End-of-lease commercial cleaning: dilapidations, schedule of condition, and avoiding the £8k surprise
The dilapidations bill arrives months after the keys are handed back. Here is how to make sure the cleaning line is not the line that hurts.
A Hertfordshire marketing agency handed back a 2,400 sq ft office in March 2025. They had cleaned it themselves over the final weekend, took photos, locked up. In August they received a dilapidations claim for £11,800. Cleaning accounted for £4,200 of it. They paid £3,600 in the end. The whole dispute would have closed at zero if they had read the schedule of condition.
End-of-lease cleaning is not end-of-tenancy cleaning with a bigger hoover. The benchmark is the schedule of condition that was attached to the lease at signing, often 5 or 10 years earlier. That document, not the current state of the office, is what the surveyor measures against.
Find the schedule of condition first
Pull the lease pack from the original solicitor. The schedule of condition is usually an appendix with photographs, dated. If it is missing, the landlord's surveyor will work from the lease covenants, which are stricter. Either way, you need to know which document governs before you spend a pound on cleaning.
The cleaning scope that closes the file
- Carpets: hot-water extraction across every tile, including under desks. Photograph before and after with a date-stamped meter reading from the machine.
- Walls: scuff removal to the height of the original paint finish. Patch paint only with a matched sample, not nearest available.
- Kitchen: degrease tops of units, behind the fridge, inside the dishwasher pump filter. The surveyor will open all three.
- Washrooms: descale every tap, replace any silicone showing mould bloom, polish chrome to the original schedule photo.
- Floors: lift every floor box, vacuum the cavity. This is the single most-missed item.
- Ceiling tiles: replace any with water marks, even historic. £4 per tile vs £40 per tile through the surveyor.
Brief the surveyor before the visit
If you are commissioning a specialist clean, invite the landlord's surveyor to inspect at the end of the works rather than after handover. A walk-through with the cleaner present resolves 70% of items on the spot. Items raised in writing weeks later become disputes by default.
When to book the clean
Two windows: the week before handover for the main clean, and the morning of handover for a 90-minute touch-up. Anything booked earlier loses surface freshness on the polished and glass items, which is what the surveyor sees first.
Quick questions, straight answers
- Can we do the dilapidations clean in-house?
- You can, but the dispute risk is asymmetric. A £600 specialist clean closes a claim that could open at £4,000. The economics only work in-house if your team has done a commercial exit before.
- Does the landlord have to use the schedule of condition?
- If one was annexed to the lease and properly executed, yes. If it was not, the lease covenants govern and they are usually stricter on cleaning.
Founded the company in 2017 after a decade managing facilities for two FTSE 250 offices in Hatfield and Stevenage.
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