Why the cheapest cleaning quote is almost always the most expensive

I have been quoting cleaning jobs in Hertfordshire for nine years. Every month I see at least one customer come back after going with a cheaper company, usually after the third missed visit, sometimes after something more expensive than that. The cheapest quote almost always becomes the most expensive, and the maths is not hidden if you know where to look.

There are six categories of cost that quietly turn a £14-an-hour quote into a £180 lesson. None of them appear on the original invoice.

The six hidden costs

• Insurance gap: if a cleaner damages your worktop and the company is uninsured, you pay. A new quartz worktop is £1,400 fitted.
• DBS gap: cleaners work alone in your home. A skipped DBS check is a risk you only notice once.
• Churn cost: cheap companies pay below market, so cleaners leave. You retrain a new cleaner every 8 weeks, and each retrain costs you 2 missed surfaces.
• Scope drift: cheap quotes drop oven, windows, and skirting. They reappear as extras at 1.6 times the standard rate.
• Key-handling risk: uninsured key loss costs £140 to £220 to re-key, plus the lost morning.
• Re-clean policy gap: cheap companies do not re-clean. If the agent fails the inventory, you pay the second company anyway.

Where the honest price floor actually is

Run the maths on a £14-an-hour quote. Take off NIC at 13.8 percent, holiday accrual at 12.07 percent, employer pension at 3 percent, public liability insurance at roughly £0.45 per hour, vehicle and product cost at £1.20 per hour, and DBS amortisation. There is around £8.10 left for the cleaner's gross pay. That is below the April 2026 National Living Wage of £12.21 for cleaners over 21. Something is being skipped.

TPN, the trade body for cleaning professionals, said in their April 2026 cost survey that the operating floor for a fully insured, DBS-checked, employed (not self-employed) domestic cleaner in the south-east is £17.20 per hour. Quotes below that floor are not the same product.

What it actually costs when it goes wrong

Three real examples from the last 12 months. A customer in Welwyn switched to a cheap company at £15.50 an hour. Six months in, an uninsured cleaner cracked a quartz worktop dragging an espresso machine. The replacement bill was £1,420. A customer in Cheshunt lost a key copy that was never returned by a cleaner who left the firm. Re-keying was £180 and they replaced the smart lock for £220 more. A landlord in Stevenage saved £85 on the end of tenancy clean, then paid £340 to re-do it after the inventory failed.

What this means for your next quote

Always get three quotes. Discard the cheapest unless you can see how the operating floor maths still works. Discard the dearest unless the brand premium is buying you something specific (a recognisable name on the invoice for a high-end let, for example). Book the middle one with the cleanest written answers to the 4-question test.

A 5-step plan to avoid the false saving

1. 1Ask every quoter for their public liability certificate and DBS policy in writing.
2. 2Reject quotes that fall more than 15 percent below the local median (£19.50 in Hertfordshire).
3. 3Ask for a written re-clean policy, especially on tenancy work.
4. 4Ask their cleaner turnover rate. Under 20 percent annually is healthy.
5. 5Read the contract for hidden extras: ovens, inside windows, skirting, blinds.

What to watch in the rest of 2026

The April National Living Wage uplift and the September employer-NIC threshold change both pushed the operating floor up by roughly 80p per hour. Expect a wave of below-floor quotes from companies cutting corners to hold their headline price, and an honest 50p to 90p uplift from the companies that did not.