How to start a cleaning business in the UK

1. Decide what kind of cleaning you'll sell

Domestic (regular weekly or fortnightly homes), end-of-tenancy, Airbnb changeovers, after-builders and commercial office cleaning all behave very differently as businesses.

Regular domestic and office contracts give you predictable repeat income. One-off jobs like end-of-tenancy pay more per visit but you have to keep refilling the diary. Most people starting out do best building a base of repeat work first, then adding one-off jobs around it.

2. Register the business properly

There is no special cleaning licence in the UK. You have two realistic options: register as a sole trader with HMRC, or set up a limited company at Companies House.

Sole trader is quicker and cheaper to run, and you file a Self Assessment each year. A limited company separates your personal finances from the business and often looks more credible to commercial clients. Either way, register for Self Assessment or Corporation Tax and open a separate business bank account from day one so your bookkeeping stays simple.

You only need to register for VAT once your turnover passes the VAT threshold, so most new cleaning businesses will not need it at the start.

3. Get insured

Public liability insurance is the one nearly every client will ask about. It covers damage to a customer's property or injury caused by your work, and most letting agents and commercial clients will not sign without seeing a certificate.

If you take on employees you also need employers' liability insurance by law. If you work with self-employed subcontractors instead, check their own cover and keep a copy on file.

4. Choose your model: cleaning yourself, or subcontracting

This is the decision that shapes everything else. If you clean yourself, your income is capped by your own hours. If you build the business around self-employed subcontract cleaners, you spend your time winning and managing work instead of doing it.

With a subcontracting model, the cleaners are self-employed: they handle their own tax, their own transport and usually their own products and equipment. Your job is the customer side of the business — the website, the quotes, the scheduling and the standards.

It takes real effort at the start. But it is the route that lets a cleaning business keep running when you are not personally holding a mop, which is why it is the model my guide is built around.

5. Work out your prices

Price from the numbers, not from what the cheapest local competitor charges. Start with what you need to pay a cleaner per hour, add your margin, then add an allowance for admin, insurance, cover for no-shows and marketing.

Domestic work in the UK is usually quoted hourly. Commercial and end-of-tenancy work is normally quoted per job, based on how long you expect it to take. Always view or scope larger jobs before quoting a fixed price.

Set a minimum visit length (two hours is common). Short jobs eat travel time and rarely pay for themselves.

6. Set up a professional online presence

A simple, fast website with your services, your area, and one obvious way to request a quote will out-perform a social page on its own. Add a Google Business Profile — it is free and it is where most local cleaning searches actually end up.

Get a business email address on your own domain, a phone number you answer, and a handful of photos of finished work. That is usually enough to look established.

7. Win your first clients

Start with the routes that cost nothing: your own network, local Facebook and community groups, Nextdoor, and flyers in the streets you actually want to work in.

Then go direct: email and call estate and letting agents about end-of-tenancy work, message local business owners and office managers on LinkedIn, contact construction firms about after-builders cleans, and approach larger cleaning companies who subcontract overflow work out.

List on platforms like Checkatrade and Bark if you want extra volume, but treat them as a top-up rather than your only source of work.

8. Turn a revenue goal into a weekly target

Pick the monthly income you want. Divide it by your average job value to get the number of jobs you need, then divide by four to get a weekly target. Now you know exactly how many quotes you need to send each week rather than hoping work arrives.

Track two numbers only at the start: quotes sent, and quotes won. Everything else can wait.

What it costs to get started

These are typical UK setup costs for a cleaning business built on subcontract cleaners, who normally supply their own transport, products and equipment.

Costs are indicative and change over time — always check current HMRC, Companies House and insurer pricing.

Frequently asked questions