End of Lease Cleaning in Canberra and Queanbeyan

What our end of lease clean covers

We clean the whole home room by room, from top to bottom. Every standard clean includes:

• Kitchen: inside the oven, including the walls, roof, base, door glass, racks, trays and grill; the stovetop, knobs and control panel; the rangehood and its filters; benches and splashbacks; the sink and tapware; inside and outside every cupboard and drawer; and the fridge, dishwasher and microwave when they belong to the property.
• Bathrooms and toilets: the shower recess, screen and screen doors, bath, wall tiles and grout, vanity, cabinet, drawers and mirror, the toilet cistern, seat and bowl, and around the toilet base and skirting tiles.
• Laundry: the sink inside, outside and underneath, the laundry cupboards, and the dryer inside and out with its lint trap.
• Bedrooms and living areas: built-in wardrobes and shelves inside and out, and cobwebs from ceilings and corners.
• Windows and doors: inside glass and frames, window tracks and sills, flyscreens, doors and door frames, door handles and sliding door tracks.
• Walls and fittings: marks on walls, skirting boards, light switches, light fittings and ceiling fans.
• Vents: exhaust fans, plus air conditioner vents, grilles, front covers and removable washable filters where we can reach them safely.
• Blinds: dusted.
• Balcony and garage: the balcony swept, suitable hard floors mopped, balustrades wiped and cobwebs removed, and the garage floor cleaned.
• Pet traces: pet hair, and pet urine marks on walls and hard surfaces.
• Floors: hard floors vacuumed and mopped, tile grout in the kitchen, bathroom and laundry, carpets vacuumed, and edges and corners.

Most wall marks, pet stains and surface mould come off with the right products and some time. A few marks are permanent, such as stains set deep into grout or silicone, or damaged paint. If something won't come off, we'll tell you. We don't do repairs or specialist mould treatment.

Have a checklist from your real estate agent?

Send it to us before your quote. We'll review it alongside our checklist and confirm the cleaning tasks and any additional services required for your property. Agencies ask for different things, so we'll tell you which items are part of your quote, which cost extra and which are outside our services.

What costs extra, and what we don't do

These can be added to your quote:

• carpet steam cleaning, at $33 a room ($30 + GST) or $3.30 per square metre ($3 + GST) when you book it with your clean
• mattress cleaning, at $75.90 each ($69 + GST) when you add it to your clean
• detailed slat-by-slat cleaning of venetian blinds
• outside windows, through our window cleaning service
• pressure cleaning for balconies or outdoor areas with heavy build-up, through our high pressure cleaning service
• upholstery cleaning for sofas and chairs, and rug cleaning, quoted to suit the job
• very dirty homes, which get a custom quote

These aren't part of our service:

• rubbish removal, so please take all rubbish and belongings with you
• mowing, gardening, weeding, gutters, sweeping paths or clearing yard rubbish
• flea, pest or pet fumigation treatment
• repairs or replacements, such as damaged flyscreens, walls or fittings
• cleaning inside air conditioning ducts, or supplying new filters
• wet-cleaning fabric blinds

If your agent's list includes any of these, check with them who should do it.

The cleaning standard you're actually held to

In the ACT, you and your landlord or agent do a final inspection together and compare the home with the condition report you signed when you moved in. The ACT Government's guide to ending a tenancy says the home should be in the same state of cleanliness and repair as at the start, with some wear and tear excepted. So you aren't expected to make the home better than it was. Faded paint, light traffic marks on carpet and small scuffs from normal living are usually fair wear and tear.

You also don't have to hire a professional. The Legal Aid ACT fact sheet on bonds says there is no requirement to use professional cleaning or carpet cleaning at the end of a tenancy. There is one exception for carpets: the tribunal (ACAT) accepts that carpets must be professionally cleaned at the end if your tenancy agreement says so and the carpets were professionally cleaned at the start of your tenancy.

If you rent in Queanbeyan, NSW rules apply. They are similar, but stricter on carpets. The NSW Government guide to pets in rentals explains that professional carpet cleaning at the end can only be a condition when the landlord agrees to a pet living indoors, and it must suit the type of pet.

So why do most tenants still book a cleaner? Time, and the oven. A proper vacate clean takes a full day or more, and it usually lands in the same week as packing, moving and starting somewhere new.

Read your condition report before the clean

Your entry condition report is the benchmark, not your agent's personal taste. Before the clean, read the report and look at the photos from when you moved in. If a stain, mark or scratch was already noted, you are not expected to remove it. If something is marked "clean", that is the standard it needs to be back to.

The jobs that take longest are ovens with baked-on grease, showers with built-up soap scum, dusty skirting boards, marks inside cupboards and carpets in busy areas. These are also the things that change the price the most.

Carpets: when to add a steam clean

Check your lease and the rules above first. If you need a carpet clean, or your carpets have stains, pet odour or heavy traffic marks, it makes sense to book it on the same visit. When you add carpet steam cleaning to your end of lease clean, it costs $33 a room ($30 + GST) instead of our usual $49.50 a room ($45 + GST). We use a truck-mounted hot water extraction machine. We check the carpet before we start, and if hot water extraction is not the right choice, we will tell you.

For example, a 3-bedroom end of lease clean plus 3 carpeted rooms comes to $484 ($440 + GST). See every price and what changes it on our end of lease cleaning prices page.

How to get your home ready

• Send us your agent's checklist before your quote, if you have one.
• Move everything out first. That includes furniture, boxes and all rubbish, including the garage, balcony and yard. We only take away our own cleaning waste.
• Empty the fridge, freezer and dishwasher if they belong to the property and stay behind.
• Keep the power and hot water on. We need both to do the job properly.
• Sort out access. You don't need to be home. Most tenants arrange access through the property manager, a lockbox or a spare key.
• Time it with your inspection. Book the clean no more than a few days before your final inspection, so the inspection falls inside your 5-day re-clean window.

Free end of lease cleaning checklist

Download our End of Lease Cleaning Checklist (PDF). It lists every task in our clean, the extras you can add and what we don't offer. It also has space for your agent's requirements, so you can send it with your quote request. You can fill it in on your phone or print it.

After the clean

We give you an invoice for the clean and any carpet cleaning, which you can show your agent. Keep it, and take a few dated photos when we finish. Your agent then does the final inspection. If your agent finds a task within the agreed cleaning scope that we missed, tell us within 5 days of the clean and we'll come back and re-clean it free. The agreed cleaning scope is our checklist plus anything added to your quote.

Where we clean

We clean rentals right across Canberra, including Belconnen, Gungahlin, Woden, Tuggeranong and the inner south. See all our Canberra service areas. On the NSW side we cover Queanbeyan, Karabar, Jerrabomberra and Googong at the same prices, and our Queanbeyan cleaning page explains how NSW bond rules apply there.

Aussie Duo is a family-owned Canberra business that has been cleaning since 2013. Our team is police-checked, White Card certified and vaccinated against seasonal flu, and we carry $20 million public liability insurance.

Ready to book? Get a free quote online, or call us on 02 5501 3316.