AIBU to think my cleaner is too expensive?

I would expect 3 hours for £75.

Find someone else op, £75 for one hour isn’t working for you or anyone really.

I pay £75 for a 4 hour clean of a four bed house (tho currently only two of us and dog live there). You can't clean a house that big in an hour! Dusting, hoovering, mopping, bathrooms, skirting boards. And the occasional clean of window frames and much else.
Our cleaner also brings her own materials and Henry

We've got a fairly large 4 bed detached, and our cleaner does 3 hours on a friday. She uses her own cleaning materials, is very thorough and charges us £18 an hour that I'm more than happy to pay.

I'd expect her to be there for 3.5 hours for £75. You usually pay per hour, if they are done earlier there is usually stuff to be cleaned that doesn't need to be done every visit, I know my in-laws would leave instructions for what they wanted doing if she was done early, she never left before their 3 hours was up.

£75 for an hour is eye watering(I put it in a calculator it's the equivalent of 146k before tax working 37 hours a week 🤣), I have 3 degrees and a professional job and don't earn that 🤣, if cleaning pays £75 an hour I might just chuck it in and start my own business!

We pay the same for our cleaner fortnightly. When she started it was 3.5hours ish, she generously takes about 2 hours now.
5 bed house but she doesn't do the bedrooms.
I swing between feeling ripped off and sucking it up because she is very good. She is extremely reliable, very flexible will always do extra weeks in December which helps us out. Changes her schedule to fit ours, will do additional things if I ask her to.
So essentially we are paying for that not just her actual cleaning.
However, an hour for £75 I would not be ok with!

Exactly! This is the problem with accepting that it's 'as long as it takes to get the job done' rather than an agreed number of hours that you pay for.

They'll soon find they manage just fine whizzing through in 2 hours when they know they quoted you on the basis it would probably take four, even if they didn't expressly say that.

After a few months of letting the skirting boards and the lightswitches get grubbier and grubbier, and ignoring the ever thicker layer of dust under the sofas and the cobwebs in high corners etc, the place won't actually be very clean at all. Then when you dare to say 'could you just....this week please?' You'll get 'Ah, well that will have to be extra I'm afraid. That's a deep clean you need.'

I wouldn't use her again if she only stayed an hour. That's just ridiculous.

I did cleaning until COVID and cleaned for two hours a week, a four bedroom house, took two hours and I charged £20. I can't believe what cleaners charge these days, work is hard to get. Find someone else, her attitude is rude. She knows roughly how long it takes. I was booked, paid for two hours, the lady would give me a list of occasional jobs to do if I had time. Your cleaner is having a laugh.

@redskyAtNigh we’ll have agree to disagree, but in OPs case there’s no way a fortnightly clean in a 4 bed house would take one hour.

I think hourly actually lends itself more to the possibility of being ripped off. Cleaning slowly does not mean you are doing a better job.

It's pretty hard to clean really slowly without doing a decent job, unless by slowly you mean taking regular breaks, constantly stopping to scroll through your phone or going out for a vape every 20 minutes. If you are present when your cleaner is there you will get a good feel for exactly how long it takes to do a particular job well without deliberately dragging your feet over it. Also don't forget that cleaners can generally do something quicker than we can do it ourselves because they don't get distracted by doing things like re-arranging the inside of the bathroom cabinets, or putting a load of clean washing away while you clean the bedroom or whatever.

I think hourly actually lends itself more to the possibility of being ripped off. Cleaning slowly does not mean you are doing a better job.

It does when it comes to hoovering. You absolutely can't pick up the same amount of dust hoovering fast vs hoovering slow - the hoover just doesn't work that way.

One way I measure how well a cleaner cleans is how much dust is collected in the hoover vs when I do it myself. I had a cleaner who collected barely any dust. I asked her to hoover a bit more slowly but she didn't so I replaced her with someone who did hoover slowly and collected a lot more dust.

I pay £75 fortnightly. But my cleaner is there 1-5

But you're describing a completely different situation. What i said was that if I agreed to pay someone £75 to end up with a clean house (not defined by hours, as OP said her cleaner never specified a number of hours either way), and i was getting a clean house for that price, I'd be fine with it.

