Eight of Eleven Agencies Selling to Cleaning Companies Will Not Publish a Price

Last Updated on September 9, 2026

On 20 August 2026 we went looking for one number: what a UK marketing agency charges a cleaning company. We found eleven agencies with a page written specifically for cleaning firms.

Three publish a price of any kind. One publishes a price you could actually put in a budget.

Then we looked at the cleaning franchises, the ones asking for twenty-four thousand pounds up front, and found they publish almost everything.

The mistake: assuming the price is hidden because it varies

The standard explanation for a missing price is that every business is different, so a number would be misleading.

That argument does not survive contact with the evidence. The franchises sell to exactly the same businesses, with the same variation, and they print the fee, the monthly minimum, the royalty percentage and the marketing obligation. The variation is identical. The willingness to say is not.

What a hidden price actually tells you is that the number is set after the seller has worked out what you can pay. That is not pricing. That is negotiation with only one side informed.

What the agencies publish

Eleven UK agency pages aimed at cleaning companies, read on 20 August 2026. Here is everything we found in public.

We have not named the eight. The finding is the pattern, not the people, and every one of them is doing what its industry considers normal. That is the same rule we applied when we checked 200 UK business websites for a price and found the trades publish almost nothing.

One point of fairness. An agency that does not publish a price is not doing anything wrong, and several of the eight look like perfectly good firms. The problem is not any one of them. It is that a cleaning company owner cannot compare eleven options when eight of them require a phone call before they will name a figure.

The reversal: the franchises tell you everything

This is the part worth reading twice. The businesses asking for the largest cheque are the most forthcoming about what it buys.

Six of the eight franchise sites we could read publish an initial fee. Three publish an ongoing rate. Against eight of eleven agencies publishing nothing at all.

The most useful number in the whole trade

Look again at the Fantastic Services line.

Fantastic Services publishes a “minimum spending budget of £500 per month” on local marketing campaigns, and separately charges £200 a month for its own SEO support, on top of a 10 per cent management fee on everything a franchisee invoices.

Read that split carefully, because only the first half is a marketing budget. The £500 is spend the franchisee directs. The £200 is a fee for a service the franchisor provides. Anyone quoting £700 a month as a marketing budget has merged a budget with an invoice.

Two more caveats before you use it. The owner operator model covers cleaning and gardening, so the £500 is buying enquiries for two services rather than one. And Fantastic Services publishes no franchisee count, so we cannot tell you how much operating history sits behind the figure.

Even with those caveats it is the closest thing to a public benchmark that exists in this trade, and it did not come from an agency, a survey or a blog. It came from a franchisor’s own recruitment page, where being wrong would cost them franchisees.

Molly Maid’s number points the same way from a different angle, and it is cleaning only: £12,000 of marketing inside a first year package.

If you run an independent cleaning company, treat £500 a month as your comparison, and treat it as an upper bound rather than a target, because it is covering gardening enquiries too.

Nobody knows what a cleaning click costs in the UK

We tried hard to find a UK cost per click or cost per lead for cleaning search terms. There isn’t one.

The figure everyone quotes traces back to WordStream and LocaliQ’s search advertising benchmarks. That study covers 13,474 campaigns, it runs April 2025 to March 2026, and it is United States only. More to the point, it has no cleaning category at all. Its home services grouping covers air conditioning, plumbing, roofing, pest control, landscaping and pools. Cleaning is not in it.

LOCALiQ’s UK home services figures are behind a form.

So when an agency tells you a cleaning lead costs a specific number of pounds in the UK, ask where that came from. On our search, there is nowhere for it to have come from.

The platforms, and what they publish

The lead platforms are more open than the agencies, though not by as much as you would hope.

Worth knowing before you sign with Checkatrade: its own trade support pages state that Approved members do not appear in standard search results and should not expect leads from location or trade searches. We went through that, and the twelve month term behind it, in our review of what the lead platforms actually publish.

The one line that is cheap and honestly priced

In a dataset full of hidden numbers, websites are the exception. We found UK providers publishing one off cleaning company websites at £299, £499 and £799, and monthly builds from £29 a month, and one at £35 a month with a £75 setup fee.

That matters because a website is the piece most cleaning companies are told they need to spend thousands on. On the published evidence, they do not.

What we would actually do

Start

Do not hire anyone. Put your prices on your website, because almost nobody in this trade does and it is the first question every customer has. Claim and fill your Google Business Profile. Ask every customer for a review, the same way, every time.

Budget: nothing but a website at the published rate, so under £300 one off or £29 a month.

Build

Now you have something worth sending traffic to. If you buy leads, buy them where you can stop tomorrow rather than on a twelve month term, and measure cost per won contract rather than cost per lead. A domestic clean is worth a few hundred pounds a year in repeat work, so a lead that converts is worth far more than its price, and a lead that does not is worth nothing at all.

If you hire an agency, use the franchise numbers as your anchor. £500 a month of directed local spend is what an established franchisor sets as its minimum. If a quote is far above that, ask what you get that a franchisee does not.

Scale

Commercial contracts are a different game to domestic rounds, and this is where tender platforms start to make sense. CleanTender at £99 a month or Tenders Direct from £1,359 a year are real published numbers you can put against the value of one office contract. One retained commercial client usually pays for a year of either.

The sharp takeaway

Eight of eleven agencies selling to cleaning companies will not name a price in public, while the franchises selling a £24,000 buy in publish the fee, the royalty and the monthly marketing minimum. Take the franchisor’s number as your benchmark, £500 a month on local marketing and £200 on SEO, and treat any quote that cannot explain why it is higher as a quote aimed at what you can pay rather than what the work costs.

Method

Checked on 20 August 2026 by reading each company’s own public pages. Eleven UK agency pages written specifically for cleaning companies, eight franchise recruitment sites, eight lead and tender platforms and three website providers. Where a company publishes no price, that is recorded as no price rather than filled in from a third party estimate.

We excluded every “average cost of cleaning company marketing” article that quoted a figure without a stated method or sample, and we excluded a United States agency whose dollar prices appear in UK search results. We have named the companies that do publish, and not named those that do not.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research bureau. We ask the AI engines what they recommend, then check the businesses they name against Companies House and the sector registers. Figures we publish carry the date they were checked. Companies cannot pay to appear or to rank.

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