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Pricing
How Our Pricing Works
We do not publish an hourly rate, and not because we are being coy. An hourly rate is the wrong unit for this service, and quoting one would mean quoting for a different service than the one we actually provide.
Retained, and billed monthly
Arrangements are retained and billed monthly. The monthly figure covers the agreed visits, your named housekeeper, their deputy, supervision, all materials and equipment, travel, parking, congestion charges where they apply, insurance, and the time we spend writing and reviewing your specification. There is nothing added afterwards.
That matters more than it sounds. An hourly arrangement makes every one of those things either a line item or a corner cut, and it puts you and your housekeeper on opposite sides of the clock — they are paid for time, you are paying for time, and the work itself is what gets negotiated. A retained figure for a specified standard removes that entirely.
We work to a minimum frequency rather than a minimum term. There is no lock-in and no notice period measured in months.
What the figure depends on
Frequency. The largest factor by far. Daily attendance costs more in total and less per visit, because a house kept continuously never needs recovering.
Size, and more particularly shape. Floor area matters less than the number of floors, the number of bathrooms and whether there is a service stair. A wide house in St John's Wood and a narrow one in Belgravia with the same square footage are not the same job.
Surfaces. Marble, limestone, antique timber, silk and specified stone all take longer and need particular products. A house finished entirely in forgiving materials is genuinely cheaper to maintain.
Occupancy. A full household creates more work than an empty one — but an empty one needs opening and closing, which is its own cost.
Access. A mansion block with a booked service lift, or a crescent house where everything comes through the front door, adds time to every visit. We would rather price that honestly at the start than discover it in month three.
Specialist work. Stone restoration, textile cleaning and after-builders work are quoted separately from the retainer.
Why we cost more than an hourly cleaner
Because of arithmetic, not positioning.
Our housekeepers are employed rather than introduced. That means we pay above the London Living Wage, plus employer's National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday pay and sick pay. It means someone is paid to cover when your housekeeper is unwell, and paid to shadow your house beforehand so that cover is worth having. It means training on the materials in your house rather than on general principles, and supervision that happens whether or not anything has gone wrong.
It also means the employment relationship, and the obligations that come with it, sit with us rather than with your household.
A low hourly rate cannot carry any of that. What it buys is one person's time, with no cover, no training, no supervision and no recourse — and whatever is left over after an introduction agency has taken its share. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy. It is simply not what we sell, and you should not pay our rate expecting theirs.
If the hourly model is what suits your household, we will say so at the survey. We would rather lose the enquiry than the year.
Questions
Common questions
Why is there no price on your website?
Because an hourly rate is the wrong unit for this service. We price a specified standard for a particular house, billed monthly, and we cannot do that honestly before we have seen the house.
Is there a minimum contract?
There is a minimum frequency rather than a minimum term. No lock-in, and no notice period measured in months.
What is included in the monthly figure?
The agreed visits, your named housekeeper and their deputy, supervision, all materials and equipment, travel, parking, congestion charges where they apply, insurance, and the specification work. Nothing is added afterwards.
Do you charge extra for the congestion charge?
No. Where it applies — Mayfair, Belgravia and Marylebone sit inside the zone, the rest of our areas do not — it is absorbed into the retainer and never appears on an invoice.
Can we start with a one-off clean?
Often that is the sensible way in. A deep clean before a retained arrangement begins means routine visits start from a known baseline rather than inheriting years of someone else's shortcuts.
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