Every working day
Offices with staff in every day, a steady flow of clients or visitors, several restrooms, or a busy shared kitchen. Restrooms, kitchens, trash and floors are kept up daily.
Commercial cleaning guide
How Often Should an Office Be Professionally Cleaned?
How often an office should be cleaned depends on how many people use it and how hard the shared spaces work. A busy office with daily staff and visitors usually needs restrooms, kitchens and trash handled every working day. A small office with a handful of people often does well with one or two visits a week. Most offices land somewhere in between, with deeper detail work added every month or so.
Start with how the space is used
Square footage matters less than traffic. A large, quiet office with a few people can need less cleaning than a small, crowded one. Before picking a frequency, answer these:
- How many people are in the office on a typical day, and on the busiest day?
- Do clients, patients or the public come in, and how many?
- How many restrooms are there, and how heavily are they used?
- Is there a kitchen or break room where people prepare and eat food?
- What kind of floors are there, and how much outside dirt gets tracked in?
- Are some days much busier than others, as in a hybrid schedule?
The more people, visitors and shared food spaces you have, the more often cleaning has to happen to keep the office from looking worn by the end of the week.
Three common schedules and who they fit
Two or three times a week
Mid-sized offices, or hybrid teams with predictable in-office days. Visits are timed after the busiest days so the office is reset when it needs it most.
Once a week
Small offices with few people and little or no public traffic. One thorough visit covers the whole space, sometimes with light upkeep by staff in between.
Not every task needs the same schedule
A good office scope mixes frequencies. Daily tasks keep the place usable, and periodic tasks stop slow buildup.
| Each visit | Periodically | |
|---|---|---|
| Restrooms | Toilets, sinks, mirrors, floors and touchpoints | Grout, partitions and wall surfaces in detail |
| Kitchen or break room | Counters, sink, table tops and appliance handles | Inside the microwave and the outside of the fridge in detail |
| Work areas | Trash and recycling, clear desk surfaces, door handles and switches | Baseboards, vents, high ledges and chair bases |
| Floors | Vacuuming and mopping of traffic areas | Edges, corners and under furniture that can be moved |
| Glass | Smudges on entry doors and conference room glass | Interior partitions and the inside of reachable windows |
How desks are handled varies. Some offices ask cleaners to wipe only clear desk surfaces and leave papers, screens and personal items alone. Tell us your policy and it goes into the written scope.
Signs your current schedule is wrong
A schedule is right when the office looks the same on Thursday afternoon as it does on Monday morning. If it does not, look for these:
- Restrooms run out of paper or start to smell before the next visit
- The kitchen sink fills with dishes and the counters stay sticky between visits
- Trash overflows on certain days, usually after meetings or deliveries
- Staff start cleaning up themselves, or complain about the same areas
- Dust shows on surfaces that are only cleaned during an occasional detail visit
The opposite also happens. If a cleaner regularly arrives to an office that is already clean, a less frequent schedule, or a lighter scope on some days, may make more sense.
Boston offices in winter
From December through March, salt and sand come in on every pair of boots. Entry mats, lobby floors and the first stretch of carpet take the brunt of it, and residue builds up fast on hard floors. It often makes sense to add extra floor attention at the entrance during those months, even if the rest of the schedule stays the same.
Older office buildings bring their own detail work, such as radiators, tall window trim and shared stairwells, while newer buildings often have rules about vendor access, loading docks and after-hours entry that need to be settled before the first visit.
Setting up the schedule
Commercial cleaning works best with a written scope and a schedule built around your operating hours. Office cleaning usually happens early in the morning or after the last person leaves, so access matters: keys, fobs and alarm codes are discussed during setup, not figured out on the first night.
Start with your best guess and review after a few weeks. It is easier to adjust a schedule that exists than to plan a perfect one on paper. Our office cleaning page covers the typical scope, and janitorial cleaning suits buildings that need ongoing upkeep of lobbies, stairwells and other common areas. For other kinds of workplaces, start with the commercial cleaning overview.
Frequency is also one of the main things that shapes the price, along with square footage and how much is in each visit. The pricing page explains how commercial quotes are put together.