How Much Does Carpet Cleaning Cost?

Price guide · Updated July 2026

Across the UK, professional carpet cleaning runs from about £25 for a small bedroom to £85 for a large living room, with a three-bed house typically £210 to £260 and hourly firms charging £60 to £120 an hour.

Our own Essex price is simpler: a fixed £40 a room with a £60 minimum visit, agreed on the phone and locked for 14 days. This guide covers what the whole market charges, why quotes vary so much, and how to avoid the pricing traps.

How carpet cleaning is priced in the UK

Three pricing models cover almost every quote you'll get, and knowing which one you're looking at is half the job of comparing them:

• Per room or per area. The most common model. Each room, staircase or landing carries its own price, so the total is checkable before anyone arrives. This is how we price: every area is £40 or less, whatever we find on the day.
• By the hour. Cleaning companies charge £60 to £120 an hour on this model. The rate looks clear enough, but the hours are an estimate until the job is done, so the total isn't.
• By the square metre. More common on large or commercial jobs. MyJobQuote puts the UK average around £2.50 per square metre. Accurate, but you can't check it without a tape measure.

Most quotes also carry a minimum charge. That's not padding: UK guides put the typical minimum call-out between £60 and £85. The fuel, the insurance and the time spent setting up and packing away a professional machine cost the firm the same whether the job is one small hallway or a whole house.

Ours is £60. It works as a minimum spend, not a fee on top.

What moves the price up or down

Two carpet cleans in the same street can be priced very differently. Why? These are the levers behind the spread:

• How many areas. The biggest factor everywhere. Rooms, stairs and landings are each priced, so a whole house costs more than one room but less per area.
• Room size. Firms that grade by size charge £25 to £50 for a small bedroom and £45 to £85 for a large living room. We charge one flat room price instead, so a big lounge doesn't cost more than a box room.
• The state of the carpet. A light refresh is quicker than lifting years of traffic and pet stains. Some firms surcharge for heavy soiling; our price stays fixed once we've quoted it.
• Stairs. Awkward, slow work. Some cleaners price them at £2 to £4 per step, which adds up fast on a full flight. Ours are a flat £40.
• Wool and delicate fibres. Wool needs cooler water and gentler chemistry, and some firms add a surcharge for it. We don't; the method changes, the price doesn't.
• Where you are. Checkatrade's city averages run from £40 in Hull to £240 in Dartford, with London around £230 for comparable work. Ours is one Essex price list.

Typical UK carpet cleaning prices

Here's the researched UK range next to our fixed price for the same job. The middle column shows what national cost guides and local firms typically quote; the last column shows what we charge for it. Same jobs, two ways of pricing them.

If you'd rather skip the reading, you can get your exact price from the form at the end of this page.

UK ranges from the Checkatrade, MyJobQuote, Rutland Cleaning and DeepCleaningNearMe carpet cleaning cost guides, accessed July 2026. Local Essex prices cross-checked against published price lists from firms across the county.

Our carpet cleaning prices

Every figure is fixed and comes straight from our price list. Stairs, and the hallway and landing together, each count as one area.

Worked examples

The maths is meant to be checkable. Add the areas. That's your price.

• Lounge, stairs, hallway and landing: £40 + £40 + £30 = £110.
• Three bedrooms: 3 × £40 = £120.
• Whole three-bed house (three beds, lounge, stairs, hallway and landing): £160 + £40 + £30 = £230. The UK guide range for the same house is £210 to £260.
• Four-bed house (four beds, lounge, stairs, hallway and landing): £200 + £40 + £30 = £270, against a guide range of £325 to £400.

A real one from our Google reviews: three rooms plus the stairs, hallway and landing came to £178.50. As the customer wrote, the carpets were old “but they came up really well.”

Hire machine vs professional: the true cost

The honest comparison starts with the hire price, because it's genuinely low. A Rug Doctor costs £27.99 for 24 hours, or £32.99 for 48, with the upholstery hand tool £4.99 on top.

Then come the consumables. Detergent, a stain product for anything set in, maybe a second bottle for a whole house, and cost guides note the realistic total for a weekend commonly passes £60. That's our minimum visit, for a machine that runs off a 13-amp plug.

The difference you're actually paying for is physics. A truck-mounted system heats water far beyond what a hire machine manages and pulls it back out with several times the suction, so the carpet gets a deeper flush and dries in a fraction of the time.

A hire machine washes the surface. Run it over a stained patch and you'll often watch the mark fade, then creep back a week later as the residue left deep in the pile wicks up.

“definitely worth it rather than trying rug doctor”

When is the hire machine the right call? A single lightly soiled room, no stains, no odours, and a free afternoon. That's a fair £30 job to do yourself.

Set-in stains, pet accidents, allergies or a whole house are where the professional price earns its keep, because doing it twice costs more than doing it once properly.

Questions to ask any carpet cleaner

Five questions sort a solid quote from a doorstep surprise, whoever you call:

1. Is the price fixed before you arrive? If the answer involves “depends what we find”, budget for more than the quote.
2. Is stain treatment included, or an extra? Stain surcharges of £20 to £50 are common in UK price lists. Ours is included on every clean.
3. Is there a minimum charge or call-out fee? Most reputable firms have one; you just want it stated up front, not discovered on the day.
4. How long until I can walk on it? The answer tells you how much water the machine leaves behind. Ours is 30 to 90 minutes.
5. What happens if I'm not happy? A firm that stands behind the work will say so before you book. We re-clean free.

Bait prices and other red flags

The classic trap is the bait price: a room price advertised so low no one could clean profitably at it, used to get a cleaner through the door. Once inside, the price grows.

Heavy soiling. A stain surcharge. A charge for moving furniture, or for the “proper” machine rather than the one the advert meant.

UK guides also list stain protector sprays at £15 to £30 a room as a common upsell, pitched hard once the cleaner is standing in your lounge.

None of that makes per-room pricing bad. It makes unverifiable pricing bad.

A checkable price list, in writing, before anyone arrives, is the filter that removes the whole category: if the advertised number is the real number, arithmetic protects you. That's the entire logic of our card, and why an estimate from us survives contact with the hallway.

Why a fixed price beats an hourly rate

An hourly rate sounds cheap until the clock starts. A stubborn stain or a slow-drying room works in the cleaner's favour, not yours, because every extra half hour is on your bill. A quote-on-the-day works the same way: the price you agreed to book is not the price you're shown at the end.

We price by the area before we arrive. You get your number on the phone, it's locked for 14 days, and nothing is added on the day.

That's the whole point of a fixed price: no surprise at the door, no reason to rush the job, and you only pay once you've seen the results.

For the full list, our full price list covers every service. You can read how we work on the carpet cleaning service page.

Carpet cleaning cost FAQs