House Cleaning near you

Cleaning businesses use the same three words for very different scopes of work, which is why two quotes for the same house can be so far apart. Settle the scope in writing before anyone starts, room by room, and say which of the extras below you expect.

No Australian state or territory licenses domestic cleaners, so there is no licence number to verify and no regulator holding a register of approved cleaners. Anyone can print a logo and start work tomorrow. What you can verify instead is ordinary business substance: an ABN you can look up, a business name that matches the invoice and the bank account, public liability insurance you have actually seen a certificate of currency for, and a written scope.

Ask specifically whether the insurance covers the individual attending. A business that subcontracts is not necessarily a problem, but its policy may not extend to a subcontractor's work, and a subcontractor may carry nothing. This is the single question most likely to matter if a cleaner knocks a television off a wall or floods a laundry.

A cleaner is usually in the house alone. Many cleaning businesses have their staff obtain a nationally coordinated criminal history check — commonly called a national police check — which summarises a person's disclosable court outcomes across all Australian police services. The Australian Federal Police notes that you cannot apply for a check on someone else without their consent, so a business can only provide one if the worker agreed to it, and that it is up to the person relying on the check to make sure it suits the purpose.

A police check is a snapshot, not a guarantee, and plenty of excellent cleaners have never needed one. Treat it as one signal among several, alongside how long the business has operated, whether the same person attends each visit, and how keys are handled. Agree in writing how the cleaner gets in, where a key is kept between visits, who else can access it, and how it is returned if you stop the service. A keysafe with a code you can change beats a key living in someone's glovebox.

Cleaning products used at work are workplace chemicals, and the work health and safety duties are real. SafeWork NSW tells businesses to get a current safety data sheet before using any hazardous chemical, to keep a register listing the hazardous chemicals used and stored at the workplace with the current safety data sheet for each one, and to make sure chemicals are always properly labelled even after they have been transferred out of the original container. Decanted bottles must be cleaned before they are reused for something else.

As the householder you are not the regulator, but an unlabelled spray bottle of unknown liquid in your kitchen is a fair thing to ask about — especially in a home with children, pets, asthma or stone benchtops that some acidic products will etch. Ask what will be used on which surfaces, and say up front if you want low-odour or fragrance-free products, or if you would rather supply your own.

Cleaning is one of the industries where worker classification genuinely goes wrong. Australian law makes it illegal to misrepresent an employment relationship as an independent contracting arrangement, to dismiss someone in order to re-engage them as a contractor, or to make false statements to push a worker into calling themselves a contractor. That is sham contracting, and the Fair Work Ombudsman enforces the protections around it.

Two consequences reach the household. First, hirers must pay superannuation for some contractors, so a business that treats everyone as a contractor to avoid super is cutting a corner that tends to correlate with others. Second, workers compensation usually does not cover contractors, and cover depends on the rules of each state or territory regulator. If the person mopping your stairs is an uninsured sole trader and falls, that is a far messier situation for everyone than if they are an insured employee. Asking which one they are is not rude; it is the most practical question on the list.

Australia's lease turnover clusters at the end of the calendar year. The school year finishes in December, university years end, leases signed in January come up for renewal, and people move over the Christmas and January break. End of lease cleaners are therefore busiest from late November through February — the height of summer — and that is exactly when they are hardest to book at short notice and least willing to take a job for tomorrow morning.

The climate compounds it. Humidity through the northern wet season from around November to April grows mould in bathrooms and on window seals faster than a fortnightly clean removes it, while summer storms and dust push grime onto tracks and flyscreens that a bond clean is expected to leave spotless. In the southern states, the dry summer means dust and pollen rather than mould. Book an end of lease clean as soon as you give notice, not in the last week.

On the standard itself, Queensland's Residential Tenancies Authority puts it plainly: the premises must be left in the same condition it was in at the start of the tenancy, less fair wear and tear, and the tenant may choose to engage a professional company to do the cleaning or do it themselves. The comparison that matters is the entry condition report, so read it before you book and give the cleaner a copy.

Cleaning is a service, and services bought by consumers come with automatic guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, including that they be provided with acceptable care and skill. The ACCC is blunt that the basic rights covered by consumer guarantees cannot be taken away by anything a business says or does, so a term in a cleaning contract saying no refunds, or that complaints must be made within an hour, does not remove them.

For a minor problem — a few rooms missed, a bathroom half done — the business must fix the problem for free, and in practice that means a re-clean. For a major problem you choose the remedy, which for a service means cancelling the contract and getting a refund, or keeping it and paying a lower price. Photograph what you are unhappy with, raise it in writing the same day, and give the business a genuine chance to return before you engage someone else.