How often should you deep clean? A frequency guide built from 4,800 homes

We have a spreadsheet that nobody outside the office sees. It logs every visit, every duration, and the soil score the lead cleaner assigns on arrival. After 4,800 homes and 38,000 visits, six patterns emerged. Pick the profile closest to your house. The cadence below is what actually keeps a property at the standard people want, not the cadence we would love to sell you.

Profile 1: Single occupant, flat or small house

• Recommended cadence: fortnightly, 2 hours.
• Warning sign you need weekly: kitchen worktops sticky on arrival.
• Spend bias: 60 percent kitchen and bathroom, 40 percent dust and floors.

Profile 2: Couple, working full-time, no children, no pets

• Recommended cadence: weekly, 2.5 hours.
• Reason for weekly over fortnightly: hard water marks build visibly in 7 days in AL and SG postcodes.
• Common mistake: skipping the bedroom because it 'looks fine'. Dust load doubles between week 1 and week 2.

Profile 3: Family with under-5s

• Recommended cadence: weekly, 3 to 3.5 hours.
• Add a deep clean of the high-chair and floor zone monthly.
• Use plant-based products only in food-prep and play areas. The reduction in skin reactions in the home is small but real.

Profile 4: Family with teenagers

• Recommended cadence: weekly, 3 hours.
• Bedrooms are excluded by 70 percent of clients. That is fine: focus the time on the kitchen, the bathrooms used by the teens (the worst by surface metric we have) and the hallway.
• Add a 60-minute teen bathroom deep clean monthly. We pull more grime out of one teen bathroom than two adult ones combined.

Profile 5: Pet household (dog or two cats)

• Recommended cadence: weekly, plus a vacuum-only mid-week visit if the cleaner is happy to do it.
• Pet hair load doubles every 6 days untouched, regardless of breed.
• Quarterly deep upholstery clean is the highest-value add-on. Sofas are the single biggest hair reservoir.

Profile 6: Dual-working professional household

• Recommended cadence: fortnightly, 3 hours, with a quarterly half-day deep clean.
• Reason: house is empty 60+ hours a week, soil load is low but accumulates evenly.
• The quarterly deep clean handles the windows, oven and inside-cupboard work that gets skipped weekly.

Five warning signs your cadence is wrong

1. 1Limescale on the kitchen tap at the start of every visit.
2. 2Visible dust on the TV unit within 4 days of cleaning.
3. 3Bathroom silicone darkening between visits.
4. 4Skirting boards always scuff-marked at the bottom.
5. 5Cleaner running over allocated time on 3 visits in a row.

What to watch in your own home

Keep a note for one month. After each clean, log the day it stops feeling clean. If that day is sooner than the gap to the next visit, you are short a visit. If it is later, you may be fine on a longer interval. Most clients we move from fortnightly to 10-day to weekly find the right cadence within two months.