The UK Cleaning Industry Is Not Worth £72 Billion

Last Updated on September 9, 2026

Search for the size of the UK cleaning industry and you will be told it is worth around £72 billion. That figure appears in trade press, in agency pitches, in franchise brochures and in the opening line of most articles written for cleaning businesses.

It is wrong by a factor of five.

The cleaning industry, meaning the businesses that actually clean things, turns over about £13 billion. The £72 billion is a different and much larger thing, and the organisation that published it says so plainly on the page everyone is citing.

Where the number comes from, and what it actually covers

The source is the British Cleaning Council’s research report, published on 18 February 2026 and reporting 2023 turnover data drawn from the ONS Annual Business Survey.

Its headline is that the industry contributes “nearly £71.9 billion”. But the industry it is describing is cleaning, facilities management, waste management and landscaping combined. Four sub industries in one number.

Break it out and cleaning is the smaller part of its own headline.

The same error runs through every headline figure in circulation.

Why this costs you money rather than just being annoying

A wrong market size is not a trivia problem. It changes three decisions.

It makes your market look five times more crowded than it is. If you believe you are competing against 78,915 firms rather than 26,315, you will price defensively and assume you cannot win work you probably can.

It makes you look tiny to yourself. A £400,000 cleaning business is a rounding error against £72 billion. Against £13 billion, and against an average firm turning over roughly £490,000, it is an ordinary and perfectly viable business. That framing changes what you are willing to charge.

It is the number agencies use to sell you growth. A pitch built on a £72 billion opportunity is a pitch built on landscaping and waste management revenue you are never going to touch.

What the industry actually looks like

Strip out the other three sub industries and cleaning is a small business trade almost end to end.

Take the pay row and the part time row together, because they are the whole commercial story of this trade.

The 65p problem

The mean hourly wage in cleaning is £12.86. The National Living Wage in April 2025 was £12.21.

One caveat that matters, and that almost nobody applies: £12.86 is the average for full time employees. Two thirds of this workforce is part time, so that figure describes the better paid end of the trade rather than the typical cleaner. The real gap for most people is smaller than the one below.

The gap between what the average cleaner earns and the legal minimum is 65 pence an hour.

Now add the direction of travel. The National Living Wage went from £11.44 to £12.21 in April 2025, and to £12.71 in April 2026. That is an 11.1 per cent rise in two years, against a sector average that has 65p of headroom.

Unless average pay rises at the same rate, the entire pay distribution in cleaning compresses onto the statutory floor. There stops being such a thing as a better paid cleaning job, which makes staff impossible to keep with money and makes everything else about how you run the business matter more.

The April 2025 change that hit cleaning harder than most trades

From 6 April 2025, employer National Insurance rose from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent. That part was universal.

The part that was not universal was the secondary threshold falling from £9,100 to £5,000.

In a trade where 67 per cent of people work part time, a large number of employees sit in exactly that £5,000 to £9,100 band. Before April 2025 those people attracted no employer National Insurance at all. Now they do.

So cleaning did not take a percentage increase like everyone else. It took a per head increase on a workforce made largely of part time heads. The Employment Allowance rising from £5,000 to £10,500 offsets some of it for smaller employers, but not the structure of it.

The most defensible evidence that this is biting: the Department for Business and Trade’s Business Population Estimates for 2025 record administrative and support services, the sector containing cleaning, as having the largest numeric fall in business numbers of any UK sector, 20,000 fewer businesses year on year.

The big firms, and why you cannot compare yourself to them

Every list of the biggest UK cleaning companies is really a list of facilities management groups, and their published revenue includes security, catering, engineering and maintenance.

Only one company in the whole sector has separated out anything resembling cleaning revenue, and that was Mitie’s Hygiene line at £461 million in the year to March 2025. Everyone else buries it.

And in its following year Mitie stopped doing it too, reporting Hygiene and Landscapes together as a single line. So the one disclosure that let anyone see a cleaning number now bundles cleaning with landscaping, which is the same merge that produced the £72 billion headline in the first place.

Which means the honest answer to “who is the biggest cleaning company in the UK” is that nobody publishes enough for anyone to know. That is worth saying out loud, because the question gets asked constantly and gets answered confidently with group revenue that is mostly not cleaning.

The one piece of arithmetic worth doing

£13 billion of cleaning turnover across 26,315 cleaning businesses gives an average of roughly £490,000 a year.

Two honest caveats. The turnover figure is 2023 and the business count is 2025, so this is an illustration of scale rather than a precise average. And an average across a population where 83 per cent employ fewer than ten people will sit well above the typical firm, because a handful of large contractors pull it up.

Even so, it is a more useful anchor than £72 billion, and it puts most independent cleaning companies in a sensible place on the map rather than an invisible one.

What to take from this

Your market is about £13 billion, not £72 billion. There are about 26,315 competitors, not 78,915. Roughly 83 per cent of them are smaller than ten people, which means the firm you are actually competing with for a local contract looks a lot like you and is under exactly the same wage pressure.

The pressure is real and it is structural. Wage floor rising 11 per cent in two years against a sector average with 65p of headroom, employer National Insurance restructured in a way that punishes part time workforces, and 20,000 businesses gone from the wider sector in a year.

None of that is fixed by marketing. It is fixed by charging properly, which is easier to do when you know how big your market really is and how few people are in it. We looked at what the industry charges, and what it claims about itself, in cheap, vetted, insured.

The sharp takeaway

If an article, an agency or a franchise brochure opens by telling you the UK cleaning industry is worth £72 billion, it has not read the report it is citing. Cleaning alone is £13 billion across 26,315 firms. Anyone selling you growth against the bigger number is selling you a share of the landscaping and waste business you will never do.

Method

All industry figures are from the British Cleaning Council research report published 18 February 2026, which draws its turnover data from the ONS Annual Business Survey 2023 results and its employment data from ONS releases in 2025. The report attributes itself to the British Cleaning Council, with no external research partner named in the 2024, 2025 or 2026 editions.

Watch the geography, because the report does not make it obvious. Employment figures are Great Britain. Business counts and the 1.51 million occupation figure are UK. The business population figures are as published by the Department for Business and Trade.

One inconsistency worth recording: the BCC’s own press release and executive summary say 78,915 businesses, while page 7 of the same report says more than 78,925. We have used the press release figure, which is the one the BCC repeats.

Company turnover figures are for the year ends stated, taken from filed accounts and published results. Several of these companies have since reported a later year, so read the year end column rather than assuming the figure is current. Where a figure was read from a filing aggregator rather than the original document, it is one step removed from the filing. Group figures are labelled as group figures every time, because for facilities management companies the cleaning share is not separately disclosed.

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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