What UK cleaning pays, and what it charges

Before building Leestly we wanted to know one thing: what does a cleaning booking actually cost, and how much of it reaches the person doing the cleaning?

That turned out to be answerable, but not from any single place. Nobody publishes it as one number. You can assemble it, though, entirely from sources that are already public — the Office for National Statistics, the UK government's minimum wage schedule, and the price pages of the companies themselves.

Everything below is somebody else's published figure. None of it is a number about what Leestly pays or charges.

What cleaners earn

The official answer is ONS ASHE 2025, SOC 9223 "Cleaners and domestics": a median of £12.64 an hour across the UK, from a sample of about 512,000. In London it's £13.85 — a premium of under 10%.

The floor underneath that is statutory. The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026. Set the two side by side and the shape of the industry appears immediately: the national median for the occupation sits roughly seven pence below the legal minimum that comes into force this year. Half the trade is at or under the floor.

Job advertisements read higher — Indeed's aggregate of about 134,000 salaries comes out at £13.98 nationally and £13.99 in London, and the city-by-city numbers barely move (£13.40–13.78). A flat national ad rate with no London premium, sitting a pound above the measured median, tells you what job ads are: an offer, not a wage.

Named operators publish their own: Molly Maid £12.27, Merry Maids £13.00, Bright & Beautiful £12.97, Poppies £14.49. Housekeep states £12.50 an hour rising to £13.00 after a year. Agencies that place self-employed cleaners (Maid2Clean, Time For You, Dolly Char) sit at £13–16.

And independents working directly for a household clear roughly £15, or £19–21.50 in London.

That last line is the whole story in one row. The same person doing the same work earns half again as much when there is nobody in between.

What clients pay

Also published, also by the companies themselves.

Across organised providers — companies, agencies and platforms, once you strip out "from £X" teasers and discount club tiers — the median is £20.00 an hour in London and £18.75 in large cities, with the UK overall around £17.

Housekeep publishes both sides, which makes it the most useful single source in the whole exercise. Its own May 2026 cost guide gives London at £19.50 an hour booked through an agency and £17.50 for an independent; outside London, £16.00 and £14.00. It even publishes its own London premium of 20–30%.

City prices from Well Polished, VAT included: Manchester £18.95, Leeds £19.50, Liverpool £17.95, Cardiff £18.75, Birmingham £20.95.

Two things the market agrees on unanimously, which surprised us:

• The minimum visit is two hours. Everywhere. Five or more independent confirmations, not one counter-example below it.
• A deep clean costs more per hour, not less — £20–30 against £17–20 for a regular clean. It is slower work, and the price reflects that. Any model that treats "deep" as a discount for buying more hours is arguing with the entire market.

What the middle takes

Some platforms state a commission outright:

• eMop: 23%. Published on their own site, and their example job-rate table is internally consistent with it (£10 to the cleaner on a £13 job; £20 on £26 — 76.9% both times).
• TaskRabbit: 15%, plus a trust fee of 5–15% on the client side.
• Airtasker: 12.5–20%, tiered.
• TidyChoice: 0% from the cleaner, funded by a subscription instead. Their wording: "We are not an agency and do not take a percentage commission from your earnings."
• Bark doesn't take commission at all — it sells leads, at roughly £7–12 each.

Others don't state one, and here you have to be careful about the difference between a figure a company publishes and a figure you calculate from figures a company publishes.

Housekeep publishes no commission. It publishes a London price of £19.50 and cleaner pay of £12.50 rising to £13.00. (19.50 − 13.00) ÷ 19.50 ≈ 33%. That is arithmetic on their numbers, not a number they state, and it should be read as such — the gap also has to cover matching, support, insurance, payment processing and everything else a platform does.

One more data point worth recording: Helpling closed its UK operation in March 2025. The margins in this market are not obviously generous.

How the research was done, and what we threw away

Twenty-one research passes across eleven domains produced 517 rows. 202 survived — the rule was two independent sources, or one official one. About sixty load-bearing figures were then re-checked against live pages by a separate adversarial pass, and the ONS archives were re-downloaded and MD5-compared against what we'd first pulled.

The discards are more interesting than the survivors:

• Glassdoor, talent.com and Payscale, all rejected. Their "hourly" figures are annual salary divided by 2,080 — which for this occupation produces numbers below the legal minimum wage. They are not measurements of what anyone is paid per hour.
• Adjacent ONS occupations, rejected. Caretakers and cleaning managers are not domestic cleaners, and including them moves the median.
• "From £X" teasers and one discount club tier, rejected — a floor price advertised to get a click is not a price.
• One template national price grid, rejected — it had been counted five separate times as though it were five different cities.

The adversarial pass also overturned things we'd already written down. One agency's "from £13.50/h" northern rate turned out to read "£15–£20 per hour, area dependent" on the live page. Two sources were unreachable behind blocks and got marked unverifiable rather than quietly kept.

Any anchor with fewer than three rows behind it was marked as a fallback rather than treated as a finding.

What the numbers do not tell you

They give an hourly rate on both sides. They do not tell you how many hours a given home actually takes — and without that, an hourly rate is not a price.

We went looking for that number too, and found something stranger: as far as we can tell, nobody has ever published it.

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This research exists because we're building Leestly, a marketplace for home cleaning. It is not a claim about what Leestly pays or charges — just the public shape of the market it is entering.