What an office cleaning contract should actually say

Cleaning contracts go wrong in a very particular way. Nobody lies. The company does roughly what it said, the client expected something a little different, and eight months later there is a tense conversation about bins and windows in which both sides are technically right. The cause is almost always the same: a quote of five lines and a price, signed because it was cheap and clear, when what was needed was something longer and duller. Here is what a contract should tell you — written, deliberately, as a guide to interrogating any cleaning company, including this one.

The scope list is the contract

Everything else is administration. If the document does not contain a specific list of what gets cleaned, you have not bought cleaning — you have bought attendance.

"General office cleaning" is not a scope. It is a heading. The list underneath it should be concrete enough to settle an argument without anyone having to be reasonable: desks wiped where clear, floors vacuumed, hard floors mopped, kitchen surfaces and sink, appliance exteriors, toilets and sanitary fittings, mirrors, bins emptied and re-lined, internal glass on doors.

Just as important is what the list excludes, because the exclusions are where surprises live. Washing up left in the sink. Clearing desks to clean them. Inside the fridge and the microwave. Windows above ground level. Anything needing a ladder. None of those are unreasonable to exclude — they are separate jobs with separate time and, sometimes, separate insurance. They are only unreasonable to leave unsaid.

A good scope list is slightly boring to read. That is the feature, not the flaw.

Frequency belongs per item

The second failure is a single frequency at the top of the page. "Three times weekly" tells you how often someone arrives; it tells you nothing about how often anything specific happens.

In practice a sensible office contract has at least three tiers, and they should be written down that way:

• Every visit: bins, kitchen surfaces, toilets, high-contact points, the floors people actually walk on.
• Weekly: all floors including under and behind, internal glass, skirting and the desk surfaces that are usually covered.
• Monthly or quarterly: high dusting, vents and grilles, light fittings, window sills, inside the fridge if it is included at all, and upholstery.

The monthly tier is the one that quietly disappears from cheap contracts, and it is the one that determines whether an office still looks right after a year. Dust on the tops of things, greasy vent grilles and grey skirting boards are not a daily-cleaning failure. They are the absence of a periodic tier nobody agreed to.

Who actually turns up

This question changes the result more than the price does, and it is rarely asked.

There are two models. In the first, a named cleaner or small team is assigned to your site and comes every time. They learn the building — which door sticks, which desk belongs to someone who does not want it touched, where the spare bags live — and the standard rises over the first month and then stays there. In the second, whoever is available that evening is dispatched. The work gets done, but it is done for the first time, every time, and the standard is whatever a stranger can achieve in the same number of minutes.

Neither model is dishonest. They cost different amounts and produce different results. Ask which one you are buying, and ask what happens when that person is ill — "we send a replacement" is fine, "we send a replacement who has been shown round" is better.

Then ask the follow-on questions: are the cleaners employed or subcontracted, are they insured, and is there any check that the visit happened at all. On our own contracts that last one is an NFC check-in at the site and photographs of the finished areas, which exists so that the answer is a record rather than an assurance. Whatever a company uses, the point is the same: you should not have to take attendance on trust.

Who buys the toilet roll

An unglamorous section that causes real friction. Consumables — toilet paper, hand towels, soap, bin liners, dishwasher tablets — are either included, charged on, or yours to buy. All three are normal. Unstated is not.

Two things worth pinning down. First, who notices when it runs out: if the cleaner is not responsible for stock, someone in your office is, and that person should know it. Second, whose equipment and chemicals are used, and whether anything is being used on your floors that the flooring manufacturer would object to. That sounds like a technicality until a wood floor goes cloudy.

Keys, alarms and what happens if something breaks

If you are handing over access to an empty building, the contract should say how that access is held and what happens when it goes wrong.

Look for: how keys or codes are stored and who has them, what happens to them when a cleaner leaves the company, who is named on the alarm and who the monitoring company calls, and what the liability position is if something is damaged during a visit. "We are insured" is the beginning of an answer. Insured for what, and what is the excess, is the rest of it.

The reasonable version of this is mundane: keys signed out and logged, codes personal rather than shared, an insurance certificate you are allowed to see, and a named person to ring at nine in the evening when the alarm goes off. If a company cannot describe its own procedure without improvising, that is useful information.

How it ends

Read this part first, actually. A cleaning contract is cheap to enter and the notice period is where it becomes expensive.

One month either way is normal and fair. Three months on a small office is a long time to keep paying for something you have stopped wanting. Automatic annual renewal with a short cancellation window is legal and common, and it is also how businesses end up in year three of a contract they meant to review. Note the date in a calendar the day you sign.

Two more clauses worth finding: what happens if the standard drops — is there a stated process, a period to fix it, a right to leave — and whether the price can be adjusted mid-term, by how much and with what notice. Indexation clauses are normal; open-ended "we may adjust prices" clauses are not.

None of this is adversarial. A company that writes all of it down is telling you it intends to be measured against it, and that is the company you want. If you are comparing quotes for office cleaning, compare these six sections rather than the headline number — the cheapest quote is usually the one with the shortest scope list, and you will find that out in month three.

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