How to Choose a Cleaner in Brisbane

Cleaning quotes are unusually hard to compare. Everyone lists the same rooms, everyone promises thorough and reliable, and the only figure that differs is the price. What actually decides whether you are still happy in 6 months is rarely on the quote at all. Here is what to look at instead, and why.

Start with insurance, then move on

Public liability insurance is a baseline, not a selling point. Any cleaner running a real business carries it and will send you the certificate of currency without hesitating. A pause, a change of subject, or a promise to email it later that never arrives tells you how the rest of the arrangement is likely to run.

What insurance does not cover is worth understanding. It exists for the accident: a knocked vase, a scratched benchtop, water where water should not be. It does nothing about work that was simply not done well. Those are 2 separate conversations, and plenty of people ask the first question and assume it answered the second.

While you are asking, ask who else holds keys or codes, whether the person doing the work is an employee or a subcontractor, and whether anyone entering your home has been through a police check. None of that is unreasonable. Someone will be in your house alone.

Will the same person come each time

This is the question people skip and later wish they had asked. Larger agencies often run a roster, so whoever is available takes the job. It works, in the sense that your house gets cleaned. What you lose is accumulated knowledge.

A cleaner who has been through your home 20 times knows that the ensuite screen builds up faster than the main bathroom, that the cupboard fronts either side of the cooktop go greasy first, that the sliding door track collects everything, and that you would rather they spent 10 extra minutes on the shower than on the spare room nobody uses. None of that transfers on a handover sheet. It gets rebuilt from scratch every time a new person walks in, and mostly it does not get rebuilt at all.

Rotating staff also makes accountability vague. When something is missed and 4 different people have cleaned your home in 2 months, nobody owns it. A small operation where the same 1 or 2 people attend every visit is harder to scale and considerably easier to trust.

How they price, and what the pricing model rewards

Cleaners price either by the hour or by the job. Both are legitimate. Neither is neutral, because each pays for something different, and people behave in line with what they are paid for.

A flat rate rewards finishing fast. If the job pays the same whether it takes 3 hours or 5, every minute saved is money earned. That pressure does not usually show up as visibly skipped rooms. It shows up as speed: a spray and wipe across surfaces instead of the physical effort that shifts build-up, a quick pass on the shower rather than working the grout, skirting boards and door frames left for another day, the back of the cupboard permanently deferred. It also creates a quiet pull toward harsher chemistry, because strong products are what you reach for when a surface has to look done in half the time it would take to clean it.

Hourly pricing has the opposite problem in theory, which is that slow work costs you more. In practice the fix is simple: agree the hours in advance, agree the list, and judge the result. What hourly buys is honesty about the trade-off. If you want the oven done properly this visit, something else moves to next visit, and you can see exactly what that costs. Nobody is quietly absorbing it by rushing.

We charge $85 per hour, and the reasoning is not complicated. A commodity clean is priced on speed, so harsh chemistry has to compensate for the minutes nobody paid for. We would rather pay for the minutes. If you want to see how that plays out against the cheap end of the market, we have written about it at length in what a low quote actually costs you, and there is a plain breakdown of hours and inclusions on the cleaning costs page.

What is included, and what quietly becomes an extra

Get the inclusion list in writing, then read it for what is absent rather than what is present. Everybody lists kitchens and bathrooms. The variation lives in the detail work, and in the spots most cleans miss.

Our standard inclusions are benchtops, tables and general surfaces; kitchens including sinks, splashbacks, stovetops and cupboard fronts; bathrooms including showers, grout, tiles, taps, basins and toilets; skirting boards and windowsills; doors, door frames and high-touch areas; furniture and accessible shelving; floors vacuumed and mopped; and cobweb removal where needed.

Higher detail work belongs in a different category. Ceiling fans, light fittings, cornices, air-conditioning vents and filters, blinds and interior windows do not need doing every visit, and charging fortnightly for work that is not due is a strange way to run a business. We rotate them across visits instead, so nothing accumulates unseen and you are not paying again for a ceiling fan that was cleaned 3 weeks ago.

Ask what happens when a home is genuinely well maintained and the booked hours are not all needed. The honest answer is not that the cleaner leaves early. It is that the remaining time goes somewhere useful: under the kitchen sink, the shelf at the back of the pantry, inside the fridge. You booked the time. The time should be spent.

The first clean is a different job on the same list

A common source of disappointment is the initial clean being quoted as though it were an ordinary visit. It is not, and any cleaner who has done this for a while knows it.

A reset deep clean on a 3 bedroom home runs 10 to 15 hours, usually 2 cleaners across a day. That is not a longer list of tasks. It is the same list on a home where nobody has done it yet, so every item takes 3 times as long: soap scum that has had years to set, mineral build-up on tapware, grout that has never been properly worked, tracks and frames and the tops of things. Once that baseline exists, weekly or fortnightly maintenance holds it, and holding it is fast. The 2 jobs are set out side by side in reset clean versus maintenance clean.

