Move-out cleaning checklist

How a check-out inspection actually runs

Most check-outs are done by an inventory clerk the letting agent books, sometimes by the agent, occasionally by the landlord with a phone. They arrive with the check-in inventory you signed when you moved in and work down it line by line. The question is never whether the property is clean. It is whether it is as clean as the check-in report says it was, allowing for fair wear and tear.

You are not obliged to be there, and plenty of tenants are not. It helps if you or someone you trust is, because a clerk who gets shown the oven writes a different line than one left guessing when it was last done.

The report then goes to the landlord or the agent. To deduct for cleaning they have to point at something and say what putting it right costs, measured against the check-in condition. They cannot end up better off than they started either: a fifteen-year-old carpet does not get replaced with a new one out of your deposit.

Where the deductions actually come from

Cleaning, mostly. The Tenancy Deposit Scheme’s Statistical Briefing 2025 puts cleaning behind 54% of the disputes it handled in 2024/25, ahead of damage, rent arrears and everything else it sees. The Deposit Protection Service splits it slightly differently, with cleaning at 26.64% of its disputes and property damage just ahead at 27.30%. The average protected deposit is now £1,175, which is a lot of money to lose over an oven.

Inside that, the same handful of items recur. The oven. Limescale on shower screens, taps and around the toilet. Carpets. And dust in the places nobody thinks to look: skirting boards, the tops of doors and frames, extractor grilles, window tracks, the rubber seal and the detergent drawer of the washing machine.

Room by room, in the order that works

Start with the oven, because it is the one job with dead time in it. Get the degreaser on, leave it, and clean something else while it works. Bathroom limescale runs on the same principle: the descaler wants a few minutes on the tile and the screen rather than a scrub and an immediate rinse.

Then the rest of the kitchen. Cupboards emptied and wiped inside as well as out, the extractor filter, behind and underneath the appliances where they pull out safely, the sink and the drain, the top of the fridge.

Bedrooms and living areas go high to low. Ledges, tops of doors and picture rails before you touch the floor. Wipe switches, handles and everything else that has been touched a thousand times. Wardrobes and drawers get done once they are empty, not before. Windows and sills wherever you can reach them safely from inside.

Floors last, always.

Bins out, fridge and freezer defrosted, and if the property is standing empty afterwards leave the fridge switched off with the door propped open. A sealed damp fridge grows mould in a fortnight and it will be in somebody’s photographs.

The evidence worth keeping

Photograph everything on the day you hand the keys back, in daylight if the light allows. Take the whole room in one frame first, then the detail. A close-up of a clean oven proves very little on its own; a wide shot of the kitchen with the oven door standing open puts it in a property, on a date.

The adjudicator never visits. If a deduction turns into a dispute, someone at the scheme reads the check-in inventory, the check-out report and both sides’ photographs, then decides on that. Evidence you cannot produce may as well not exist.

So keep the check-in inventory, the check-out report if you are given one, your meter readings and the invoice for any cleaning you paid for. Two dates are worth carrying in your head: a landlord has 30 days from receiving your deposit to protect it in one of the three schemes, and 10 days from the two of you agreeing a figure to pay it back.

One thing catches people out every year. You cannot be required to pay for a professional clean as a condition of the tenancy. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 banned those clauses for tenancies granted from 1 June 2019, and for every existing tenancy from 1 June 2020. A landlord can still deduct for cleaning where the property comes back dirtier than it went out. Those are two separate things and agents still muddle them.

The deposit side has its own guides: what a landlord can charge for cleaning, what to photograph before handing keys back and the move-out timeline from a week out to moving day. If a phrase on your check-out report reads like another language, the end of tenancy glossary has it.