How often should your office really be cleaned?
There is no single right answer, because an office is really several spaces with very different needs sharing one address. The useful question is not how often the office is cleaned but how often each part of it is.
Start with foot traffic, not floor area
A quiet twelve-person office and a busy twelve-person office generate very different amounts of soil. Count the people who pass through a space in a day, not the square footage, and the schedule tends to write itself.
Daily
- Washrooms: fixtures, floors, consumables, bins
- Kitchens and break areas: worktops, sinks, appliance handles, bins
- High-touch points: door handles, lift buttons, shared keyboards, handrails
- Reception and entrance matting
Two or three times a week
- Open-plan desk surfaces and shared meeting rooms
- Vacuuming circulation routes and hard-floor mopping
- Glass on partitions and doors at hand height
Weekly
- Full vacuum of carpeted areas including under desks
- Dusting of shelves, sills and cable trays
- Interior glass and internal windows
Periodically
- Carpet extraction and hard-floor restoration
- High-level dusting of vents, light fittings and ceiling edges
- Upholstery cleaning on soft seating
Adjust for what the space is
Medical and dental practices, food premises, schools and childcare have their own requirements that sit above anything on this page. Retail and hospitality usually need the customer-facing areas reset more than once a day and the back of house less often than people expect.
The simplest test
If a visitor forms an impression of the business from a surface, it belongs on the daily list. Everything else can be scheduled around opening hours so nobody is cleaning around a meeting.
