Handing back an office at the end of a lease is one of the few moments when the quality of your cleaning and maintenance regime turns into a hard number on an invoice. A landlord's schedule of dilapidations is, in effect, a bill for every gap between the condition your lease required and the condition you actually left behind. In London, that bill is rarely small: terminal dilapidations on Central London offices commonly run at roughly £15 to £35 per square foot, with claims ranging from around £10,000 on a small suite to well over £1m on a whole floor.
Cleaning will never be the largest line in that schedule — reinstatement and repairs see to that. But it is almost always the cheapest line to fix, the easiest to fix late, and the one most often used by a landlord's surveyor to characterise a tenant as having neglected the building. This guide sets out what end of lease cleaning actually involves for a London office, how it fits into the dilapidations process, and how to keep the cost of exit under control.
What the lease actually asks of you
Dilapidations sit in four clauses of a typical commercial lease: repair, decoration, reinstatement, and yield up. The yield up covenant is the one that tends to carry the cleaning obligation, usually with wording along the lines of returning the premises "clean and tidy", "in a good and substantial state of repair and decoration", or — in modern London leases — restored to Cat A specification: a clean, open-plan, base-build environment with suspended ceilings, perimeter lighting, raised access flooring and finished decoration, ready for the next tenant to fit out.
Two documents determine how far that obligation really stretches:
- The repairing covenant. A full repairing and insuring (FRI) lease puts almost everything on you. A lease qualified by reference to a schedule of condition puts a ceiling on it.
- The schedule of condition. Agreed at the start of the lease, this records the state of the space when you took it on. Where one was properly prepared and cross-referenced in the repairing covenant, you are not required to return the premises in better condition than recorded — and large parts of a schedule of dilapidations can be challenged on that basis.
If you are taking a new lease in London this year, commissioning a photographic schedule of condition is the single highest-return hour of facilities work you will do. If you are three months from exit and no such schedule exists, you are negotiating from a weaker position and should plan accordingly.
The dilapidations timeline: why cleaning gets left too late
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has managed an office move. The landlord's surveyor serves a schedule; the figure is alarming; the finance team asks why nobody flagged it; and the operations team is left arranging a builders clean in the fortnight between the fit-out contractor leaving and the keys going back.
The tenants who fare best start thinking about dilapidations 18 to 24 months before the lease end or break date, not three. A workable timeline looks like this:
- 24–18 months out: retrieve the lease, licences for alterations and any schedule of condition. Get a surveyor to produce an indicative liability figure so it can be provisioned.
- 12 months out: decide what you are reinstating and what you will try to settle in cash. Get the fabric of the space back under control — deep cleans, carpet restoration, redecoration where it is cheaper to do than to be charged for.
- 6 months out: expect the landlord's schedule of dilapidations. Under the Pre-Action Protocol for Dilapidations Claims this is the start of a negotiation, not the end of one.
- Final 8 weeks: strip-out and reinstatement works, followed by builders clean and sparkle clean before handover.
Cleaning appears in that list twice for a reason: the routine, ongoing work that stops damage accumulating, and the one-off handover clean at the end. Only the second is optional, and only in the sense that skipping it guarantees you pay for it at the landlord's rate rather than your own.
What an end of lease office clean covers
An exit clean is not a bigger version of your nightly office clean. It is a different specification, and it is worth being precise with your contractor about which of the following you are buying.
Builders clean
Carried out after strip-out and reinstatement works, while dust is still settling. This deals with construction debris, plaster dust, adhesive residue, protective films, paint splashes and swarf. It is the same discipline as post-construction cleaning: dirty, methodical work that needs to happen before anything else — a sparkle clean carried out too early is simply money thrown at a room that will be dusty again by Friday.
Sparkle clean
The final presentation clean immediately before handover: glazing inside and out, frames and reveals, skirting, ceiling grids and diffusers, light fittings, floor boxes, raised access floor tiles, kitchen and washroom sanitisation, and the detail work that makes an empty space read as "cared for" rather than "vacated". This is the clean the landlord's surveyor actually sees.
Restorative work worth doing before handover
- Carpets and hard floors. Hot water extraction on carpet tiles, and strip-and-seal or burnishing on vinyl and hard floors. Worn but clean flooring is a decoration argument; stained flooring is a replacement argument, and replacement is far more expensive.
