The Real Cost of Bringing On a New Cleaner (And Why It's Not the Wage)
Dan Teare
Most cleaning businesses know exactly what a new cleaner costs in terms of wage, National Insurance, holiday pay, etc.
What tends not to be in that spreadsheet is everything that happens before and after, and if you asked most managers to put a number on that, they'd genuinely struggle, because it's just spread across too many people and small jobs to ever end up on one line.
But start with just getting someone in the door: the ad, going through applications, the interview itself, chasing up references. CIPD's UK-wide research puts the typical cost of recruiting an ordinary role at around £1,500 once you count advertising and everyone's time on it. Cleaning roles usually come in a fair bit under that figure; to be clear, you're not running a lengthy executive search. But under £1,500 still isn't nothing, and it's rarely written down anywhere as a cost.
Then there's checking them and kitting them out. A DBS check is £21.50 through the DBS directly, though most businesses go through an umbrella body, which adds another £5 to £16 on top. Add uniform, ID, site access, PPE where it's needed. All small amounts individually, and that's probably why nobody bothers logging them.
The bigger one is getting someone properly up to speed. CIPD asked HR professionals across the country how long it takes a new starter to become genuinely productive, and 71% said three months or more. For those three months, someone more experienced is keeping an eye on the work, answering the questions a settled cleaner wouldn't need to ask. That time has to come from somewhere, and usually it comes from a manager who was supposed to be doing other more important things.
CIPD's same research found that 41% of new hires across UK employment hand in their notice within the first twelve weeks. And cleaning tends to run above that national average; there's reporting from within the industry putting typical turnover in commercial cleaning above 40% a year, with some operators in the toughest patches of the market seeing figures closer to 300 or 400%.
What that means in practice is that for a fair number of new starters, all of the above happens, and then it happens again a few months later.
We won't pretend there's a single tidy industry figure for what all this adds up to, but what's fair to say is that even a conservative version of the above- the ad, the DBS check, the kit, a light estimate of extra supervision in the first month- comes to a few hundred pounds before that cleaner has done a single shift. And that's before anything's gone wrong yet, and before you factor in the real possibility they don't make it past twelve weeks.
None of that happens because anyone's careless, but because it's spread so thin across the week that it never once gets seen as a total.
If there's a pattern in where this actually costs businesses the most, it's rarely the hiring itself; it's what comes after, and none of it shows up as a wage cost anywhere. It shows up as admin, and it tends to grow with every new hire, right up until someone can actually see it happening as it happens rather than hearing about it a few days later.
That's probably the real story behind trying to grow a cleaning business smoothly. The hiring was never really the expensive part on its own. It's how much of it happens without anyone watching, and every hire that goes through without much visibility is one more place where a bit of control gets missed.
