Cleaner price increase

[yellowgecko]

TLDR: it’s going from £130 a month to £250 a month at the start of August. Is that usual market rate for East Midlands?

We pay an hourly fee of £17. Cleaner is usually here less than 2 hours. In that time she cleans 3 bedrooms, 1 family bath, 2 en-suites, open plan kitchen /living room. (Hoover, mop, dusts some things, wipes down kitchen & dining table, sinks, etc) EOW she cleans spare room (4th bedroom), alternate weeks she does skirting boards & blinds.

i have previously said we’re happy to pay for 3 hours, and she can do other things in the time but she’s always said no to this.

Going forwards she’s going to charge £70 per week for a 4-bed house clean. The weeks she does 3 bedrooms will be £55. There’s no extra time or services being added to this. It’s being framed as a ‘clean’ rather than an hourly price to reflect the ‘level of service she gives’. It’s good, but I don’t see it as a ‘premium clean’.

Of course she’s free to structure her business as she likes and we’ll figure out what to do. Does this seem reasonable / with the current market? Are other people with similar houses paying £250 a month for a cleaner?

extra info to avoid drip feeding:

We supply all cleaning materials and equipment
She doesn’t empty bins or the hoover
we are in East Midlands large town
She is very reliable, which was a huge problem when we used agency cleaners

TIA

I’m in SE and pay £18/hr for a 5 hour clean every other week, so approx £200 month.
Four bed, four bath and four downstairs rooms.

I can’t see how she can clean it it under two hours unless you are a very clean and tidy person!
£20 is the going rate here (SW London) and they supply the cleaning stuff (use my vacuum).

She must be exceptionally fast and efficient if she is able to do all that in 2 hours. My cleaner does that for a smaller house than yours, and some ironing, every week, in three hours. We pay her about 55 per week so that that works out to 220 a month. I would say if you take the time out of the equation, it is not wildly out of whack for what you would pay for having a house of that size cleaned to a high standard every week.Maybe talk to her about adding some services - ironing? and, bringing her own cleaning supplies?

We pay £25 which is the most I would be prepared to pay, but she is excellent so worth it. I don’t know how your lady can charge so much more over night. They usually increase by a few pounds an hour, not by hundreds!

I pay £17 per hour for a 2 1/2 hour clean twice a week. £85 a week. I am happy with my cleaner who will do any job I ask including sorting out under stairs cupboard.

I don’t like the way it’s set up either. You pay for the clean rather than by the hour is odd op. I would want set hours. With an agreed list of jobs. Surface cleans aren’t ideal. Our deep cleans are booked in separately.

So the day stays the same, but the time changes every week. I would be happy paying more if she did more, like ironing or windows. The house isn’t small, but we don’t have a mansion either. It does have multiple bathrooms, which I know can take longer. 2 of them are cupboard-size en-suites

I don’t think she cares about your business so she’s trying her luck to see if you’ll be crazy enough to pay double. Get a new cleaner.

its £15 per hour around me in in south London

See that surprises me, it’s cheaper than I’m paying!

We pay £20 an hour for a house similar size to yours 3 hours a week. We supply all cleaning products

I’m a cleaner and I follow quite a few professional cleaners on TikTok / Instagram. I’d be willing to bet good money that your cleaner has also been ‘influenced’ - most of these pro cleaners charge by the job, not the hour, and they all claim to be raking it in, (£1000+ a week). It’s all well and good if you are both extremely quick and extremely thorough, but few cleaners are both, (I’m not, which is why I charge by the hour - I’m very thorough but not super quick!)

I'd charge you £85 for a weekly clean but that would take me 4-5 hrs each week to do properly. But that would be me agreeing to do light tidying and a full maintance clean in each room. After the first month, we would be in a place where things like walls and skirting boards only need spot cleaning plus the maintance clean that I do as part of my usual schedule.

So you'd be paying me more money and I would not accept less unless we took out the bedrooms to bring it down to a 2-3hr clean. Then I'd charge you £30-50 a week depending on whether it took 2 hrs or more like 3 and a bit.

I have found in the last few years the number of self employed cleaners has gone through the roof.
You might have had to use unreliable agency cleaners in the past, but you'll probably now be able to find local people self employed who are reliable and reasonably priced.

When I last looked looked for a cleaner one was recommended to me who charged one rate for a regular clean and a higher rate for a deep clean. When I asked for an explanation she explained that the higher rate was eg for polishing chrome, skirting boards etc. I asked why I had to pay extra to have my bathroom taps cleaned or why it would cost more to dust the skirting boards than to duesy a bookshelf. She really couldn't explain it so I couldn't use her. It just seems like a rip off to me.

Anyway, if your fee is going up by significantly more than inflation, then you need to ask what you're paying extra for, and it doesn't sound like your cleanrr has thought through the benefit to you.

Personally with that sort of increase I would ditch her and someone who makes a reasonable charge for a reasonable job.

Good luck!

@Lexibletheflexibleits easier to justify paying more in that situation as you are doing more hours and more things. To me that is a ‘premium clean’.

@Jopo12she does promote her business on social media, maybe that is where it’s coming from…

We’re midlands and pay £20 an hour, she supplies cleaning products. That’s the “cash” rate, she wants £25 an hour to pay by bank transfer! She is ultra reliable but if her prices increase again I think I’d cut from 2 x 2 hours a week to 1 x 2 or look for a new cleaner. Reliability is more important to me than an excellent clean and it seems to be the harder trait to find!

I charge a lot.
i wouldn’t say ‘expensive’ because that’s a word used negatively.
But I do very thorough, meticulously detailed cleans. No way I could do that to my standard in 2hrs.
I would say, after her travel time (2hr jobs so she’s probably doing 3-4 a day so lots of dead unpaid times travelling in between), overheads, trying to compensate for no holiday pay or pension, she’s realised £17/hr is falling below NMW and she’s no hiking it up. I get that, but she needs to be sure she’s doing a good enough job for clients to be accepting of that new price. In 2hrs, for that size house and multiple bathrooms, I’d question the quality of the clean.