Do it yourself or have it done: what a DIY move-out clean really costs

Almost everyone who considers doing the move-out clean themselves works out one number: what it costs to have it done. Very few work out the other side, which is what it costs to do it yourself. With both numbers on the table the decision usually looks different, and these are the items people forget to count.

Your time is not free, it is just invisible

An empty home of around 100 square metres is typically 12 to 16 person-hours if it has to pass an inspection. That is not an evening. It is a day and a half for one person, and that day has to come from somewhere.

Spend a weekend and you never get it back. It is the day you were going to rest on, in the middle of a move, which is already one of the more exhausting things people do. You get up tired and go to bed sorer.

Spend a weekday and it is money. One or two days of leave spent scrubbing an oven is one or two days of leave not spent on a holiday. Leave is not free, it is part of your pay, and it can be spent on something closer to what it was meant for.

You get roughly a quarter of the labour back

This is the item most often left out entirely, and it moves the arithmetic noticeably. Cleaning in your own home is partly deductible in Denmark through the servicefradrag, and that includes move-out cleaning as long as the home is yours until the handover date.

The 2026 servicefradrag gives up to 18,300 kr per person, and if two adults live at the address you can both use it. Around 26 percent of the labour comes back as a tax saving, which is close to the VAT you paid on it. Only the labour counts, not materials, payment has to be digital, and you report the amount yourself to SKAT. Rates change from year to year, so check the current figures at skat.dk.

So the comparison is not "free against full price". It is "my weekend against roughly three quarters of a price".

What gets missed is not random

People clean the places they see day to day. The inspection looks at the places nobody sees day to day, which is exactly why they are used to judge whether a home was cleaned properly.

• The window rebate, the groove the window closes into. It gets checked every single time.
• Ceiling and wall vents, which turn grey and stand out against white.
• The tops of doors, frames and wall units, where nobody looks until a finger runs along the edge.
• Behind and underneath the appliances, which have to be pulled out.
• The extractor's metal filter, behind the flap, a job of its own.
• Bathroom grout, where limescale needs contact time, not force.

And then there is contact time, the single habit that separates a result that looks clean from one that is clean. Limescale and grease are dissolved by time, not by rubbing harder. Spray it on and wipe it straight off and you have washed the surface, not descaled it.

Break something and it is yours

This is the item that can cost the most, and it almost never enters the decision.

Scratch a worktop with the wrong product, etch a tap with a descaler that is too strong, wash a wood wool ceiling and find out it cannot be undone, or put a ladder through a door, and you are the one paying. There is nobody else to go to.

An insured cleaning company carries liability insurance precisely because these things happen. If we have an accident it is our problem and our insurance, not your bill. That is not a sales line, it is a real difference in who carries the risk on the day something goes wrong.

The equipment you probably do not own

A move-out clean needs more than a bucket. It needs a telescopic pole for ceilings and high windows, a soft brush for wood wool, a squeegee and proper window tools, a descaler and oven cleaner that work rather than merely smell of working, enough microfibre to change cloth all the way through, and a vacuum that does more than hold a bag.

Buy or hire that for one job and part of the saving disappears immediately, and you are left with equipment to store or return.

The last room

The hours do not disappear evenly. People start thoroughly and finish quickly. The last two rooms are always the rushed ones, because the van has to go back or because it has got late, and that is where the inspection finds something.

Two of us come to a move-out clean precisely because the job is built for it: one carries on while the product works somewhere else. Most homes are therefore finished in half a day to a full day, and the last room gets the same effort as the first.

The bill nobody budgets for

An inspection that fails on cleanliness usually ends up costing more than the cleaning would have. The landlord books it themselves, at their price and their supplier, and takes the amount out of the deposit. You have then spent the weekend and paid for the cleaning anyway.

When does doing it yourself actually make sense?

Sometimes it does, and it would be dishonest not to write it.

If you have a small home, plenty of time, no tight handover date, and you are the sort who does things thoroughly rather than fast, it is a perfectly reasonable job to take on. The same goes if the home is new, has been lived in briefly, and there is no limescale, grease or high ceiling to fight.

What pulls the other way are the usual ones: a large floor area, two bathrooms, wood wool ceilings, a lot of glass, a tight date, and having to move house yourself at the same time.

Our guarantee, if we take it

We walk the home with you before we leave and put things right on the spot. If there is still something about the cleaning after the inspection, we are back within 48 hours at no charge. The guarantee covers our cleaning, not wear and damage in the home.

If you would rather do it yourself, use our checklist. It is the same one we work from and you can download it from the move-out cleaning page. You may also want the full guide to move-out cleaning.

Shall we take it?

We are a small fixed team based in Bork, and we do move-out cleaning in Ringkobing, Skjern and Tarm, Varde, Esbjerg and Videbaek, as well as Hvide Sande, Sondervig, Henne Strand, Norre Nebel and Oksbol. A fixed written price before we start, no invoice afterwards that you did not agree to. Send us the address and your handover date and get a fast quote.