat clean that skirts round it.
When is your own clean genuinely not enough?
Four situations, and outside them I’d tell you to save the money.
Pets, first – cat protein and dog odour go into carpet underlay and soft furnishings and they don’t come out with a domestic vacuum. If your agreement had a pet clause requiring professional treatment on exit, that clause is likely still enforceable in a way the general cleaning clause isn’t, because it’s tied to specific damage rather than a blanket condition.
Smoking or heavy vaping. Nicotine sits in wall paint and it’s a sugar soap job, not a cloth job.
Third: a check-in report that says professionally cleaned and has the photographs to back it. You’re being measured against a standard you can’t reach on your own knees, and a hundred and eighty quid protects a deposit that might be two grand.
Fourth: any tenancy where you’ve been there four years or more and the place has drifted without you noticing. Long tenancies are the ones where people are most confident and most wrong. A flat in Catford, seven years, lovely tenants, and the kitchen ceiling above the hob was tacky to the touch and neither of them could see it because it had happened at the speed of a fingernail growing.
The one nobody predicts – the second bathroom
Houseshares and two-bathroom flats. The en-suite that one person used and nobody else ever entered is reliably the worst room in the property at check-out, because responsibility for it was never collective and the person who used it left in March. Sydenham, a four-bed, exactly that – three immaculate rooms and a shower cubicle with a grout line I’d describe as geological.
Budget for it separately or do it first, while you still have energy.
What order should the last week run in?
Move out completely, then clean, then photograph, then hand the keys over. Cleaning around your own furniture is the most common wasted effort in the whole exercise and I watch people do it every summer.
Empty rooms clean in a third of the time. The strip of laminate along the skirting that the vacuum never reached, the wall behind the headboard, the wardrobe base where the shoes lived – none of that is reachable until the van has gone.
Then the photographs, the same day, before anyone else has been in the property. Wide shot of every room from the doorway. Close-ups of the oven interior with the door open, the hood filters, the fridge with the door open and the shelves in, the shower screen, every windowsill. Date visible if your phone will do it.
Send them to the agent by email on the day you return the keys, attached, with a line saying the property is left in the condition recorded at check-in. That email timestamps everything and it changes the tone of the conversation three weeks later when somebody proposes a deduction.
Keep the check-in report. People delete it the week they move in and then spend a fortnight in October trying to get a copy out of an agent who’s changed branch, changed staff, or gone under – I had a tenant in Finsbury Park who never did get hers, and she settled for less than she should have.
Put the bin out on the way to the car. There’s always more than you think.