The situation you describe is paying someone for 4 hours and not getting it, and that the house isn't cleaned properly. That's a completely different scenario. I can't even easily see now that the OP isn't happy with how clean the house is, and her cleaner never said how many hours she'd spend there!

Cleaners should be paid by the hour and the client needs to work out what needs doing and how long it should take. If you don't manage your cleaner, you will be ripped off!

Yep, dust her off.

My cleaner charges 16 per hour and assumes 3hrs for a large 2 bedroom appartment. I would say 75 is ok for 4-4.5 hrs clean for a 4-bed fortnightly.
OP, was the house clean up to your standard after 1 hr of her work?

Ooh no, my house is a similar size and I can’t clean the whole house in one hour. She’s doing the bare minimum in that time. I’d say that you need to agree an hourly rate.

I think a problem with hourly is that people's expectations about what can be done in two hours is wildly ridiculous sometimes. They can't do it in two hours but expect a cleaner to it and more.

I think hourly actually lends itself more to the possibility of being ripped off. Cleaning slowly does not mean you are doing a better job.

I can't think of any other service where you would pay for a number of hours rather than specifying the jobs that you wanted completing.

If I had a window cleaner, for example, I wouldn't say I would pay them for an hour's cleaning - I would want all my windows cleaned regardless of how grubby they were. If the window cleaner thought they were extra grubby, they would be free to charge more.

OP's desire is surely that her whole house is cleaned to a good standard, not that the cleaner spends x hours on it.

So either
-the house is not cleaned to a good enough standard (in which case OP should raise this) or
-the house is cleaned to a good enough standard because the cleaner is Super Cleaner (hang onto her) or
-the house is cleaned to a good enough standard because it wasn't that dirty to start with (in which case OP's being overcharged)

I promise you you wouldn't if you had one. Speaking from bitter experience it would soon start to irritate you if you were regularly paying for 4 hours and the job was only taking two, especially if paintwork wasn't getting wiped down or windows weren't being cleaned, or sofas were being vacuumed around every time, rather than under or behind. Lots of cleaners get complacent and go on automatic pilot, just doing the bits that show and obviously need doing each time, never using the extra time that you are paying for to keep on top of the less obvious jobs too.

When they initially price up, they should be doing it on the basis of how long they think it's going to take them. That's why you should ALWAYS ask for their hourly rate. If they say they don't have one they are lying. Of course they do. Everyone does. Ask them how long they estimate your house will take as a regular maintenance clean, not one-off deep clean. Then when they give you their price, that will give you their hourly rate.

If they say it should take 4 hours or whatever, that is what you will be charging you for, so why would you be happy to see them consistently leaving in 2 or 3 hours? Either it never needed 4 hours in the first place and they over-quoted you, or they are rushing or skipping stuff and not doing it as well as they could be.

When my cleaner first started my house really needed a good deep clean so it took longer for the first couple of sessions. I told her I'd happily pay for as many hours as it took to get the whole house up to scratch over two or three longer sessions and then she could let me know how long she thought about a regular clean after that. We settled on 4 hours a fortnight as a maintenance clean, but she's frequently done in three. When that happens she lets me know and she asks if I'd like something extra done, like some windows done, or a bit of ironing, or the oven or something, or if she prefers to get off early she'll do that. But she only charges for the time she's there. If she's done in 3.5 I still pay her for four because I don't want to be mean over it, she works so hard. But equally there are times when we've been away between cleans and the house has barely been used, so if it only takes her two hours that's all she charges for. We are both happy with this and it works well.

She's fantastic and because she's so fair and transparent and I don't feel she takes the piss, she will get a good Christmas bonus when the time comes. Other cleaners I have had in the past started well but very quickly got lazy and complacent, leaving earlier and earlier each time, even though there was clearly still things they could have found to do with the time they were charging me for. They didn't last long with me. I'm not mean but I won't be taken advantage of.

Did you not say anything to her the first time? And then just paid 75 quid for the second one? Why on earth didn’t you speak up?

I’d expect 4-5 hours for that on our local rates.

It should be more like 4 hours cleaning not one.

I would assume it’s swings and roundabouts.

£32.50 a week for a 4 bed house seems reasonable.

I would be more concerned about the standard of the cleaning.