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A cleaning company, or
your own cleaner?
Not a question of how dirty something is. It is a question of whether the job needs machinery, height access, several people, or a result someone else will inspect.
A regular cleaner keeps a place that is already clean in good order. A cleaning company is what you call when the work needs equipment, height access or a crew finishing to a deadline. The dividing line is not how dirty something is, it is whether the job needs machinery, several people, or a handover someone else will inspect.
| Cleaning contractor | Your own cleaner | |
|---|---|---|
| Best at | One-off work that needs equipment, height access or a deadline | Keeping a property that is already in order that way |
| Equipment | Machines, chemicals and access equipment supplied | Household equipment, usually yours |
| Height work | Planned, with a lift or tower where needed | Not appropriate |
| Crew size | Several people, so a deadline is achievable | One person |
| Who checks it | A quality control check separate from the person who cleaned | You |
| How it is priced | Per job, against a scope | Per hour or per visit |
| Ongoing cost | Higher per visit, only when needed | Lower per visit, continuous |
01What a regular cleaner is genuinely good at
Maintenance, and it is not a lesser thing. A property that is cleaned regularly by the same person stays in a condition that never needs intervention, and the relationship means they know the place. For an occupied home or a small office that is the right arrangement, and no contractor improves on it.
What it is not built for is a property in an abnormal state: after building work, after long vacancy, or when a floor has stopped responding to ordinary cleaning.
02What needs a contractor instead
Three things, reliably. Work that needs machinery — floor restoration is the clearest case, because a rotary machine and surface-matched chemistry are not household equipment. Work at height, which is a planned activity with its own requirements rather than a taller ladder. And work against a deadline, where the answer is more people rather than more hours.
The fourth, less obvious one is work that will be inspected by somebody else. A handover, a tenancy end or a building manager's sign-off is a different standard from clean, and it is worth buying explicitly.
03Why the cost comparison is not like for like
An hourly rate and a job price are not comparable numbers. A contractor's price includes equipment, consumables, several people, and the fact that the work is finished to a scope rather than until the time runs out. An hourly cleaner's rate includes none of those.
The useful comparison is against the alternative: what a floor costs to replace rather than restore, what a delayed handover costs, or what a failed inspection costs. Those are the numbers that decide it, and they usually decide it clearly.
04In practice most properties want both
The common arrangement, and the sensible one, is a regular cleaner for upkeep and a contractor for the handful of occasions that need one: after a renovation, when a floor needs restoring, when the exterior glass is due, and at a tenancy change.
Treating them as competing options is how properties end up with a cleaner attempting a job that needs equipment, which is the outcome that costs the most in the end.
05The risk nobody prices in
Asking a regular cleaner to take on a contractor's job is not simply less effective; it can be expensive. The two failures that recur are chemical and physical. A household acid used on marble etches it permanently. An abrasive pad used on a glazed tile strips the glaze. Neither is recoverable by cleaning, and both cost more to remedy than the job would have cost done properly.
The other is height. A ladder used past its sensible limit is how people are seriously hurt in this trade, and asking an employee or a domestic cleaner to do it puts the risk somewhere it does not belong.
06A practical way to decide
Ask four questions about the specific job in front of you. Does it need a machine or a chemical you would not keep at home? Is anything out of reach from a step-ladder on level ground? Does it have to be finished by a particular date? Will somebody other than you inspect it?
One yes is enough to make it a contractor's job. Four noes and you are better off with the cleaner you already have, and any contractor worth using will tell you so.
07Getting the two to work together
Where a property has both, the arrangement that causes least friction is to be explicit about the boundary. The regular cleaner owns everything routine. The contractor is called for the specific interventions, and ideally the cleaner is told when that is happening.
It matters more than it sounds. A floor that has just been restored and sealed should not be mopped with a general-purpose cleaner for the first day or two, and nobody will know that unless someone says so. A short handover between the two is usually the difference between restoration work lasting years and lasting months.
From the job photographs
The kind of job that needs the equipment.
A workshop floor no household equipment would recover.
In short
Equipment, height, crew or an inspection: that is the line.
If none of those four apply, a regular cleaner is the better and cheaper answer, and we will say so. If any of them do, it is a contractor's job, and doing it the other way round usually means paying for it twice.
Still not sure which yours is?
Send photographs. Telling you which job it is costs nothing, and it is the answer that decides everything else.