“What’s your rate?” Four little words that can turn a confident new cleaner into a stammering wreck. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Someone who can blitz a kitchen like a Formula 1 pit crew suddenly freezes the moment a client asks the price, blurts out a number that’s far too low, then spends the next eight months quietly resenting every job they took at it. Pricing terrifies people far more than the actual cleaning ever does. Limescale you can scrub. A figure you’ve committed to out loud is much harder to walk back.
So let me be straight with you, because it’s the question hiding inside this whole article: there is no single correct rate for a self-employed cleaner in London. Anyone who tells you “charge X an hour and you’re sorted” is selling you something. What there is, though, is a right way to arrive at your number – one that accounts for what you actually cost to run, what your time is genuinely worth, and what the market around you will bear. Get that process right and the figure looks after itself. Get it wrong, and you’ll be the cheapest cleaner in SE23 and the most knackered. Let’s make sure you’re neither.
The Number You First Think Of Is Almost Always Too Low
Here’s a pattern I’d put money on. Ask someone just going self-employed what they plan to charge, and they’ll name a figure a pound or two above minimum wage, said with the nervous optimism of someone who half expects you to laugh. They’ve done a sum in their head that goes, “Well, I’d be happy earning fifteen quid an hour, so I’ll charge fifteen quid an hour.” And right there, in that one innocent sentence, they’ve made the most expensive mistake in the trade.
The hourly rate a client pays you is not your wage. I’ll say it again, because it’s the single most important idea in this article: the rate is not your wage. Out of that number comes everything – your products, your travel, your insurance, your tax, the new hoover when the old one dies a dramatic death on someone’s stairs. What’s left after all that is your actual take-home. Charge fifteen and your real earnings might be eight or nine. Suddenly that “happy” figure isn’t looking quite so cheerful.
Why “Charging What the Last Person Charged” Is a Trap
The other classic error is pricing by copying. You hear the cleaner down the road charges eighteen pounds an hour, so you charge seventeen to undercut them, and off everyone trots to the bottom of the barrel together. It’s a race nobody wins, because there’s always someone newer, more desperate, or worse at maths who’ll go a pound lower than you.
London isn’t one market, either. A regular domestic clean in leafy Dulwich, ten minutes from my patch in Forest Hill, supports a very different rate from the same job two postcodes over. Pricing yourself against a vague “going rate” ignores the fact that your costs, your skill and your local area are yours alone. At the time of writing, independent domestic cleaners across London sit somewhere in the broad range of fifteen to twenty-five pounds an hour, with agencies charging more on top. But that range is a starting point for thinking, not a number to copy. Where you land inside it – or above it – is the whole game.
What You’re Actually Charging For (It Isn’t Just the Hour)
Now I should confess something: I’m a cleaner, not an accountant, and if you want proper tax advice you’d be far better off talking to someone who does it for a living than to a man whose genius is mainly in grout. But you don’t need a finance degree to grasp the basic problem, which is that self-employment quietly strips out a load of things a salaried job hands you for free.
No paid holiday. No sick pay. No employer topping up your pension. Take two weeks off in the summer and nobody pays you for them – you simply earn nothing. Catch a stinking cold and you can’t lift a mop, and that’s income gone. Every one of those gaps has to be priced into your rate, because the version of you sunning yourself in August is funded entirely by the version of you working in February.
The Hidden Costs That Eat Your Rate Alive
Then come the running costs, and London adds a few cruel ones of its own. Products and equipment are obvious enough, though they add up faster than you’d think once you’re buying decent kit rather than whatever’s on offer at the Sainsbury’s Local. Travel is the sneaky one. Time spent crossing the city between jobs is unpaid time, and if you’re driving a vehicle that doesn’t meet the standards, the ULEZ charge of twelve pounds fifty a day takes a tidy bite before you’ve cleaned a single thing. Venture into the centre and the Congestion Charge piles on more.
Add insurance – public liability is non-negotiable, as I bang on about constantly – plus your tax and National Insurance, which you’ll be setting aside yourself through self-assessment, since no kindly employer is doing it for you. Roughly speaking, by the time you’ve covered the lot, a meaningful chunk of every hour you charge never reaches your pocket. Price as though it does, and you’re not running a business. You’re running a very tiring hobby.
Hourly, Fixed or Per Job – Picking How You Price
Once you know what you need to earn, you’ve got to decide how to present it, and this is where a lot of cleaners trip over their own feet. There are three main ways to price: by the hour, by a fixed rate for a defined job, or by the room. Each suits different work, and the one you choose says a surprising amount about how the trade will treat you.
Hourly pricing feels safe and transparent, and clients understand it instantly. The problem is that it quietly punishes the very thing you should be rewarded for: speed. My old mentor Stewart drummed this into me years ago, and I’ve written about it before – in cleaning, time is the most important factor there is. The professional who cleans a flat brilliantly in two hours is worth more than the plodder who takes four, yet pure hourly pricing pays the plodder double. That’s madness, and your clients can feel it too.
When a Flat Rate Beats the Clock (and When It Doesn’t)
This is why, as you get experienced and genuinely fast, a fixed price for a defined job often serves you far better. You quote a flat figure for “a full clean of a two-bed flat,” and if your skill means you finish in good time, that efficiency rewards you rather than penalising you. The client gets certainty about the bill, you get paid for results instead of for dawdling, and everybody’s happy. It’s the single best argument for getting properly good at this job rather than just clocking hours.
Fixed pricing isn’t right for everything, mind. For open-ended or unpredictable work – a hoarder’s flat, a post-builders chaos site where nobody knows what’s lurking under the dust – hourly protects you from quoting blind and getting savaged. The skill is reading which job is which. As a rule: known quantity, price the job; great unknown, price the time and build in a buffer for the horrors you can’t yet see.
Charging More Without Losing the Work
Eventually you’ll want to raise your rates, and the fear is always identical: “If I charge more, won’t everyone leave?” Almost never, in my experience. The clients worth keeping value reliability and trust far above saving two quid an hour, and the ones who’d ditch you over a small rise were always going to bolt for the next cheap option anyway. Good riddance, frankly.
The trick with existing clients is simple courtesy. Give plenty of notice, keep it matter-of-fact, and frame it as the routine adjustment it is rather than apologising as though you’ve done something wrong. “My rates are going up to X from the first of next month” – no grovelling, no lengthy justification. People respect a professional who knows their worth far more than one who plainly doesn’t.
How Specialism and Reputation Move Your Rate Up
The real money, though, comes from giving people a reason to pay you more, and that loops straight back to what I wrote about certifications. A bog-standard general cleaner competes on price with everyone. A specialist – someone with NCCA carpet credentials, or a name for spotless end-of-tenancy work that actually gets deposits returned – competes on expertise, and expertise commands a premium. End-of-tenancy and deep cleans in London routinely fetch a flat fee that works out at a far healthier hourly equivalent than regular maintenance cleaning, precisely because they demand knowledge the average person hasn’t got.
Reputation does the same over time. Once you’ve built a name in a specific corner of South East London, the referrals start arriving pre-sold, and people who come recommended rarely haggle. That’s the long game, and it’s the one Stewart was really pointing at all those years ago. Your rate isn’t just a number you pluck from the air. It’s the sum of what you cost, what you can do, and what people trust you to deliver. Get good, get known, and charge accordingly – and you’ll never again be the cheapest cleaner in SE23.