£22 per hour for cleaning - REALLY?!

[DorotheaShottery]

I was thinking the other day "Dot - you've had enough of this cleaning lark - get yourself a cleaner!"

I put some feelers out on FB and it appears the going rate is £20-£22 per hour!!

Is that normal in the not-SE-not-Cheshire parts of the UK? AIBU to think it's ridiculous?

I suspect it's because it's done predominantly by women. 😕

Good luck with a teenager thoroughly cleaning your house

Neither
They are self employed not employees
They get to set their own terms and condtions and can charge what they want
The upside of that though they dont get holiday or sick pay.

Actually my friends teenage daughter left school after GCSE s and set up her own cleaning company.at17 She's brilliant at it and earns very well.

I don't mind paying £20 or £22 an hour. What I do mind is that every one I've employed has insisted on cash as 'otherwise they'd have to declare it'. Posters insisting they all pay tax and have insurance seem to live on a different planet to me.

Thats probably the exception though...

That's awful, so disrespectful leaving that kind of thing for someone else to clean. We have a cleaner but clean our toilets ourselves, and wouldn't dream of leaving anything gross for her to clean. I don't believe cleaners should be expected to clean up anything that's come off, or out of, a person.

I pay £50 for 2 cleaners 1.5 hours, so about £17 per hour in the South East (Surrey)
They do not work for any agency or corporate

I regularly get flyers posted through my door from agencies quoting double that

Agree. This gives you a rough idea of what MN in general thinks of unskilled workers. They want their services but they don’t want to pay anyone properly for those services, or their time - they’re ’just a cleaner’. Any other services you hire for home services have their terms and conditions and set tariffs for different services. Why should cleaners be any different ? The solution is simple - if you don’t want to pay do it yourself. I have a cleaner because I’m disabled. It would take me all day to do what she does - thoroughly - in a couple of hours.

They're not going to 'price themselves out of the market', generally the good ones who are giving great service are more expensive and they are mostly always fully booked with waiting lists.

They can charge whatever they need to and people will pay.

People ARE paying it and are willing to wait for them to have a spot free, so as long as they're busy it's definitely not too much to charge.

It's a totally reasonable price to pay for the job.

The issue, as others have noted, is that other traditionally middle class jobs which require tens of thousands and multiple years to train for, are not getting any price increases - even as inflation and minimum wage continue to increase.

Makes me wonder why you'd both becoming a nurse, teacher etc when you can set up your own business at 18 and jump straight into work.

This doesn't make sense, she's let you know what's included in her standard cleans and what isn't and she's clearly told you which packages are available in her services. It is very professional of her to clearly communicate her pricing structures within her business, so why is she a cheeky fucker?

She wasn't saying she wouldn't clean them, she was letting you know the cost of the additional work because it isn't free!

Sounds like she's not the one who was being cheeky 🙄

Why is this ridiculous??
I take it you've never been self employed in your life OP?
You do realise that being SE comes at great risk. You dont have 8hrs of continuous work 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year with 4 weeks paid AL, all Bank Holidays off and sick benefits, or a company pension.....
When SE you're also HR, accounts, reception, the manager and the workforce all rolled into one. This is without taking into consideration overheads such as travel time, running a vehicle, cleaning products equipment and insurance.
After all this is taken into consideration, the cleaner won't even be on NMW.

What even is pin money? Money for fripperies. Not a lot of chance of fripperies is you're on minimum wage or being taken advantage of by middle-class misers who want maximum bang for their (minimal) buck.

I pay my cleaner £20 ph and I also top up by an extra £10. So it is very expensive however I am working very long hours at the moment and it really means I can enjoy my time off. If I lost my job it would be the first thing to go. Cleaner is lovely, really thorough and works the full
4 hours.

This thread is fascinating.

Turn it on its head people who think this is expensive and don't have a cleaner (I don't). I bet that you are the person in your household that does a lot of this if not all of it for free.

As many people have said on this thread, this is how much it costs (there or thereabouts). So if you count up the free labour you do, from childcare, to tutoring, cleaning, household organisation etc, you're doing an extra job on top of whatever paid work you do.

Notice that rather than belittling (mostly) women who are monetising it.

The problem is that a lot of these highly paid middle class jobs that require high qualifications actually don't need people with high qualifications to do them.

Cleaning is hard work and can be unpleasant. And the cost of living is going up all the time, so not really surprising that it is getting more expensive.

You have to bear in mind that whilst in your mind £15ph is above minimum wage, it would be well below minimum wage, and living wage, when you take into consideration all the other costs and time that are involved. Cleaners are self employed, so if they are sick they get nothing (no statutory sick pay). No holiday pay, no pay to cover travel time to your house, fuel or public transport costs. Many provide supplies and prefer to use their own so also need to cover those costs. You want them to declare earnings, pay tax and NI, so they need to spend time on their own accounts and tax submission, or pay someone to do it for them.

You can't directly compare an hourly rate at an employed job to a self employed hourly cost. There are many more costs associated with being self employed. Also, why should a good, trustworthy cleaner have to work for minimum wage. Particularly in higher cost of living areas. Good cleaners are hard to come by. Supply and demand means they can charge a higher rate, same as anyone who is skilled and great at their job. So you are likely to find at a lower rate you'll find people who are struggling to fill their diary and probably aren't as good or trustworthy. Many cleaners work in homes whilst the owners are out, and hold keys to the property. You don't want to be underpaying someone with that access.

You aren't willing to pay more, and would rather do it yourself. Absolutely your prerogative to do that. But please don't demean, undermine or criticise people of any trade who are trying to make a good living by working hard running a business because they charge more than you deem their services to be worth. If they charge more than people will pay, they won't get the continued business to keep going and will either have to reduce their rates or find other work. Most cleaners in my area seem to be constantly busy, so clearly most people understand the value behind the charges and are willing to pay a fair rate.

Totally agree. It’d be like being annoyed at the people you pay to wash your car for not also doing the inside for the same price.

My cleaner just charges by the hour. I have her two hours a week but sometimes ask her to do a bit more if anything needs a deep clean. She takes initiative and cleans things that need doing if she has time left over such as the inside of my fridge etc. She is honestly wonderful and totally worth the money in my view. But we all like to spend our money on different things I guess.

Because it isn't meeting client needs. An hour of cleaning, is an hour of cleaning. What difference does it make if you're cleaning skirting boards or kitchen floors?

Fine to set pricing structures. Given the competition for good cleaners, perfectly understandable.

But I wouldn't employ on that basis (and have sacked cleaners for it).

My guess is that most "lowly" cleaners have a better grasp of workplace economics than their supposed middle class "superiors".

It's simple enough. If you charge too much you won't get the work. It's the same for trades. They will charge as much as they can until they price themselves out of the market.

If you can't afford it self cleaning and DIY is the way to go.

It's one of those things that you balk at as the buyer of the service but if you started putting together a business case of becoming a cleaner yourself, you would soon want to start charging £25ph yourself.

As others have pointed out, self employed cleaners don't get the benefits that PAYE employees do. Pension, sickness cover, annual leave, paid bank holidays etc

I wholeheartedly agree - and I'm somebody with a job that 90% does require me to fart around on a laptop.

I think I'm very good at what I do on my laptop - just as plumbers, cleaners, teachers, nurses, shop assistants, bin men etc. etc. are very good at what they do (except for a few bad apples like you get in every job), and I wouldn't be very/any good at.

You're basically saying what @Overwhelmedandtired just said.

I think the issue mainly seems to centre around what the working person considers reasonable and what people who don't work in that job and in fact explicitly want to outsource that work considers reasonable.