Do Commercial Tenants Have to Professionally Clean Carpets at Lease End?

No.

Not automatically, and not because a managing agent’s checklist says so. Whether you owe a lease-end carpet clean depends on what your lease says, what condition the floor was in when you took it, and what the landlord plans to do with the space in the eighteen months after you hand the keys back. I’ve cleaned floors in Clerkenwell where the tenant had no obligation at all and paid us anyway because it was cheaper than the argument. I’ve also told a tenant in Southwark to keep their money because the whole floor was coming out in July.

I clean carpets for a living and I read a lot of schedules. What follows is what I see from that side of the table, and none of it is legal advice.

Does your lease put carpet cleaning on you?

Read the yielding-up clause first. Most London commercial leases require the tenant to yield up the premises in repair and decorated, and many add a phrase about leaving the premises clean, or in a clean and tidy condition. That last phrase is where carpet cleaning lives. There’s no separate covenant called “professionally clean the carpets” in any lease I’ve been shown.

Then check whether carpets are part of the demise at all. In a lot of Grade A lettings the floor covering was installed by the tenant as part of a Category B fit-out, which makes it a tenant’s alteration. If it’s an alteration, the question stops being about cleaning and becomes about reinstatement, and the landlord may have a licence to alter that requires the whole lot to be lifted and the raised access floor left exposed. Nobody cleans a carpet they’re contractually obliged to skip.

Where the tiles came with the building, they’re landlord’s fixtures, and condition on handover is a repair-and-cleanliness question. Leases granted on a shell-and-core basis with a lengthy fit-out rent-free period almost always fall the other way, and I’ve seen tenants pay for cleaning on floors they installed themselves and were separately being asked to remove.

Where “yield up” quietly turns into a cleaning bill

The wording that costs tenants money is the compound one: yield up in good and substantial repair and condition. “Condition” does more work than tenants expect. Heavy traffic-lane soiling in a floor that was handed over new is arguable as a failure of condition, and it lands on the schedule as a specialist clean, usually at a rate the surveyor pulled from a cost book rather than from anyone who owns a machine.

What does a schedule of condition change?

Everything, if you have one and it’s any good.

A schedule of condition is a photographic and written record annexed to the lease at grant, limiting your repair obligation so you don’t have to hand the space back better than you found it. For carpets, this is the difference between a claim and a conversation. If the annexed photographs show a five-year-old floor with visible lane greying at the point you took occupation, the landlord is claiming for a condition that predates you.

The trouble is that most schedules of condition are prepared with the building fabric in mind. Roof, windows, M&E plant, the state of the WC cores. Floor coverings get one wide-angle shot per room taken from the doorway with the blinds open and the sun behind the camera, which shows nothing. I’ve sat in a handover meeting in Fitzrovia where the tenant’s only carpet evidence was a photograph so bright the tiles read as uniform beige. They were not uniform beige. They had a coffee route running from the kitchenette to the meeting rooms that predated the lease by two tenants.

Photographs beat adjectives

If you’re taking a lease now, get the floor documented properly at grant. Close-range shots at pile level, taken with the overhead lighting on and the blinds shut, in the lift lobby, at every entrance threshold, along the primary circulation route and in front of every tea point. Note existing burns, bleach spots, castor damage and any tiles that were already replaced from a different dye lot. Twenty minutes of work at the start removes an entire category of dispute at the end.

What do surveyors look for when they walk the floor?

Contrast, mostly. A dilapidations surveyor inspecting a 12,000 square foot floorplate in Aldgate is not crawling about with a soil-load meter. They walk the circulation route, look down, and record where the carpet is visibly different from the carpet next to it. Traffic lanes, lift lobby fans, the arc in front of the double doors, the two square metres beneath every desk where a chair has ground grit into the pile.

They also photograph anything with an edge to it. Individual stains, mismatched replacement tiles, curled corners, fraying at door thresholds. Those items are easy to describe and easy to defend, so they end up itemised on the schedule while general soiling gets one catch-all line.