If a quote treats visit 1 and visit 5 as the same job at the same price, 1 of 2 things is happening. Either the first clean will be shallow, or the ongoing price is padded to cover it. Neither is fatal. You should know which.

What products come through your door

Most people never ask, and then spend the evening with the windows open. You are entitled to know exactly what is being sprayed in the room your child sleeps in, and entitled to a say in it.

Marketing language is close to useless as a screening tool. Natural, eco, plant-based, green and non-toxic have no enforced definition here, and a product can carry all of them while containing synthetic fragrance, an antibacterial agent and a dye. If the answer to what do you use is a vibe rather than a list, treat the question as unanswered. There is more on decoding this in our guide to reading a cleaning product label.

Our standard is defined by exclusion, which is the only way to make it specific. Every product is fragrance-free. Beyond that we exclude synthetic fragrance and parfum in every product without exception, hormone-disrupting chemicals, SLS, parabens and phthalates, antibacterial agents including triclosan and anything else that disrupts the skin, gut or respiratory microbiome, bleach, and dyes and added colours. We also avoid essential oils as a rule, which surprises people who assume natural means safe: an essential oil is still a fragrance, and still a common trigger. The reasoning behind each exclusion sits in the cleaning ingredients we avoid and on our natural house cleaning page.

The obvious objection is whether a clean without the strong stuff actually works. It does, but only if something replaces the chemistry, and what replaces it is tools and time: professional HEPA vacuums, the right brush for the surface, steel wool where a surface can take it, citric acid for mineral build-up and soap scum, and physical effort. Take harsh products away from a cleaner who is being paid to finish in 2 hours and you get a worse clean. Take them away from someone with the right equipment and enough hours booked and you get the same result by a slower route.

The fragrance question, if anyone in the house is sensitive

This is where the gap between cleaners is genuinely large, and where a vague answer costs you most. A cleaner may be entirely willing to use your products and still arrive carrying scent on their uniform, in their cloths, in a laundry product, or in the vacuum from the last house. Scent is stubborn and it travels.

Ask 3 specific things. Are all products fragrance-free, including the ones nobody thinks of as products, such as the detergent used to wash the cloths. Are essential oils used anywhere. And can you see the actual list. A business genuinely built around this answers immediately and in detail, because it is what everything else is organised around. A business that is not will offer to use unscented products on request. That is a reasonable offer and a completely different standard.

For households where this is the main reason you are hiring anybody at all, our allergy-friendly cleaning approach sets out how the method changes: HEPA filtration rather than agitation, dust removed rather than redistributed, and no fragrance introduced at any stage.

What happens when something is not right

Every cleaner misses something eventually. The difference is what the business does next, and you can usually predict it from how the question is answered before you book.

Look for a specific commitment with a time frame attached. Ours is that if something agreed has been missed or not done properly, tell us within 7 days and we come back and put it right at no charge. Vague reassurance that they will make it right is not the same thing, because it leaves both the definition and the deadline open.

There is a fairness point on the other side. The clean is booked for a set amount of time and we work through the agreed list thoroughly. If particular areas matter most to you, saying so before we start is the difference between a guarantee that means something and a disagreement about priorities afterwards. Nobody can prioritise everything at once. Tell us what comes first.

Questions worth asking before you commit

• Can you send me your certificate of currency for public liability insurance
• Will the same person or people attend every visit, and what happens when they are on leave
• Is the price hourly or fixed, and what happens if the job runs over or finishes early
• What exactly is on the standard list, and which items rotate rather than being done every time
• Can I see the products you use, in full, including the laundry product used on your cloths
• How is the first clean priced compared with ongoing visits, and how many hours do you expect it to take
• If I am not happy with something, what is the process and how long do I have to raise it

None of these are aggressive. All of them are answerable in a sentence by someone who has thought about their own business. We have expanded on the reasoning behind each one in the questions to ask before booking a cleaner, including how to read the answers you get back.

A quote tells you what a clean costs. How the quote is structured tells you what the cleaner is being paid to do, which is the part you actually live with.

The honest version of who this suits

Plenty of homes do not need what we do. If nobody in your household reacts to fragrance, if you are comfortable with conventional products, and what you want is a competent clean at the lowest sensible price, there are good cleaners across Brisbane's north who will do that well and charge less than we do. That is a real answer, not false modesty.

Where the difference earns its price is narrower. Households where somebody is sensitive to scent. Homes where a baby or a young child spends most of the day on the floor. People who have already stripped fragrance out of their own cupboard and would rather it was not reintroduced fortnightly by someone else. Older Queenslanders around Gaythorne, Ashgrove and The Gap, where humidity and airflow make dust and damp a permanent management job rather than an occasional one.

If that sounds like your house, the practical next step is a conversation about hours rather than a quote off a room count. Have a look at how we work and what we refuse to use, or get in touch and tell us what your home is actually like. Realistic beats optimistic every time.