£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 wasn’t comparing. I was explaining that NI and tax are not the reasons for the increased cost. Everything you have outlined absolutely is… but tax and NI is not. I don’t think anyone can disagree with that.

Typical MN......

"I'm happy for you to come into my house and clean the shit marks off my toilet, pick up the crap my kids have left everywhere, use your own cleaning products and travel from one job to another but don't expect me to pay you much more than minimum wage because, frankly, you are just not worth it".

People also have this attitude towards carers btw. Wouldn't want to wipe their own elderly parents arse but happy for a stranger to do it for peanuts and then look down on them because doctors and lawyers deserve more respect because cleaning and caring are not worthy professions.

But you are still happy for these people to service you. Ffs, I'd have hoped we'd have moved on from such snobby attitudes.

Well the fact she could see physically It was clean means she was trying it on. She didn't get the work

Heard stories from others as well of this sort of thing happening. If someone wants to hire a cleaner for 2 hours a week then the cleaner starts demanding they pay a shitload of money to " get it to standard" first then something is upside down. Since when do people dictate to their employers?

BTW I think£20 an hour is reasonable for a cleaner ( more than I earn and I'm also self employed) if they are reliable and do a good job. Not fanny about with towels and toilet roll etc

Most people my sister cleans for are either elderly or disabled and simply can't not physically do the job or they have other issues which means they can not do the job themselves.

Very few houses are IG worthy, just normal houses.

People also have this attitude towards carers btw. Wouldn't want to wipe their own elderly parents arse but happy for a stranger to do it for peanuts and then look down on them because doctors and lawyers deserve more respect because cleaning and caring are not worthy professions

I don’t think a doctor & a cleaner should be on the same pay, that’s an odd take. It doesn’t mean I don’t respect a cleaner.

The minimum wage is £12.71 which is not close to £20.

It's nothing new, and AI becoming increasingly sophisticated means it is only going to get worse.

The current influx is due to the upcoming local elctions.

You can't compare the minimum wage (which includes paid annual leave, sick pay, tax, NI and pension contributions) with the rates of someone who is self-employed and has to fund all the above themselves.

Link got lost in the edit, thread from 2024

Min wage plus holiday pay, pensions equal to an employer contribution, a proportion for potential sick pay, only being able to charge for perhaps 5.5 hours when taking travelling into account, products, petrol, part of car costs, products, insurance, admin time, accounting software and advice etc. Seems OK to me. Plus it's a very physical job.

Ok of course there’s some bad ones out there but there’s also excellent ones who can name their price

Also they absolutely can dictate to clients how the service will work because clients are not their ‘employers’ so they totally will be laying out their terms and conditions and the client can then buy it or not, that’s the part you can control

You say ‘since when’ but it’s always been the case!

It’s a service for sale from a business, even if it’s a sole trader, and it has nothing to do with being ‘employed’

I dont think it is a luxury I work long hours. Im a lone parent. Cleaning takes 1/2 my weekend in a small 3 bed.
We need family time. Im SE and struggling to find a cleaner

Fair enough but it gets people's goat . I used to fix computers etc. I did what the client asked me to do, I certainly wouldn't have insisted of doing a whole lot else and charging them far more for it when they only wanted one thing done

Yes, this.

Interestingly it's left wing poltiicians who always say we need more immigrants to do the shitty jobs they don't want to do. Which doesn't seem particularly fair on the immigrants since they're low paid, difficult jobs. If someone is a geniune asylum seeker fleeing human rights abuses, working in care doesn't seem the best fit. It can be traumatising, you need emotional resilience.

Working in care is hard and should have proper pay and CPD around the conditions they have to manage. It should be not for profit for the venture capitalists and much better paid. There are very few people with the mental and physical resilience to cope long-term -it's a rare skill set and these people should be paid well and developed. There is a lot of turnover of staff which is not good for the quality of care. Last time I was in a care home an elderly man with advanced dementia was trying to break a carer's finger (another carer came to help and with enormous skill and diplomacy got him to stop). But you know, only worth min wage because lower classes dontcha know.

Doesn’t sound expensive to me. You need to consider petrol, insurance, pensions etc. As well as time taken to travel between houses. They won’t be able to do 8 of continuous hours of cleaning a day, so travel time needs to be considered in the cost.

I really do see what you mean, it’s not the best

Could you ask friends who they have? Or ask on local pages for recommendations? I think word of mouth is the best

When someone is minimum wage, PAYE, £12.71 is gross pay but then you get holiday pay, sick pay, pension etc etc. Cost to the employer is more like £18. Why wouldn't your cleaner factor in those additional benefits? Add in 45 per mile to get to your house and your 22 quid an hour becomes entirely reasonable.

All of these argumennts about what Dr,s Nurses ,teachers etc are on compared to the cleaner charging £22 / hour are all completley irrelevant .the cleaner is self employed and can charge whats she wants
I could set myself up as a cleaner and charge £1000, / hour if i wanted yeah it highly unlikely anyone would pay that but theres nothing stopping me doing it.

@x2boys I don’t disagree but I was replying to a post about looking down on cleaners which is a separate point

You're preaching to the choir 😄 I was on my lunch break (self employed, so entirely unpaid) and didn't have time for the whole list. The thought was there - 7 hours paid, and let's say they are doing that between 3 clients and travel time in total is 1 1/2 which isn't fun, but people drive 45 minutes to an office and back so them's the breaks. That's an 8 1/2 hour day before they have any unpaid breaks. Add an hour's admin per day maybe? That covers communications, making appointments, ordering stuff. Then I was going to work backwards to the actual hourly wage they might be getting.

I've just "finished work" i.e., stopped doing the things my clients literally pay for. Now I should planning appointments for May and the first half of June, allowing for my week's holiday at the start of june and somehow redistrubuting clients for that week to the week before and the week after 🥴 yes, my rate allows for money to be set aside for holiday pay but if I were employed, I wouldn't just get that - they would also pay someone else to cover my hours / work while I'm away.

I absolutely know that the two things can't be compared. I'm also constantly amazed that people who don't want to scrub their own shitty toilets think someone should jump at the chance to do it for a pittance 🤔

Yep! I'm going to buy a pinny, charge myself £15 x 3hrs and have £2,340 for a treat once a year. I'll have a cup of coffee half way through my shift and finish early too

Minimum wage workers may have holiday pay etc, and self emplyed dont. And cleaning supplies can be very very expensive, plus transport (petrol) to drive to places.

This

Haven't read the thread but it seems like a reasonable amount to me. I wouldn't do it for any less, it's hard work.

Well said, it makes me really angry that some people look down on others like this.

Well it wasn't for me Was sorting out for someone else

I gave up and do my own cleaning after losing a great cleaner and having 5 on trot the at were dire