How often should you have your house cleaned?

There is no correct interval. There is only how fast your particular home goes from clean to not-clean, and that varies more between two houses on the same street than between two neighbourhoods.

The useful way to decide is to stop thinking about a schedule and start thinking about two rooms. Kitchens and bathrooms set the pace. Bedrooms and living rooms tolerate a long gap; a shower does not. If you know how those two rooms behave in your house, you know your interval.

Four things that set the pace

These four account for most of the difference between two homes of the same size. Count yours before you pick a frequency.

• People and pets per square foot. Four people in 1,100 square feet generate more than two people in 2,400. A shedding dog counts roughly like an extra person.
• Whether shoes come off at the door. This one is close to a switch. A shoes-off house keeps floors presentable two to three times longer, and Pacific Northwest streets are wet most of the year.
• Whether the house is occupied during the day. A home office in daily use means a kitchen used three times a day instead of once, and a bathroom used all day rather than twice.
• Hard floors versus carpet. Hard floors show dust sooner and clean faster. Carpet hides it and holds it. The one that looks dirty first is not the one that is dirty first.

Every two weeks

This is the interval the work is designed around, and it is the sensible place to start. Two weeks is short enough that nothing has time to bond to a surface — soap film wipes off instead of needing to be dissolved, kitchen grease is still soft, grout has not started to shade.

The practical test: if your bathroom looks fine on day ten and questionable on day fourteen, every two weeks is your answer. You are cleaning just before the point where it gets harder.

Weekly

Weekly is not twice the cleaning. It is a different relationship with the house. Nothing accumulates, so each visit is lighter, and the home stays at a level that a fortnightly schedule touches only on the day itself.

It earns the difference in three situations: a shedding pet, children under about six, or a household where someone is home all day. In all three the load is continuous rather than occasional, and two weeks is long enough for it to become work rather than upkeep.

Monthly

Monthly is a real option and it suits a specific household: one or two adults, out most of the day, no pets, shoes off. Under those conditions thirty days does less damage than you would think.

The honest part is that a monthly visit cannot be a lighter visit. Thirty days puts down a film in the kitchen and hard-water marks in the shower that fourteen days does not, and both take longer to remove than to prevent. A monthly clean that is priced and scheduled like a fortnightly one will leave you disappointed at the edges.

Not on a schedule at all

Sometimes the interval is the wrong question. A one-off makes more sense when the trigger is an event rather than a rhythm — before family arrives, after a renovation, at the end of a lease, or when a house has simply got away from you and needs a reset before any schedule would help.

In that case book the reset first and decide about a rhythm afterwards, once you can see what the house looks like maintained.

What it costs to guess wrong

Very little, which is the point. Recurring visits with us start at $185, the first visit is priced as a deep clean because it is heavier, and you can reschedule or cancel free up to 24 hours before a visit.

Start at every two weeks. After three visits you will know whether the house is arriving at each one already tired, which means go weekly, or still looking fine, which means you can stretch. That is a better answer than any rule of thumb, including this one.