The best cleaner I ever employed stayed with me for eleven years. She knew which office kept confidential files out on the desk overnight and where the spare bin bags lived on the third floor, and she knew it without being told twice. When she retired it took three people the better part of a month to cover what she’d done on her own. That’s the thing nobody tenders for: continuity. And in London commercial cleaning, continuity is rare.
Why do cleaners keep walking out of commercial contracts?
Turnover in this trade runs high for reasons that stop being mysterious the moment you’ve built a rota yourself. Pay sits underneath most of it. A cleaner on the statutory minimum, in a city where a monthly travelcard swallows a chunk of the week’s wages, is doing sums that don’t add up. When a warehouse round the corner offers forty pence more an hour, the maths makes the decision for them. I’ve lost good people to a supermarket depot and a hospital portering job in the same month, both for pennies more and daylight hours.
Then there’s the way the job treats people. Cleaners are often the only workers in a building told to be invisible – finished and gone before anyone important arrives. Invisibility by design wears at you. A supervisor who never learns your name, a head office that only rings when something’s been missed, a client who steps over the mop bucket without a word: it adds up to a message, and the message is that you don’t much matter.
I’ll say the thing most of my competitors won’t. Zero-hours contracts are the single biggest driver of churn in this industry, and any contractor still handing them out is telling you plainly how they see the people doing the work. You can’t ask someone to build childcare and travel around hours you won’t guarantee, then act surprised when they’ve gone by spring.
The shift that eats your evening
The hours are their own problem. Offices get cleaned when they’re empty, so the work lands before seven in the morning or after six at night. A lot of contracts run as split shifts – two hours at dawn, two at dusk, with a dead gap in the middle too short to go home and too long to sit around unpaid. That pattern grinds people down. They tolerate it while they must and drop it the instant a single daytime job comes up, and I don’t blame one of them.
What does turnover actually cost the contract?
The visible cost of replacing a cleaner is the advert and the interview. That’s the small part. The real bill hides in the fortnight after someone leaves, when the site runs short-handed and the people still there either pick up the slack or let the standard slip. Either way, that costs.
Then you recruit. In commercial work that usually means a DBS check and, for secure sites, a vetting process that can run weeks before the new person sets foot in the building. Through those weeks you’re covering a Farringdon floor with agency staff at a premium, or with your own supervisors doing shifts they shouldn’t have to. That costs too – and more than the wage you were trying to save.
The part nobody prices in is knowledge. A cleaner who’s worked a building for two years knows the boardroom gets used on Thursdays and that the client is particular about the glass doors. A replacement knows none of it and takes months to learn. In the gap, complaints go up, and a client who fields three complaints in a month starts wondering whether the contract’s worth renewing. Lose the contract and you’ve lost far more than a cleaner.
And there’s the redoing. A half-trained starter misses the underside of the desks or leaves streaks on the partition glass, a client photographs it, and now a supervisor drives across town to put it right on a Saturday. The job gets paid for once and done twice. On a tight-margin contract, a handful of Saturdays like that is the difference between a site making money and losing it.
The bill that never reaches the invoice
Every departure pulls a manager off the work that actually grows a business and drops them into recruitment and paperwork. Multiply that across a portfolio running thirty per cent annual churn and you’ve got a manager who does little else. Meanwhile the team that stays watches the churn and reads it correctly – if everyone keeps leaving, this must be a bad place to work – and a few of them start looking too. Churn breeds churn. I’ve watched a stable site come apart in a single quarter because two good people left within a fortnight of each other and took the mood of the place with them. The replacements cost me nothing on paper and a small fortune in practice – six weeks of wobble on the floor and a supervisor stretched so thin I nearly lost her as well.
How does churn show up on the client’s floor?
From the client’s side, turnover doesn’t announce itself as turnover. It shows up as inconsistency. One week the desks are spotless, the next the bins get missed, because a new starter hasn’t been shown the routine and nobody had time to teach them properly. The client doesn’t know they’re watching churn. They know the standard wobbles, and they start to lose faith.
There’s a trust cost sitting behind that. A building’s cleaning team holds keys and after-hours access to floors full of laptops and confidential paper. Every time the team changes, the circle of people with the run of your office at ten at night gets redrawn.
A revolving door is a security problem
There’s a reason the vetting process exists, and constant turnover puts it under real strain. When you’re desperate to fill a shift on a secure site, the temptation is to cut a corner – start someone provisionally, chase the paperwork later. Good contractors don’t. I’ve turned down last-minute cover rather than put an unvetted person into a solicitor’s office overnight. A client rarely sees that decision, but it separates a contractor who takes the keys seriously from one who doesn’t. Get that wrong once and you’re not managing a complaint any more. That costs in a way no invoice captures.
What do the good contractors actually do differently?
Everything above is fixable, and the contractors who manage it tend to do the same handful of things. They guarantee hours, so a cleaner knows what’s landing in their account at month’s end and can plan around it. Each site gets a named supervisor who actually knows the team, not a voice on a phone. There’s a proper induction, too – a walk round the site with someone who already knows it, rather than a laminated sheet and a bunch of keys – so a new cleaner starts the first shift knowing where the risers are and which floor the fussy tenant sits on. And they build somewhere to go – a good cleaner can become a supervisor and then an account manager, so the job turns into a career with a floor under it rather than a stopgap. When people can see a way up, they stay to climb it.
Pay is the argument I keep having
I pay the London Living Wage, and I argue about it with prospective clients more often than I’d like. The London Living Wage sits at £14.80 an hour for 2025–26, set by the Living Wage Foundation against the real cost of living in the capital. The statutory National Living Wage rose to £12.71 in April 2026. That gap of a little over two pounds an hour reads as trivial until you annualise it: for a full-time cleaner it works out at roughly four thousand pounds a year, money that decides whether someone stays put or spends their breaks scrolling job adverts.
A client looking only at the monthly invoice sees the London Living Wage contractor as the expensive one. What they don’t see is that the cheaper quote has already priced in turnover. The low wage guarantees people leave, and the client pays for that leaving in missed bins and unfamiliar faces instead of in pounds on the invoice. I’d rather charge a bit more and send the same person to your building every week for five years.
Can you really build a stable cleaning team in London?
You can, and I have, but it takes deciding to. Stability comes from a dozen dull choices made in the staff’s favour rather than the invoice’s – luck has little to do with it. The awkward moment where it’s won or lost is the handover, when a contract changes hands.
The TUPE handover nobody plans for
Under TUPE, when a new contractor takes over a site the existing cleaning staff transfer across on their current terms. On paper that protects people. In practice it’s the most fragile point in the whole business, because the incoming contractor often inherits a demoralised team who’ve watched their old employer lose the contract and assume they’re next. The good contractors read that fear and move fast to settle it; the bad ones confirm it by trimming hours in the first week.
We took over a nine-floor block off Wellesley Road in East Croydon a little over two years ago – a mixed-tenant office with a cleaning team of six, every one of them braced to be managed out within the month. The previous contractor had run them on zero-hours and a rotating cast of supervisors. I did the opposite. I guaranteed everyone’s hours in writing in the first week and moved the whole team onto the London Living Wage. One supervisor went in and stayed. Five of those six are still with us. The sixth left to train as an electrician, which is the one kind of leaving I’m glad about.
