What home cleaning costs and how often to book it

The price is easy to state: 45 euros an hour with one cleaner, products included. The harder question is how many hours your home needs — and the answer depends more on frequency than on square metres.

What the hours cover

Two hours is enough for a studio or a small one-bedroom on a regular schedule. That covers vacuuming and washing floors, wiping surfaces, the bathroom, the kitchen worktops and a change of towels.

Three hours is the standard for an ordinary one-bedroom every fortnight. That adds window sills, mirrors, cupboard fronts, washing the bin cupboard and under the bed.

Four hours is needed for a two-bedroom, or when a month has gone by. Then there is also time for the oven surfaces, the fridge shelves, the gaps between radiator fins and the skirting boards.

Six hours and up is house territory, or a thorough one-off. That goes through the places a weekly clean never touches.

Frequency sets the price, not size

The same one-bedroom takes three hours if someone comes every fortnight and five if the last visit was two months ago. Dirt does not accumulate evenly: limescale in the bathroom and grease in the kitchen harden, and hardened dirt releases more slowly than fresh.

Over a year, twice a month costs less per clean than once a month. That is counter-intuitive, but it is simple physics rather than a sales line.

A reasonable default: every two weeks with children or pets in the house; every three or four weeks for one or two adults who do not cook much.

What to do before the cleaner arrives

This is what turns a three-hour clean into a two-and-a-half-hour one.

Clear things off surfaces. A cleaner does not know what is rubbish and what matters, so they move objects and wipe around them. An empty worktop is washed in one pass; a full one takes three.

Say in advance what not to touch. Instruments, an aquarium, a collection, a particular desk. A written list works better than something said aloud once.

Leave a key or agree a door code. If the cleaner has to wait at the gate, that is still working time.

One-off or regular

A one-off suits a situation that is out of the ordinary: renovation, illness, guests arriving, a move. It is essentially the same work as an end-of-tenancy clean and is priced the same way, by the hour.

A regular arrangement suits a home where cleaning chronically does not get finished. It has two advantages that have nothing to do with price: the same cleaner learns the home, and there is no need to agree a time from scratch every visit.

We do not tie customers to a fixed term. If the interval feels too frequent, it can be stretched.

The household tax credit cuts the bill

Home cleaning is ordinary household work, so the labour share qualifies for kotitalousvähennys. For the 2026 tax year the credit is 35 % of the labour cost, up to 1,600 euros per person, with a 150 euro own-liability.

A worked example: three hours every fortnight is 135 euros times 26, or 3,510 euros a year. The credit on that is 1,228.50 euros, less the 150 euro own-liability. That returns 1,078.50 euros and makes the real cost 2,431.50 euros a year.

In June 2026 the government proposed raising the credit to 40 % and 2,100 euros for 2026–2027, retroactively. If it passes, it will also apply to work already done this year. Check the rate in force on vero.fi before working out your own.

For the credit, the labour share has to appear separately on the invoice. On ours it does.

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The scope of each service is on the apartment cleaning and house cleaning pages, and the credit rules in full are in a separate article. Tell us the size of the home and the interval you want and we will work out the hours.