Deposit disputes in England and Wales are decided by adjudicators who compare two documents: the check-in inventory from the day you moved in and the check-out report from the day you left. Not how tidy the place looks. Not how hard you worked. The difference between two reports, minus fair wear and tear.
That is genuinely good news, because it means the standard is knowable in advance. Here is what gets checked, in the order worth tackling it.
First: find your check-in inventory
Before you clean anything, dig out the inventory from when you moved in. It will have photographs. If the oven was already marked as lightly soiled, you are not liable for returning it showroom-new. If the carpets were recorded as professionally cleaned, that is the bar you have to meet.
People routinely over-clean things that were already damaged and completely miss things that were pristine on arrival. Twenty minutes with that document will save you hours.
The six items that cost most deposits
- The oven — including the door glass, the racks and the grill pan
- The extractor hood filter — metal mesh, usually thick with grease, almost never cleaned
- Limescale on taps, shower screens and shower heads
- Window tracks, sills and the inside edges of the frames
- Carpets, particularly traffic lanes and stairs
- Skirting boards, door tops and light switches
Notice the theme. None of these is where you look when you walk into a room, and all of them are on a clerk's printed list. That is precisely why they cost people money.
Kitchen
- Oven interior, door glass between the panes, racks, trays and the grill pan
- Hob, burners and the gap where the hob meets the worktop
- Extractor hood, and the metal filter degreased or replaced
- All cupboards emptied and wiped inside, outside and on top
- Fridge and freezer defrosted, cleaned and left open and switched off
- Washing machine drawer, door seal and filter
- Sink, taps and plughole descaled; splashback and grout cleaned
- Bins washed out; behind and under the appliances swept
The gap beside the cooker is the one everybody forgets. Clerks pull appliances out. Pull yours out first.
Bathrooms
- Limescale off taps, shower head, screen and tiles
- Grout and silicone scrubbed; mould treated rather than ignored
- Toilet cleaned inside, behind and at the base of the pan
- Extractor fan cover removed and dusted
- Mirror and cabinet cleaned inside and out
- Plugholes cleared of hair and residue
Living areas and bedrooms
- Carpets vacuumed thoroughly, then professionally cleaned if required
- Skirting boards, door frames and door tops wiped
- Light switches, sockets and handles cleaned
- Windows inside, including tracks, sills and frames
- Radiators dusted, including behind them
- Curtain rails, blinds and any picture hooks or fixings you added
- Marks and scuffs on walls dealt with sensibly
On walls, be careful. Touching up with slightly wrong paint often looks worse to a clerk than the original mark, and a patchy wall can be treated as damage rather than wear. Clean it, and leave it.
Outside and everything else
- Garden cut and tidy if that was your responsibility under the tenancy
- Patio, path and bin store cleared
- Shed, garage and loft completely emptied
- All rubbish removed from the property — not left in the bins
- Every key, fob and remote returned, including window keys
- Smoke alarm batteries working and light bulbs all present
Rubbish left in the bins is a surprisingly common deduction. If the collection day falls after your check-out, the waste is still yours to remove.
An adjudicator is not asking whether you cleaned. They are asking whether the property is in the condition the check-in report describes, allowing for fair wear and tear.
Carpets: the one to be careful about
Read your tenancy agreement. A great many require carpets to be professionally cleaned at the end of the term if they were cleaned before you moved in, and some ask for a receipt as evidence. A domestic machine will not meet that standard because it lacks the suction to lift grit out of the base of the pile — it mostly wets the carpet and leaves the dirt lower down.
High-powered extraction equipment is a different thing entirely, and it dries in hours rather than days. If your agreement mentions it at all, hire it in and keep the receipt.
When to do it yourself and when to hire in
Do it yourself if you are in a small flat, the check-in report was not especially strict, and you have a clear day after the furniture is out. Cleaning around boxes is not really cleaning, so wait until the property is empty.
Hire in if the deposit is large, the tenancy specifies a professional clean, the property is three bedrooms or more, or you are moving house on the same day. Nobody does a good oven at eleven at night after carrying furniture since eight in the morning.
The timing that makes it easy
The neatest version is one crew doing both halves on the same day: van loaded in the morning, belongings delivered, then straight back to a genuinely empty property for the deep clean. Nothing is cleaned twice, nothing is cleaned around, and there is only one arrival window to be at home for.