Apartment Cleaning Service: What to Expect (and What to Pay)

The cleaning industry was built around single-family homes. Most national pricing models — square footage tiers, $150+ minimums, "bedroom count" multipliers — were designed for suburban houses and then awkwardly bolted onto apartments. The result: a studio apartment that needs 60 minutes of work gets quoted $150, while a 4-bedroom house that needs 4 hours of work gets quoted $260. The per-hour math doesn't make sense for either, but apartment dwellers eat the worst of it.

A correctly-priced apartment cleaning service treats the apartment as what it is: a smaller, denser, faster-to-clean unit that should cost proportionally less than a house. On our pricing, a studio is one room ($10) plus a bathroom — typically $30–$40 total. A 1-bedroom is $40–$55. A 2-bedroom is $55–$75. Those numbers reflect the actual work involved, and they're the reason our apartment-cleaning volume has grown faster than any other segment over the last 18 months.

A standard apartment clean covers the same surfaces as a standard house clean, just compressed: dusting all accessible surfaces, vacuuming carpet and rugs, mopping hard floors, sanitizing all bathroom surfaces, wiping kitchen counters and appliance exteriors, taking out the trash, making the bed (linens left in place). Total time for a 1-bedroom is typically 60–90 minutes for an experienced solo cleaner. For a 2-bedroom, plan on 90–120 minutes.

What's not included in a standard apartment clean: inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows beyond the kitchen, baseboards in every room, blinds, ceiling fans, light fixtures. Those move into deep-clean territory. For a first-time clean of an apartment you've lived in for over a year, expect to need a deep clean rather than a standard — the dust accumulation in baseboards and blinds alone usually justifies it.

Walk-up apartments add time to the job that the cleaner has to absorb — hauling supplies up four flights, navigating narrow staircases, dealing with no parking. Some services tack on a "walk-up fee" of $15–$25. We don't, because we've built our crew structure around urban cleaning and the walk-up math works at our flat rate. If you're in a walk-up and you're being quoted a surcharge, that service isn't built for your kind of building.

High-rises bring different logistics: doorman buildings require check-in (some require advance notice of the cleaner's name), freight elevators often need to be booked in advance, and some buildings restrict cleaning hours. When you book a high-rise apartment cleaning with us, tell us the building name and any check-in requirements when you call — we'll handle the rest. None of it affects the price.

Apartment move-outs are the highest-stakes cleaning many renters will ever pay for, because the security deposit is usually a full month of rent — $2,000–$5,000 in most urban markets — and landlords are aggressive about deducting cleaning costs from it. A proper move-out clean for a 1-bedroom apartment runs $90–$140 on our pricing and includes inside the oven, inside the fridge, inside cabinets, baseboards, blinds, and the deep-detail work landlords inspect.

Move-in cleans are simpler but worth doing. Apartments often sit empty for days or weeks between tenants, and the "professional cleaning" the landlord paid for is usually cursory. A move-in clean from us runs the same $40–$75 range as a standard 1-bedroom clean and resets the apartment to a baseline you can live with from day one — which matters more than people realize when you're unpacking 40 boxes and don't want to live in someone else's residue.

Tell the booker three things: the number of rooms (including the studio space if you live in one), the number of bathrooms, and any special access notes (walk-up floor count, building name, doorman, freight elevator). That's enough to give you a flat, all-in price in 60 seconds. You shouldn't need an in-home estimate, a follow-up email, or a "we'll get back to you" for an apartment cleaning quote. If you're getting any of those, the service is built for houses and is going to mis-price your job.

Most apartment customers on our network end up on bi-weekly recurring service. The math works: a 1-bedroom at $45 every two weeks is $90/month — less than a single one-time clean from most national services. That's the difference flat-rate pricing makes when it's actually built for the unit you live in.