Cleaning schedules

How Often to Clean Everything, Room by Room

Updated 19 August 2026 · 3 min read

Most cleaning guilt comes from not knowing the answer to a simple question: how often is this actually supposed to happen? Without a reference, everything feels overdue.

Here is the honest version. Some of it is less often than you fear. A few things are considerably more often than most people manage.

Every day

• Kitchen surfaces and sink, last thing at night
• Move one load of washing along a stage
• A five-minute tidy of whichever room you use most
• Air the bedroom for ten minutes, even in winter

That is the entire daily list. Anything longer is a list you will abandon.

Every week

• Bathrooms: loo, sink, mirror, a quick pass on the shower
• Floors: vacuum the rooms you actually use
• Change bed linen
• Dust at eye level and clean the mirrors
• Wash bath mats and tea towels
• Empty and wipe the bin

Every two to four weeks

• Mop hard floors properly, rather than a spot clean
• Vacuum under and behind furniture you can move
• Wipe skirting boards in the main rooms
• Clean the inside of the microwave properly
• Wash cushion covers and throws

Every one to three months

This is the band that quietly makes a house feel neglected. Nothing runs out to remind you, so it slides for months without anyone identifying exactly what is wrong.

• Descale the kettle, monthly in a hard water area
• Run a dishwasher cleaner cycle and clean the filter by hand
• Run a washing machine cleaner cycle and wipe the door seal
• Descale the shower head
• Clean the bathroom extractor fan cover
• Degrease the kitchen extractor filter
• Vacuum the mattress and rotate it
• Wash pillow and mattress protectors
• Clean light switches, door handles and remotes
• Check smoke alarm batteries

Every six months to a year

• Wash the duvet and the pillows themselves, not just the covers
• Wash curtains
• Clean windows inside and out, plus the tracks and sills
• Clean light fittings and lampshades
• Descale taps
• Clean the oven properly, glass included
• Move the big appliances and clean behind them
• Replace pillows that fail the fold test

What people get wrong

Wildly overestimated. Mopping, dusting low surfaces, and washing duvet covers. Weekly is plenty for most households, and fortnightly is fine for many.

Wildly underestimated. Extractor filters, shower heads, mattresses, pillows, and the bathroom extractor fan. Most of these have never been done in the lifetime of the house.

The one nobody does at all. The bathroom extractor fan cover. Take it off, wash it, put it back. It takes four minutes and the difference to how quickly the room dries is noticeable.

Adjusting for your house

• Hard water area? Halve every descaling interval.
• Pets? Floors move to twice weekly, soft furnishings to monthly.
• Allergies or asthma in the house? Bedding weekly on a hot wash, mattress monthly.
• Damp or condensation? Air rooms daily and check window seals monthly, because that is a ventilation problem becoming a cleaning problem.

What helps

• A calendar or tracker you can see. The monthly and quarterly jobs fail purely because there is no trigger. A ticked box is the trigger.
• Descaler in bulk, so a monthly job is never blocked by not having any.
• Spare filters for the extractor and dryer, so a dirty one can be swapped and cleaned later.
• A second vacuum kept upstairs, which is the single biggest predictor of whether floors actually get done.

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