With the cost of living crisis pronounced across the UK, it’s easy to think that people are cutting back on as many outgoings as possible. But studies suggest that something they’re not willing to let go of is having a cleaner. According to the home interior company Hillarys, one in five people under 40 hire their own.
Of those polled in 2022, 75 percent said they hired a cleaner due to lack of time, with over half saying that cleaning and chores had caused too many arguments between housemates or themselves and a partner.
Yasmin Shaheen-Zaffar, 51, a trauma practitioner and therapist, says “I haven’t got loads of money”, but that she still has a cleaner.
For one, she runs a full-time business, so hasn’t always got a huge amount of time for cleaning spare. Her work is also full on. “I do get quite a lot of clients with trauma, so it’s about self care”, she tells me. She uses the hours she saves with a cleaner to go for a walk, run or to the gym, and look after herself, “because I do need time to process and get things out of me” and “decompress”. She pays £15 an hour for her cleaner to come every two weeks.
Yasmin also has ADHD and dyspraxia, and says having a cleaner can help if you’re neurodivergent.
“If things aren’t in the right place, I can have meltdowns, so that’s really helpful for me to keep order”, she says, adding “if I start cleaning I might end up painting, or rearrange the whole room. The cleaner comes in to do a job and gets it finished”. People with ADHD can be especially prone to getting distracted in the middle of tasks.
Elizabeth Matsangou, 36, a freelance writer and mum of two toddlers uses a cleaner roughly twice a month and says “Even though having a cleaner has become a real luxury since I stopped working full-time, I’d rather sacrifice other things and keep the help.”
“Being able to use that time to get some work done or organise something that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to do is invaluable. Having a cleaner really takes the pressure off and honestly it’s such a big relief for me every time she visits.” She pays £45 for three hours and found her cleaner through word of mouth.
Kerryn Fields, 46, a PR consultant and mum of two, has found similar benefits from having a cleaner. “It started because my husband and I were exhausted from our new baby and I was too weak for months from a massive haemorrhage during the caesarean. We had been spending hours every weekend cleaning and we decided we would prefer to spend that time with our children”, she tells me.
Although the cleaner costs £51 for three hours a week, Kerryn says it “saves our marriage and sanity”. Something that gives Kerryn and her husband pride, too, is that they’re easing someone else’s issues in the cost of living crisis.
“Our one cleaner was a qualified lathe machine operator who couldn’t get work so he was doing this to support his family,” she says. “He finally found work so we found a new cleaner who is a grandmother and primary carer to a six year-old and 18 month old after their mother recently died after going into a diabetes coma.”
Still, Kerryn says it’s troubling that cleaning apps charge £16 to £18 an hour while the cleaners get around £11. Some popular apps are Task Rabbit, Handy and Nextdoor app. Prices can vary quite significantly between cleaners, ranging from £14.95 per hour to £53.83 for central London when using the app Task Rabbit.
Jane Hawkes, a consumer champion, says that in order to work out whether getting a cleaner makes financial sense for you, it’s a good idea to work out your own rate per hour and multiply this by the number of hours it would take you to do the job yourself. “Or to avoid any cost at all, consider skill swapping with a friend or neighbour for example babysitting for cleaning.”
