Move-Out Cleaning: What Gets Checked, and What It Costs

The truck has gone, the rooms echo, and there is one job left that nobody planned for. Move-out cleaning is the part of a move people either forget entirely or discover at 9 PM the night before the walkthrough, standing in an empty kitchen with a sponge.

It is also the part with a price tag attached to getting it wrong: the deduction a landlord takes for cleaning is usually larger than what the clean would have cost.

What a move-out clean is, and what it is not

The three levels get mixed up constantly, so here is the difference in plain terms.

A standard clean is the regular tidy-up: kitchen, bathrooms, floors, dusting, bins out. It assumes furniture is in place and someone lives there.

A deep clean adds the parts that get attention once or twice a year — baseboards, door frames, window sills, light fixtures, the built-up grime around a cooker and behind taps.

A move-out clean is the empty-house version, and it is the only one that includes the things an inspection actually looks at: inside the cabinets and drawers, inside the oven, inside the fridge, the closets, and every floor with nothing standing on it. That last part matters more than people expect — a place is only cleanable like this once it is empty, which is why the clean belongs after the truck, not before it.

What inspections tend to catch

From what comes back to us, the deductions cluster in the same few places:

• The oven and the stovetop. The single most common one, and the most time-consuming to fix yourself.
• Inside kitchen cabinets and drawers. Crumbs and liner residue in a cupboard nobody opened for two years.
• The fridge, if it stays with the property: shelves out, seals wiped, nothing growing in the bottom drawer.
• Bathroom grout and shower doors — limescale, not dirt, which needs product and dwell time rather than scrubbing.
• Baseboards, skirting and door frames, which look fine until the furniture is gone and the light hits them.
• Marks where furniture stood. Worth mentioning to a cleaner rather than hoping nobody looks.

What it costs

We book cleaning through the crew we work with, and our prices go by bedrooms and bathrooms rather than by the hour, so you know the number before anyone starts. Move-out cleaning starts at $430 for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom home; a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house is $730. A regular clean of the same house is far less — a standard visit starts at $185 — because it is a different job.

Add-ons exist for the things that are not always needed: inside the fridge or the oven when they are not part of the level you picked, interior windows, a basement. The full table, all three levels and every extra, is on our cleaning page.

Doing it yourself: when it is worth it

Honestly? Sometimes.

If you are leaving a studio you have lived in for eight months, you kept on top of it, and you have a free day before the keys go back, do it yourself. Buy an oven cleaner the day before so it has time to work, start at the top of each room and finish with the floors, and do the fridge last so it can drain and dry.

If you are leaving a family house after five years, you have a job on Monday and the movers are coming Saturday, the maths changes quickly. A deep clean of a three-bedroom house is a full day of two people’s work. You are not really choosing between paying and not paying — you are choosing between paying a cleaner and paying the landlord.

How to line it up with the move

• Book both at once. We schedule the clean for the same day the truck empties the place, so the cleaners are not standing in a hallway of boxes.
• Leave the power and water on. Obvious right up until somebody schedules the utilities cutoff for the morning of the clean.
• Keep one bin bag and the keys back. Everything else can go on the truck.
• Do the walkthrough the day after, not the same afternoon. It leaves room for anything the inspection turns up.
• Ask your building for its checklist. Some property managers publish one; working to their list beats guessing at it.

If you want the move and the clean handled as one booking, that is what we do — see cleaning for prices by home size, or get a quote with your move date and we will line the two up.