The thing that consistently draws a claim is patch replacement. A tenant who has swapped fifteen tiles over six years from attic stock that no longer matches has produced a floor with visible chequerboarding, and a surveyor will price replacement of the whole area rather than a clean. That’s a self-inflicted wound and it’s usually the largest carpet number in the claim. Keep spare tiles from the original delivery, sealed, in the comms room. Buying tile from the same range four years later gets you the same product code and a different batch, and under 500 lux of downlighting that difference is obvious from standing height.

Lift lobby and desk positions get read differently

Common-part-facing areas carry the reputational weight. A landlord marketing the floor to a replacement tenant cares more about the twelve square metres a viewer sees stepping out of the lift than about the state of the pile under desk 47. Surveyors know this and weight accordingly, whatever the schedule says about uniform condition throughout.

When does the carpet line vanish from the claim entirely?

When the landlord is going to rip it out anyway.

Section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 caps damages for breach of a repairing covenant at the amount by which the value of the landlord’s reversion is diminished by the disrepair. <cite index=”20-1″>The second part of the section goes further: no damages are recoverable where it can be shown that at the end of the term the premises would be demolished or altered so as to render the repairs valueless.</cite> Surveyors call the second point supersession, and <cite index=”28-1″>the 7th edition of the RICS guidance note on Dilapidations in England and Wales, effective from December 2016, added basic guidance on it.</cite>

Supersession, without the surveyor’s vocabulary

In practice, if the landlord has already tendered a Category A refurbishment that includes new floor coverings, a claim for cleaning the old ones is superseded. The cleaning would be valueless. This is not obscure – <cite index=”24-1″>the Dilapidations Protocol requires the landlord’s surveyor, in endorsing a schedule, to confirm that full account has been taken of the landlord’s intentions for the property.</cite> The intentions are supposed to be on the schedule already.

Here’s my unpopular position, and it costs me work: if you can see a strip-out contractor’s hoarding going up on the floor above, do not pay anyone to clean your carpets. Not us. Ask your surveyor to put the supersession point in the response and let the two of them settle it. I’ve had two clients in Chiswick Park book a full-floor extraction in the last fortnight of their term while the incoming tenant’s fit-out drawings were already with building control.

The reverse of that rule holds just as firmly. Where there’s a schedule of condition, no refurbishment in prospect, and a floor that a viewing agent will walk a prospect across next month, clean it. The claim line for specialist cleaning on a floor that size is typically somewhere between one and three thousand pounds, and a tenant’s surveyor who bills four hours arguing that line has spent more than the work costs. Concede it and fight the M&E items, which is where the real money sits.

What’s worth doing in the final ninety days?

Get a copy of the lease, the licences to alter and any schedule of condition into one folder, and read the yielding-up clause with the floor plan next to it. Work out which areas are landlord’s fixtures and which are your fit-out. That takes an afternoon and it determines whether cleaning is even the right question.

Then ask the landlord’s agent, in writing, what the intentions for the space are. You are entitled to an answer, and the answer determines the supersession position on every line of the eventual schedule.

Time the clean so it survives to inspection

A clean done six weeks before handover, with staff still occupying the floor and the tea point still running, will be back to where it started by the time the surveyor arrives. Book it after the last desk goes and after the strip-out of your own furniture, when the empty floorplate shows every mark the movers made. Skid marks from pedestal drawers dragged across a lobby are a common one. So is adhesive residue where somebody taped cable protection down for eight weeks in a Camden building I worked in last autumn and pulled it up in January.

Budget for the movers’ damage rather than the accumulated soiling. Six years of traffic responds to encapsulation and a decent extraction. Two days of a removals crew produces oil marks from trolley wheels, torn tile edges at lift thresholds and adhesive tape residue, and those are itemised line items with photographs attached.

The surveyor’s inspection date is the only date that matters. Everything before it is rehearsal.

Last year a tenant off Great Suffolk Street handed back 4,000 square feet with a clean floor, a five-page photographic schedule of condition from 2017, and a two-line carpet entry. It settled at nil.