Is it better to have a house cleaner weekly or biweekly?

Why it matters

Frequency is the biggest cost decision in house cleaning, larger than which company you choose. It also decides what your home feels like on the worst day of the cycle, which is the day before the cleaner comes.

Consider a household in Surrey: two working parents, two kids under eight and a golden retriever. They start on a monthly plan to keep costs down. By the second week the bathrooms need attention and there is dog hair along every baseboard, so one parent spends Saturday morning cleaning anyway. They are paying for a cleaner and still doing most of the cleaning. Moving to every two weeks costs them about $165 more a month, and gives them their Saturdays back. For that family, monthly was the expensive option.

Now consider a retired couple in the same size of home, with no pets. Monthly suits them well, and weekly would mean paying someone to wipe clean surfaces.

A simple way to decide is to ask how long your home stays acceptable to you after a clean:

• If it slips within a week, choose weekly. This is usually homes with three or more children, pets that shed, or someone working from home in the kitchen all day.
• If it holds for ten days to two weeks, choose biweekly. This is most couples and families.
• If it holds for three weeks or more, choose monthly, and expect to do bathrooms and floors yourself once in between.

There is also a practical effect on the cleaning itself. Soap scum and kitchen grease get harder to remove the longer they sit. A home on a weekly or biweekly plan is maintained. A home cleaned monthly is partly being rescued each time, so the same crew gets through less detail in the same visit.

How Honourable Cleaning helps

Recurring plans are discounted because the visits repeat: 20% off for weekly, 15% for biweekly and 10% for monthly. For a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Abbotsford, where a one-time standard clean is $175, that works out before GST to:

• Weekly: $140 a visit, about $605 a month
• Biweekly: $149 a visit, about $325 a month
• Monthly: $158 a visit

There is no contract term. You can skip or move any single visit for free with 24 hours' notice, change frequency, or stop the plan from the link in your confirmation email. The one condition is that the discount assumes the plan continues: if you stop before your third visit, the cleans you already had are re-billed at the one-time rate.

Recurring visits also come with a rotating detail focus, so jobs like interior windows and sills get done over the course of the plan without needing a separate deep clean.

If you are unsure, start biweekly. After two or three visits you will know whether the home is slipping before the crew returns, and you can move up or down from there.

Key takeaways

• Biweekly suits most homes. Weekly is for busy households with kids or shedding pets. Monthly is for tidy homes of one or two.
• Judge by how your home looks the day before the cleaner comes. If you are cleaning in between, the visits are too far apart.
• Weekly roughly doubles the monthly cost of biweekly, even with the bigger discount.
• Start biweekly and adjust after three visits.

Related pages

Recurring cleaning in Langley → House cleaning in Surrey →

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