Office cleaning: a checklist for choosing a provider

Office cleaning is not a booking, it is a contract, and that changes almost everything about how it should be assessed.

A domestic clean is judged the day it happens. A commercial one is judged over months, by people who did not choose the provider and will not report a problem until it is a complaint.

That makes the scope document more important than the price on the front page. A contract that does not say what happens weekly, monthly and quarterly will drift to whatever fits the hours.

It also means the relationship matters. The provider who answers the phone in January is worth more than the one who was cheapest in July.

A daily or per-visit scope is short by design. It is the work that keeps a workplace usable.

• Bins emptied and liners replaced, including under desks.

• Kitchen benches, sink and appliance fronts wiped, and the dishwasher run or emptied.

• Bathrooms cleaned and consumables restocked, with a check rather than a glance.

• Hard floors vacuumed or dust-mopped through traffic areas.

• Reception and meeting rooms reset, including glass on the entry doors.

• High-touch points sanitised: door handles, light switches, lift buttons, shared keyboards.

Desks are usually excluded unless clear. Nobody wants a cleaner deciding what is rubbish, and every office learns this the expensive way once.

The periodic scope is where contracts differ most, and where the cheaper ones quietly say nothing.

Ask for a table like that in the contract itself, with frequencies against each line. “As required” is the phrase that means it will not happen.

Commercial work is quoted per visit, on the area, the fit-out and the frequency, rather than per hour.

A small office of 100 to 200 square metres is commonly $80 to $150 a visit, three times a week. Larger sites are priced per square metre and fall as the area grows.

Frequency lowers the per-visit cost, because there is less to do each time. Five visits a week is rarely five times the price of one.

Commercial quotes are often written excluding GST, since businesses claim it back. Check which you are looking at before comparing with a domestic rate. Our commercial cleaning service quotes on site, because no two fit-outs take the same time.

Six questions do most of the work of separating providers.

• What is the notice period, and is there an exit fee?

• Who covers a cleaner who is sick or on leave, and how quickly?

• Are staff employed or subcontracted, and are they paid the award?

• What public liability cover is held, and can you see the certificate?

• Who supplies consumables, and are they billed at cost or marked up?

• Is there a documented process for reporting a problem, and a response time?

A provider who answers all six without hesitating has been asked before, which is itself a useful signal.

Most office cleaning happens outside business hours, which means handing over access to an empty building.

Ask how keys and access cards are stored, who holds them, and what happens when a cleaner leaves the company.

Ask whether staff are police-checked. For sites handling client records, medical information or cash, it is not an unreasonable question.

Get the alarm procedure in writing, including who is called first at two in the morning. The answer to that question is worth more than a five per cent difference in price.

Toilet paper, hand soap, paper towel, bin liners and sanitiser add up, and how they are handled varies more than the cleaning does.

Some providers supply at cost, some at a margin, and some expect the client to stock everything and simply report shortages.

None of the three is wrong. What causes friction is not knowing which arrangement you are in until the first invoice arrives.

Agree a par level for each item and who checks it. An office that runs out of hand soap on a Friday has a cleaning problem in everyone's mind, whoever was responsible for ordering.

Illness moves through an office by hand contact rather than through the air alone, and the surfaces that matter are not the ones that look dirty.

Shared keyboards, phone handsets, kitchen tap handles, microwave and fridge door handles, and the button panel in the lift carry more than any desk surface.

These take minutes to sanitise properly and are the first thing dropped when a visit is running short. Name them in the scope so they are not.

The kitchen sponge is the other one worth mentioning. Replacing it weekly costs almost nothing and does more for workplace hygiene than most of the visible work.

Carpets, windows and high-level work are usually outside the regular contract, and they are the items most often forgotten until somebody notices.

Traffic-lane carpet steam cleaning two to four times a year keeps an office floor from reaching the state where replacement is the only option.

External windows are quoted per building and are typically quarterly. Internal partition glass is usually part of the weekly scope, which is worth confirming.

Put the periodic items on a schedule with dates rather than leaving them to be requested. Anything that depends on somebody remembering will happen roughly once.

Nominate one person on your side as the contact. Cleaning contracts fail most often because feedback arrives from six people in three directions and none of it is written down.

Keep a shared log rather than sending messages. It gives both sides a record and turns a complaint into a data point. One line per item is enough.

DATE        RAISED BY   ITEM                              STATUS
2026-03-04  Reception   Bins in meeting room 2 missed     Fixed 05/03
2026-03-11  Facilities  Kitchen tap handle sticky         Fixed 11/03
2026-03-18  Reception   Bins in meeting room 2 missed     Fixed 19/03
2026-03-25  Facilities  Bins in meeting room 2 missed     Escalated

Four lines and the pattern is visible. That is a room being skipped on a particular night, not a cleaner being careless. It is fixed by changing a route, rather than by a conversation about standards.

Review the scope once a year. Offices change: a new fit-out, a hybrid roster, or half the floor sublet all change what the visit should cover.

And tell them when it is going well. Office cleaning is one of the few services where the only feedback most providers ever receive is a complaint.

A commercial lease has an exit condition too, and it is usually stricter than a residential one.

Make-good clauses often require professional cleaning of carpets, kitchens and bathrooms, and sometimes the removal of signage and cabling.

Book it after the fit-out is stripped, not before. Anything removed after the clean puts dust straight back through the space, and the make-good has to be paid for twice.

Ask for an invoice that itemises the work. A landlord's agent will accept a documented clean far more readily than an assurance that one happened.

Give your office cleaning provider notice of the exit date as early as you can. Make-good work is a full day or more, and it always lands in the same week as the move, the handover and the disconnections.