Last Updated on September 8, 2026
Anyone can start a commercial cleaning company tomorrow. No licence, no register, no qualification. That is the fact the whole sector’s marketing has to work around, and it is worth establishing properly rather than assuming.
Testing the two exceptions people assume exist
Cleaning firms often believe they are caught by gangmasters licensing or by SIA licensing. We read both statutes on 8 September 2026.
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| Does the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 cover cleaning? | No. Section 3 covers agricultural work, gathering shellfish, and processing or packaging of agricultural produce, shellfish, fish or their derivatives. Cleaning is not mentioned |
| Does GOV.UK guidance list cleaning as licensable? | No. Four sectors are listed: agriculture, horticulture, shellfish gathering, and food processing and packaging |
| Does the Private Security Industry Act 2001 cover cleaning? | No. Schedule 2 lists manned guarding, private investigations, security consultants, keyholders, door supervisors and, in Scotland, taking precognitions |
| Is the British Cleaning Council a regulator? | No. It describes itself as the collective voice of the UK cleaning, hygiene and waste management industries, comprising 20 trade and membership associations |
One exception worth knowing: if you supply labour into food processing or packaging, gangmasters licensing does bite. The band fees from the 2025 licensing instrument’s explanatory document are £620 application and £2,870 inspection under £1m turnover, rising to £4,000 and £4,500 above £10m, implemented 28 April 2025. We could not confirm those are the operative 2026 figures because the current GOV.UK guidance carries no fee schedule, so treat them as indicative.
Also worth noting institutionally: gangmasters guidance is now published by the Fair Work Agency alongside the Department for Business and Trade, and the old GLAA pages redirect to GOV.UK.
So what does gate the work
Buyer-imposed prequalification. These are the schemes a facilities manager or a procurement team will actually ask for, with every published price read at source on 8 September 2026.
| Scheme | Published cost | Free public check? |
|---|---|---|
| CHAS Standard, including SSIP | From £429 a year | No |
| CHAS Advanced | From £659 a year | No |
| CHAS Elite, adds public sector and Common Assessment Standard | From £949 a year | No |
| SSIP portal | Not published for suppliers | Yes, free to clients |
| Constructionline Bronze | £75 joining plus £150 annual | No |
| Constructionline Silver, Gold, Platinum | Not published | No |
| SafeContractor | Not published | No public directory found |
| Achilles | Not published. It costs nothing to get started | No |
| BICSc corporate membership | £330 to £5,350 a year by turnover | Yes, free directory |
CHAS states its prices scale with organisation size, so those are floors rather than quotes. One third-party comparison we read gives CHAS Elite at £909 rather than £949; we report both and neither is reconciled.
The free portal, and why it belongs on your tender page
SSIP publishes that its portal is freely available and lets clients verify an assessment at no charge, covering 90,860 suppliers registered with an SSIP member scheme, with a claimed saving of over £68 million in 2023.
That is the only free public verification in this sector, and it is on your side. Put the link on the page where you talk about accreditation, not buried in a footer, because it converts a claim into something a procurement officer can check in thirty seconds.
BICSc, the credential that publishes its price
| Turnover band | One year | Three years |
|---|---|---|
| £250,000 or under | £330.00 | £808.00 |
| £250,001 to £1,000,000 | £545.00 | £1,354.00 |
| £1,000,001 to £5,000,000 | £1,050.00 | £2,577.00 |
| £5,000,001 to £20,000,000 | £1,640.00 | £4,062.00 |
| Single country group, £20m to £50m | £2,820.00 | £7,030.00 |
| Single country group, over £50m | £4,300.00 | £10,940.00 |
| Regional group, over £50m | £5,350.00 | £13,676.00 |
| Franchiser | £760.00 | not published |
| Franchisee | £320.00 | not published |
No joining fee is published on that page. BICSc claims over 80,000 individual and corporate members and runs a free searchable membership directory, filterable by company, membership type, nation, city and sector. It does not publish a total on the directory itself.
The three year rate is roughly 2.5 times the annual, which is a genuine saving and unusual enough in this sector to be worth taking.
ISO, and the distinction buyers get wrong
UKAS accredits certification bodies. It does not certify companies. Its own page makes the distinction between accreditation and certification explicitly, and it publishes a free searchable list of accredited organisations.
So when a tender asks for ISO 9001, what it wants is certification from a body that UKAS has accredited. BSI publishes no certification cost; a quote is required. ISO itself sells the standard document for 155 Swiss francs, which is not a UK certification cost and should never be presented as one.
Labour supply, and the bit we could not verify
If you supply labour rather than deliver a service, the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003, made under the Employment Agencies Act 1973, apply. The core prohibitions on GOV.UK are that you cannot charge a work-seeker a fee for work finding services, and that workers must be paid for all work done, get paid holiday, not be forced to work more than 48 hours a week, and receive at least the National Minimum Wage.
Whether cleaning is specifically covered or exempt is not stated on the guidance we read, and the licences page we opened carried no sector list. We are recording that as unverified rather than guessing, and if your model is labour supply rather than contract cleaning it is worth taking advice on.
The wage floor, which is the real gate
| Rate | From 1 April 2026 |
|---|---|
| National Living Wage, 21 and over | £12.71 |
| National Minimum Wage, 18 to 20 | £10.85 |
| Under 18 | £8.00 |
| Apprentice | £8.00 |
| Real Living Wage, UK | £13.45 |
| Real Living Wage, London | £14.80 |
The Living Wage Foundation reports over 16,000 accredited UK employers. Its accreditation fee is a sliding scale based on organisation size and no figures are published on any page we could open, with two paths returning errors.
For a contract cleaning business the wage floor is not a compliance detail, it is the price. Everything above it is supervision, consumables, equipment, cover and margin, and a tender that does not show that structure is asking to be compared on a single number.
Common questions
Do I need a licence to run a commercial cleaning company in the UK?
No. There is no register, licence or qualification requirement. Gangmasters licensing covers agriculture, horticulture, shellfish gathering and food processing and packaging, and SIA licensing covers security activities. Neither covers cleaning.
Which accreditation do buyers actually ask for?
SSIP or CHAS most commonly, Constructionline for construction-adjacent work, and BICSc as the sector credential. The SSIP portal is the one a client can verify free, which makes it the most useful to display.
What does BICSc membership cost?
Corporate membership runs from £330 a year at turnover of £250,000 or under to £5,350 for a regional group over £50m, with three year rates at roughly 2.5 times the annual and no joining fee published.
The structural checks behind this research run on any website in about twenty seconds. Enter yours and read the full result on the page. Free, and we do not ask for your email.
Run the free Visibility Check