- Kitchens and tea points. Degreasing, appliance interiors, extract grilles, and the underside and rear of units. Grease build-up behind a fridge is a reliable way to invite a broader condition complaint.
- Washrooms. Limescale removal, grout and sanitaryware restoration, and clearing of extract vents.
- Glazing and frames. Central London facades collect a remarkable amount of traffic soot and construction dust (see our guide to commercial window cleaning frequency) — the Mayor's inventory attributes a substantial share of the capital's coarse particulate emissions to construction and resuspended road dust, and it lands on your windows.
Our carpet and floor care cover the restorative end of this list, and our general cleaning contracts are what prevent most of it becoming necessary in the first place.
What it costs — and what it saves
As a rough guide for London in 2026, one-off deep and handover cleaning is priced at a premium to routine contract work: expect somewhere in the region of £30–£50 per hour for deep cleaning labour, or roughly £3 per square metre and upwards for a commercial deep clean, with builders cleans priced on survey because the variable is how much mess the fit-out contractor left. Routine office cleaning, by contrast, sits nearer £0.10–£0.30 per square foot per clean.
Set that against the dilapidations benchmark. RICS data puts the average dilapidations claim across all sectors at about £7.27 per square foot, and modern London offices typically at £15–£35. A handover clean on a 5,000 sq ft office might cost a few thousand pounds. The cleaning-and-condition element of a schedule of dilapidations on the same space, priced by the landlord's surveyor with their contractor's margin and a supervision fee on top, will not.
The landlord's first schedule is an opening position. Claims are commonly settled well below the initial figure once each item is tested against the lease, the schedule of condition and the landlord's actual loss.
Two defences worth knowing about
Cleaning contractors are not surveyors, and none of what follows is legal advice — but facility managers negotiating an exit should at least know the terrain.
Section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 caps damages for breach of a repairing covenant at the amount by which the value of the landlord's reversion is actually diminished by the breach. If the works are costed at £300,000 but the building is worth only £150,000 less in its unrepaired state, the claim is capped at £150,000. The second limb goes further: if the premises are to be demolished or structurally altered at or shortly after lease end, damages for putting them into repair may not be recoverable at all. A tenant relying on this must serve its own diminution valuation, generally within 56 days of the landlord's quantified claim.
Supersession is the practical cousin of that argument. If the incoming tenant is going to rip out the ceiling you have been asked to repair, the repair has no value to the landlord. Landlords' schedules routinely include items that a planned refurbishment would supersede.
Neither defence, it should be said, does much for you on cleaning. Cleaning items are cheap, uncontroversial and easy for a surveyor to justify — which is precisely why they are the items you should simply deal with rather than argue about.
A practical checklist for London facility managers
- Find the lease, the licences for alterations and the schedule of condition before you need them.
- Provision for dilapidations in the accounts early; the number should not be a surprise to your finance director.
- Photograph the space on the day you take occupation and on the day you hand it back.
- Keep evidence of your cleaning and maintenance regime — service records, deep clean certificates, carpet and floor treatment history. This is the documentation that rebuts "neglect".
- Sequence the works: strip-out, reinstatement, builders clean, snagging, sparkle clean, handover inspection.
- Do the cleaning yourself, through your own contractor. Tenants who carry out works directly rather than settling in cash routinely pay materially less than the schedule figure.
- Get the handover inspection in writing, with photographs, and ask the landlord's surveyor to walk the space with you.
The cheapest dilapidations strategy is a boring one
Almost everything that turns up on a cleaning-related dilapidations schedule is the accumulation of small omissions over a long tenancy: the carpet that was never extracted, the kitchen extract that was never degreased, the limescale nobody dealt with in year two. A well-specified cleaning contract with a proper periodic deep clean cycle is not a cost centre — it is a hedge against a bill you will otherwise receive in your final quarter, priced by someone else.
If you are approaching a lease end or a break date at a London or South East property, Mithraic can carry out builders cleans, sparkle cleans and full pre-handover deep cleans, and can advise on the condition-related items most likely to appear on a schedule. Get in touch for a site survey.