How Often Should You Have Your House Cleaned? Weekly, Fortnightly or Monthly

Most people who ask how often should you have your house cleaned are choosing between three bookings: weekly, fortnightly or monthly. The trouble is that a house doesn't get dirty at one speed. The bathroom needs attention within days and the kitchen floor within a week, while the spare room could go a month before anyone noticed.

So the answer depends on the rooms you use most and the people living in them. Here is how we'd choose between the three for homes around Leighton Buzzard, Dunstable and Milton Keynes, and which jobs can't wait for a cleaner whatever you book.

What decides how fast a house gets dirty

Size matters less than you'd think. A four-bedroom house with two tidy adults often needs less cleaning than a two-bedroom flat with a toddler and a dog. These are the things that change the answer:

• Who is home during the day. Working from home means more cooking, more cups and more trips to the bathroom. A house that is empty from eight until six stays clean far longer.
• Pets. Hair and paw prints land on floors and sofas every day. A dog that sheds can undo a vacuumed carpet by the weekend.
• Young children. Floors, door frames and anything at knee height get sticky quickly, and the area around a highchair needs wiping after every meal.
• Shoes indoors. Most of the grit on a hallway floor walks in through the front door. A shoes-off house needs its floors done far less often.
• How much you cook. Frying leaves a film of grease on the hob, the splashback and the nearest cupboard fronts. Left for a few weeks, it sets hard and takes much longer to remove.
• The water. This one catches out people who move here from softer water areas.

Hard water sets the pace in the bathroom

The water across our area is hard. Anglian Water, which supplies Leighton Buzzard and Milton Keynes, says most of the water in its region is either hard or very hard. Dunstable's supply is very hard too, and our guide to end of tenancy cleaning in Dunstable explains what that does to taps and shower screens over a tenancy.

Every splash of hard water that dries on a surface leaves a little limescale behind. After a week it's a faint white mark that wipes off with ordinary bathroom cleaner. After a month it's a crust around the base of the taps and a cloudy shower screen, and shifting it takes a descaler, a scrubbing pad and a lot more time. Scale left on glass for long enough can mark it for good.

That's why the bathroom usually decides the schedule. If nobody touches the shower between visits, a fortnight is about as long as you can leave it in a hard water area before the clean turns into a rescue job. A squeegee over the screen after each shower buys you more time than any product.

Weekly, fortnightly or monthly: which suits your home

Weekly

Weekly suits families with young children, homes with pets, anyone working long hours and people who work from home. Nothing has time to build up, so each visit goes on keeping the whole house in order instead of catching up on one room. It's also the right choice if you'd rather not clean at all between visits.

Fortnightly

Fortnightly is the middle ground, and it works well for couples and smaller households who are out during the day. The catch is the second week. Most people on a fortnightly clean give the bathroom and the kitchen floor a quick once-over in between. If you're happy to do that, a fortnightly booking keeps the house comfortably under control.

Monthly

A monthly visit is closer to a regular deep clean than to upkeep. It suits people who keep on top of the house themselves and want someone else to do the slow jobs: skirting boards, the insides of the windows, behind the furniture, the oven door.

It doesn't work as the only cleaning a busy house gets. A month of limescale and cooking grease means the cleaner spends the visit catching up, and the house looks its best for one week in four.

A one-off deep clean first

If the house hasn't had a thorough clean for a while, start with a one-off deep clean before any regular schedule. It brings every room back to the same standard, so the regular visits only have to keep it there. A deep clean also makes sense before guests arrive, and our pre-Christmas deep clean checklist sets out the order to do it in.

The jobs that can't wait for a cleaner

Whatever you book, a few things run on a shorter clock than any cleaning visit.

• Kitchen cloths, sponges and tea towels. The Food Standards Agency's advice for households is to wash or change them at least once a week and to let them dry between uses, because bacteria breed in dirty, damp cloths.
• Bedding. Allergy UK advises washing sheets every week, and says a wash at 60°C or above kills house dust mites. This matters most if anyone in the house has asthma or a dust mite allergy.
• Worktops and the hob. Wipe them after cooking. Yesterday's splashes are a ten-second job, and last week's need soaking.
• The kitchen bin. Empty it before it's full and wipe the lid when you change the bag.
• The shower screen. Squeegee it after use, for the reason above.

None of this takes more than a few minutes a day, and it's what makes a fortnightly clean feel like enough.

How often to book the bigger jobs

Some jobs sit outside a regular clean altogether. These are rules of thumb from the homes we look after, so adjust them to how you live:

• Oven: every three to six months if you roast most weekends. When it smokes as it heats up, it's overdue.
• Carpets and upholstery: about once a year, and more often with pets or small children.
• Extractor hood filter: every few months. A clogged filter stops pulling grease out of the air, and it settles on the cupboards.
• Inside windows, frames and sills: every couple of months, and more often in winter, when condensation leaves black spots along the bottom edge.
• Fridge: a full empty-and-wash every few months, with spills wiped up as they happen.

Our domestic and specialist cleaning services include oven, carpet and upholstery cleaning.

Try it for two months, then adjust

You don't have to get the frequency right first time. Pick the one that looks closest and watch what happens just before each visit. If the limescale is back on the taps and you find yourself cleaning the day before the cleaner comes, you need visits more often. If the house still looks fine when they arrive, you can stretch the gap.

Households change as well. A new baby, a puppy or a switch to working from home can each turn a fortnightly house into a weekly one, and it can go the other way once children start school.

In a hard water area, the bathroom will tell you sooner than any other room whether you've booked often enough. Start with the schedule that fits how you live now, and change it when the house tells you it's wrong.