What’s a Fair Tip For a Regular Domestic Cleaner in London?

The question comes up every December, and it always arrives sideways. Never a straight ask. It’s a text at half nine at night that starts “sorry, random question” and then hovers around the subject for four lines before landing on the actual thing, which is: how much, and in what, and do I put it in a card?

Awkward, isn’t it.

I’ll give you the number, because that’s what you came for. Then I’ll tell you why the number is the wrong thing to be thinking about, and you can take that or leave it.

Do you tip a domestic cleaner in the UK at all?

Yes, and mostly at Christmas, and mostly in cash.

Britain never built a tipping habit around domestic work the way it did around restaurants and cabs, so there’s no script and everyone improvises. What we’ve ended up with is a once-a-year lump – sometimes a week’s money, sometimes a note folded into a card, sometimes a bottle of something and nothing else. Roughly half my regular clients do it. The other half don’t, and I’ve never once thought less of them for it, because the ones who pay properly through the year have already made their position clear.

The confusion is imported. People have absorbed twenty per cent from American television and hotel bills, and they try to apply a per-visit percentage to a service they use fifty times a year, and it doesn’t fit. Tipping twenty per cent on every clean would be an enormous sum by March, and nobody does it, so instead they do nothing all year and then panic in the third week of December.

Where the awkwardness comes from

You know your cleaner’s name and you don’t know her hourly rate. That’s the whole problem in one line.

If you book through an agency, you pay the office and the office pays her, and the split isn’t on the invoice. So when you go to hand her a tenner you’re doing it blind – you have no idea whether that tenner is a nice gesture on top of a fair wage or a small patch on a bad one. And you can’t ask her, because asking someone what they’re paid while they’re cleaning your bathroom is not a conversation either of you wants to have standing up.

What’s the going rate when people do tip?

For a regular weekly cleaner, one visit’s worth of money in December is the shape most people land on and it’s a decent instinct. If your cleaner does three hours a week, that’s three hours’ pay, given once, at the end of the year. Fortnightly, the same. Someone who’s been coming for five years, more.

Per-visit tipping I’d leave alone entirely unless something out of scope happened – she stayed late because the plumber overran, she took a delivery in, she dealt with something a pet did that no reasonable person should have to deal with. Then yes, cash, that day, and say what it’s for. A tip attached to a specific thing lands. A tip attached to nothing just creates a question about whether it’s now expected every week, which is a burden you’ve handed her without meaning to.

Cash beats a bank transfer, and I’ll defend that even though it sounds old-fashioned. Not everyone in this trade banks in a way that makes a random Christmas transfer straightforward, and a note in a hand is unambiguous about who it’s for.

Christmas, and why it carries all the weight

There’s a reason the whole thing bunches into one fortnight. December is when the relationship becomes visible to you. You’re at home more, you can see her working, you notice the flat looks good for the people coming on the 27th, and the gap between what she does and what you’d assumed she does closes for about a week.

Then January arrives and everything goes back to invisible. That’s the actual mechanism, and it’s why the December lump exists at all: it’s a year’s worth of noticing, compressed and paid off in one go.

Does the money reach your cleaner?

Sometimes it doesn’t, and this is the bit of the trade I’d happily see cleaned up.

Some agencies take a cut of tips. Some have a policy against tipping altogether that exists to stop cleaners being poached, which is a fine commercial motive dressed up as an ethical one. Some pass on every penny and would be offended you asked. You cannot tell which sort you’ve got from the website, because every website in my industry says the same eight things.

Cash directly into a hand is the only method with no leak in it. Whatever the office’s stated policy, a folded note given on a Thursday afternoon in your kitchen is money that reaches the person who did the work, and no honest agency will have a problem with that. If yours does have a problem with it, you’ve learned something worth knowing.

The one question to ask the office

Ask what proportion of your hourly rate the cleaner receives. Once, by email, so there’s a record.

A firm that answers with a number is telling you the truth or has decided to look like it does, and either way you now have something to hold them to. A firm that talks about “competitive rates” and “market-leading packages” for two paragraphs without a figure has answered you completely. That’s an answer, and it’s the answer.

When is a tip the wrong tool for the job?

Here’s the argument I came to make, and it will annoy some of my own clients.

If you feel the pull to tip your cleaner, what you’re feeling is that she’s underpaid. A tip is what you reach for when you can’t change the price. You can change the price. You are the client, the rate is between you and whoever you pay, and a twenty-pound note in December from a household that hasn’t moved the hourly rate since 2023 is not generosity. It’s an apology with a bow on it.

Do the sum. A pound an hour, on a weekly three-hour visit, is roughly a hundred and fifty pounds a year – an amount you would not notice and she absolutely would. Give it as a tip and it arrives once, taxed by nothing but timing, and it’s gone by February. Put it in the rate and it compounds: it changes what she can plan around, what she can turn down, whether she can afford to be ill. A December cash gift can’t do any of that, because you can’t budget a thing that might not come.

I have never met a cleaner who’d rather have the lump.

The rate review nobody schedules

Put a reminder in your phone for the first week of every year. That’s the whole system.

When it goes off, look at what you’re paying and move it, without being asked, in line with what’s happened to rent and buses and everything else. Cleaners hardly ever ask. It’s a trade where asking risks the client going quiet and finding someone off an app for two quid less, and everyone in it knows it, so the rate sits still for years while the price of getting to your flat doesn’t.

Household in Lavender Sweep, SW11 – five years now, two kids, a spaniel that sheds like it’s a career. They review the rate every January without a word from anyone and they’ve never tipped me a penny, not once, no card, nothing. They’re among the best clients I’ve got and it isn’t close. Compare that with a place off St John Street in EC1 I did for two years at the same rate throughout, where there was always a bottle of something decent at Christmas and a lovely note. I liked them. I liked the wine. I left, because the maths stopped working and the wine wasn’t a wage.

So what does a cleaner want instead?

Money, correctly, on time, in the rate. After that it’s a shorter list than you’d expect.

Somewhere to park, or at least a straight answer about the permit situation before the first visit rather than after a ticket. Heating on in winter, because a cold flat with wet hands is miserable work and it costs you about eighty pence. Products that work – if you supply your own and they’re all the pink stuff from the corner shop, she’s fighting your kitchen with a handicap and losing time you’re paying for. Somewhere to put a coat that isn’t the floor. Being told about the dog before she meets the dog.

And notice, occasionally. The thing about this job is that it’s only visible when it hasn’t been done. Nobody comes home and says the skirting boards look excellent. They come home and say the bin wasn’t emptied. Six months of that wears at a person in a way a tenner in December doesn’t touch.

What to write in the card, if there’s a card

Say the specific thing. Not “thanks for everything this year” – that’s the sentence people write when they can’t remember a single instance. Say that the flat was clean the week your mother came and it mattered, or that you noticed she got the mark out of the hall carpet and never mentioned it. Cleaners work alone in empty rooms and the entire feedback loop is silence, so one concrete observation lands harder than the note ever will. Then put the cash in and don’t make a thing of it at the door. The doorstep handover is where all the embarrassment lives. Leave it on the counter with the card, say the sentence you were going to say anyway, and let her put it in her bag without an audience.

Awkward, isn’t it. The generous thing and the cheap thing look almost identical from the outside, and only one of them shows up in her rent.

If you’re going to do both – good rate and a Christmas lump – then obviously nobody’s complaining. But if you’re picking one, pick the boring one. Set the reminder for January.