This is probably the question we get asked most often when a business is setting up a new cleaning contract, or reviewing the one they’ve got. People want a number. The honest answer is that frequency depends on the type of space, the amount of foot traffic, and what you’re trying to achieve with the clean.
Here’s how we usually walk clients through it.
Start with foot traffic, not floor area
A 200 square metre showroom with ten visitors a day has completely different cleaning needs to a 200 square metre call centre with forty staff. Foot traffic is what drives how fast the space gets dirty, not size.
A rough rule: for every ten people through a space on a given day, plan on one proper clean per week as a baseline. Scale up from there if you have bathrooms, kitchens, or high touch surfaces that are shared.
Offices and professional services
Most offices we service in Bayside run on a once or twice weekly schedule. Once a week works for small offices with six or fewer staff, dedicated desks, and a simple kitchen. Twice a week tends to be the point where bathrooms and kitchens actually stay presentable.
If you have client visits, meetings in boardrooms, or any hospitality component (catering, after hours events), you’ll want a clean on the morning after those.
Medical, allied health and childcare
These spaces almost always need daily cleaning, and the work is more involved than a standard office clean. Surface sanitisation, floor cleaning with hospital grade product, and strict attention to bathrooms and waiting areas. The regulatory standard for most of these sectors actually mandates it, so the question is usually not frequency but scope.
Retail and hospitality
Retail is almost always daily, usually before opening. Floors, glass, changerooms. The trap a lot of retail businesses fall into is using their own staff for the daily clean, which burns time that could be spent on trading, and rarely gets the back of house (staff room, bathrooms, stock area) properly touched.
For hospitality (cafes, restaurants), daily is a minimum. We also do a deep clean on kitchens and grease traps once a month for most hospitality clients. Without that, the kitchen exhaust becomes a fire risk and a food safety issue.
Warehouses, body corporate and common areas
These are the spaces where frequency varies the most. A warehouse with five forklift moves a day is different to one with fifty. A body corporate common area in a busy apartment block with two hundred lots needs something closer to daily attention for lobbies and lifts, and weekly for corridors and stairwells.
In these environments, the right number is almost always “more often than the building manager originally thought”, because deterioration is gradual and the baseline drifts.
A practical way to decide
If you’re trying to work out what’s right for your own space, the simplest approach is to start with twice a week for six weeks and see what you notice. Pay attention to what’s always dirty at the end of the week, and what never gets dirty. Either the schedule goes up, or it goes down, and you end up with the frequency that actually fits how you use the space.
We do this walkthrough with most new clients, and the right answer is usually obvious within a month.