£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?

Teenagers miss a lot, like many cleaners.
If you find a good cleaner who will work solidly for every minute then 22 an hour is money well spent.
Most people don’t have the skills to clean professionally as silly as that sounds.
You’ll find one great one out of ten who do the basics and miss bits.

How much would you charge to clean my house op?

But they are just a cleaner. How dare they have any business acumen?!?!

We pay £18ph but I’ve seen quotes of £20+ before. I live in West Yorkshire.

Are you not smart enough to understand that the issue here isn’t cleaners charging too much, it’s nurses not being paid enough?

Definitely & that’s the point i was trying to make - albeit badly! Def not a race to the bottom. Everyone deserves to be paid fairly for the job they do.

Folk getting their knickers in a knot about working class (usually women) earning good money for hard work. Classism with a side of misogyny.
It isn't cleaners’ fault they earn good money and you don’t. If you earn comparably less that’s your problem to take up with your union and employer.

But you're true cost to NHS is usually 30-40% higher than your hourly rate. That's just salary, pension, employers NI, holiday, and some admin to employ you.
On top of that you add things like uniform, the desks and chairs you use. Plus of course the hospital, surgery or car, tools like a thermometer etc you use to do your job.
That will easily double your employment costs.
So you cost £35-40/hr.
So a cleaner being charged out at £20-25/hr is not earning much more than minimum wage.

That's all before consumables like syringes, gloves, drugs etc.

Yes & that’s the point i was trying to make - albeit badly! Def not a race to the bottom. Everyone deserves to be paid fairly for the job they do.

If she were a CF, she would have told you that after you booked the package that doesn't include them. As it is, she's simply telling you what it costs to do the job you want. Together with your complaint that cleaners no longer work for "pin money" and know their place, I'm not sure you should be chucking around insults about cheeky and entitled people. By your own admission you can't use a mop (wut) so for you, it would seem like money well spent.

Teaching is a profession. As a fully qualified teacher I earned less than minimum wage per hour over the year.

Of course that's principally because of long hours of unpaid extra-curricular (expected in my subject) on top of the usual planning and assessment etc.

Life is expensive and I think £22 sounds reasonable.

However, we have just advertised at my school for and English Tutor, who must have an English Degree and a teaching qualification for £25. It is essentially a 0 hours contract as they don't get paid holidays/sickness etc. I don't think the cleaner's wage is too much with the cost of living and inflationbut 'professional' wages are not increasing at alland quite rightly the minimum wage and other wages are increasing and it really makes you think about if it is worth training in a profession. That English Tutor will have paid for a three year degree and a post grad qualification. I'm not dissing cleanersthey work hard and I've done it myself-but they've not had to invest 100K in education. I think i'll be really telling my kids to consider a trade or setting up a business.

As an ex-cleaner, I am happy to pay my cleaner £20 an hour because she does a good job and I know what hard work it is. I suggest that you do a little experiment and clean your house for two hours how a cleaner would do it. I can’t do that now, literally going through the house and cleaning every room and not stopping or being distracted by phone calls or other things. Not thinking “I will just sit down for a minute or have a coffee.” Not thinking “I can’t be bothered to mop the floor, it doesn’t look too bad “.
Another thing to consider is how much are you paid per hour? Would you be offended if your boss balked at paying that much?

I pay £22 per hour in SW. I have 2 cleaners for 90 mins so a three hour clean. They dont stop - they bring all products, hoover, mops and do a good job. I expect they don't take all the money as they work for a company that will provide an alternative if illness or leave etc plus insurances.

Mine is £18 (midlands) which would be fine if she was good but she’s become really complacent. We’ve literally had her for 15 years so im not about to end that but I am becoming g more and more frustrated because it isn’t cheap and we obviously have to earn a lot more than that to pay her because of tax/ni.

I don’t see the issue. I used to get paid that an hour for teaching dance. By the time you factored in tax,NI, expenses, training and insurance,i don’t even think it was fair for the physical effort, totally ruined my body 😂 if i was sick i got nada, nothing. Wanted a holiday? Nothing. Kids sick? I don’t get paid

(i went off on my own and make a tidy profit for a single hour now 😂)

All these things are luxuries , no one needs it but people want it and pay it.

Why not become a cleaner then if its so lucrative and easy?

£20, North East England. Totally reasonable. Provides all cleaning equipment (fresh, clean cloths at every house) and products. Tax, NI, insurance, transport. No holiday pay. No sick pay.

Market forces. If people are willing to pay £22 an hour they'd be stupid to charge £15. They are doing it to pay the bills, it's not a hobby.

YABU.

Our cleaner is £25 per hour and I don’t think that rate is ridiculous at all.

The thing is if the person is an excellent cleaner / housekeeper it's worth it 100%. Sadly most cleaners we've had are very average (as I would be), sometimes you can barely tell they'd been. They've done the bare minimum. With a good cleaner the place is sparkling and you see it straight away.

In sum - if I knew the cleaner would be very good, I'd be happy to pay that much. But at the moment, having moved recently ish, we've no cleaner because I've tried 3 different ones (some in groups) and not been happy to pay that much to any of them based on how average they were. South East.

That's why most of us do our own? 🤷 (Also our own cooking, gardening, etc)

Are you being deliberately goady?

What's with the quotation marks?

Try getting a cleaner and see how hard it is to get a good one. Our neighbour got a girl in for far cheaper than the going rate and she ruined their worktop. Then as you can probably guess, she didn't have any insurance. I'm not saying that all expensive ones are better. But most of my friends would happily pay £25 for a decent, reliable cleaner.

And if you count up the hours that a cleaner is unpaid into their hourly rate you may find something similar. Remember they won't get sick pay, holiday pay, pay during travel time during their day (which will be significant) on top of all of the costs of running a business. Also when it's your own business you are everybody. Nobody else buys your consumables for you. Nobody does the invoicing. You do every job.