A standard house cleaning covers dusting and wiping surfaces, kitchen counters and appliance exteriors, sanitising bathrooms, vacuuming and mopping floors, making beds and removing trash. It does not normally include the inside of the oven or fridge, interior windows, baseboards, or anything needing scrubbing rather than wiping. Those are deep clean or add-on items.
What does a standard clean cover in the kitchen?
- Countertops and backsplash wiped down
- Appliance exteriors, including the front of the fridge, oven and dishwasher
- Cooktop surface and the outside of the range hood
- Sink scrubbed and taps polished
- Cabinet fronts spot-cleaned where marked
- Floors vacuumed and mopped, including under movable items
- Trash and recycling emptied and re-lined
What is not in a standard kitchen clean: inside the oven, inside the fridge, the range hood filter, and the interiors of cabinets. All four are available as add-ons and all four are standard in a move-in or move-out clean.
What does it cover in the bathrooms?
- Toilet cleaned inside and out, including the base and behind
- Shower and tub wiped down, glass cleaned
- Sink, counter and taps
- Mirrors
- Floors vacuumed and mopped
- Trash emptied, towels straightened
The important distinction here is wiping versus scrubbing. A standard clean wipes a shower. It does not resurface grout or strip hard-water film off the glass, which in Chicago builds up faster than most people expect. That work belongs in a deep clean.
What does it cover in bedrooms and living areas?
- All reachable surfaces dusted
- Beds made, or linens changed if you leave them out
- Mirrors and glass surfaces
- Floors vacuumed, hard floors mopped
- General tidying of visible clutter into sensible places
What is not included in a standard house cleaning?
This is the part worth reading before you book, because it is where expectations usually break.
- Inside the oven, fridge or freezer
- Interior windows, sills and tracks
- Baseboards, door frames and switch plates
- Grout scrubbing and hard-water removal
- Inside cabinets and drawers
- Vents, radiator covers and ceiling fans
- Laundry, dishes and pet waste
- Anything requiring a ladder beyond a two-step
- Mould remediation, biohazard, or post-construction debris
None of these are omitted because they are difficult. They are omitted because they take substantial time, and including them by default would mean charging everyone for work most homes do not need every visit.
What are the most common add-ons?
Inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows, and laundry, roughly in that order. Adding one or two targeted items to a standard clean is almost always cheaper than upgrading to a deep clean, and for most homes it addresses the specific thing that was bothering you.
How does a standard clean differ from a deep clean?
A standard clean is eight points of maintenance work. A deep clean is twenty and adds the removal work listed above. The full comparison is in our piece on deep clean versus general clean, but the short version is that a standard clean assumes there is nothing to excavate.
Common questions
Does a standard house cleaning include inside the oven?
No. Oven interiors are an add-on to a standard clean, and are included by default in a deep clean or a move-in/move-out clean.
Do house cleaners do laundry and dishes?
Not as part of a standard clean. Dishes are sometimes handled if the sink is blocking access to the counter, and laundry is normally a paid add-on.
Are baseboards included in a regular cleaning?
Usually not. Baseboards, door frames and switch plates are deep clean items because they add real time to every room in the home.