The Great Australian Clean: What 56,712 Home Cleans Reveal About How Australia Really Lives

You cleaned the bathroom on a Friday morning, didn't you? Or your cleaner did. We can be fairly confident about that — because we looked at every professional clean booked through Simply Maid over an entire decade, and Australians turn out to be remarkably predictable about their cleaning.

Quick Answer: We analysed 56,712 completed professional home cleans across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and the Gold Coast between 2015 and 2025. The headline findings: Friday is Australia's cleaning day (20.2% of all cleans), fortnightly cleans outnumber weekly 3.5 to 1, November — not September — is the real "spring cleaning" month, the average clean costs about $195 and takes 101 minutes, and professional cleaning has risen ~15% in price since 2018 while general consumer prices rose more than 20%.

That's roughly 9,260 Australian homes, 95,772 hours of professional cleaning and $10.4 million in household spending — one of the largest datasets on Australian home cleaning habits ever published. Here are the ten things it tells us.

1. Friday Is Australia's National Cleaning Day

One in five professional cleans in Australia — 20.2% — happens on a Friday, comfortably the busiest day of the cleaning week. Add Thursday and nearly 4 in 10 cleans are squeezed into the last two weekdays. The pattern is unmistakable: Australians want the house perfect before the weekend starts, not during it.

Sunday, meanwhile, is a cleaning dead zone. Just 2% of cleans happen on a Sunday — Friday outranks it ten to one.

2. Spring Cleaning Is a Myth. Australia Christmas-Cleans.

September — the supposed spring-cleaning month — actually runs 3% below an average month for professional cleaning. The real annual peak is November, 15% above average, as households race to get the place guest-ready before the Christmas season, followed by strong October and December.

The single busiest cleaning day of the year, aggregated across the decade? December 21 — the last weekday slot before the relatives land. We counted 138 cleans on Christmas Eve across the dataset, and 21 households that had a professional cleaner in the house on Christmas Day itself.

The quietest months are April (school holidays and Easter) and the long January hangover, both around 8% below average.

3. The Fortnight Is Australia's Cleaning Rhythm

Of every clean in the dataset, 42% was part of a fortnightly schedule — by far the most popular arrangement in the country. Among households with a recurring cleaner, 60% choose fortnightly, against just 17% weekly and 23% monthly.

Australia runs on the fortnight: it's how we're paid, and it's how we clean. Fortnightly cleans outnumber weekly cleans 3.5 to 1.

Seven in ten cleans (69.8%) belong to a recurring schedule rather than a one-off booking — professional cleaning in Australia is overwhelmingly a habit, not an emergency.

4. Cleaning Is Beating Inflation — It's Cheaper in Real Terms Than in 2018

In FY2018–19, the average completed home clean cost $177. By FY2023–24 it was $203 — a rise of about 15% across seven years of the sharpest cost-of-living squeeze in a generation. Australian consumer prices rose by more than 20% over the same window, which makes a professional home clean one of the rare household services that is cheaper in real terms than it was in 2018.

A standard two-bedroom clean tells the same story: it averaged $188 in FY2016–17, drifted down to about $160 through 2021–22, and only returned to $188 by 2024. In nominal dollars, a two-bed clean costs today what it cost eight years ago.

5. Sydney Is — Surprisingly — the Cheapest City to Get Your House Cleaned

Across 2022–2024, the average clean in Sydney cost $195 — the lowest of any Australian capital in the dataset. Perth averaged $259 and Adelaide $229. The likely reason: Sydney has the deepest pool of professional cleaners in the country, and competition does what competition does. Cleaning is one of the very few line items where Sydneysiders get the best deal in Australia.

*Melbourne's 2022–24 average is drawn from a smaller recent sample (around 400 cleans) that skews toward larger jobs — treat it as indicative.

6. Sydney's Cleaning Capital Moved From Mosman to the Inner West

From 2016 to 2020, postcode 2088 — Mosman — was the undisputed cleaning capital of Australia, topping the booking charts five years straight. Then something shifted. From 2022 onward the crown moved across the bridge and down Parramatta Road: Leichhardt–Lilyfield (2040) became the busiest cleaning postcode in the country, with Newtown, Glebe, Erskineville and Marrickville all surging into the top ten.

Professional cleaning stopped being a North Shore luxury and became an Inner West utility — the surest data signal of who's actually time-poor in Sydney now.

Australia's top 10 cleaning postcodes, 2015–2025:

7. The 9am Economy: Two-Thirds of Cleans Start Before Noon

Australia likes its cleaner to arrive at 9am sharp — the single most common start time, accounting for 21.6% of all cleans. Another 14.3% start at 7am, before the household leaves for work and school. In total, 68% of professional cleans begin in the morning, and the industry effectively shuts down by late afternoon: barely 1 clean in 60 starts after 4pm.

8. COVID: The Crash, the Rebound and the Lockdown Effect

April 2020 cut Australia's professional cleaning volume by 53% almost overnight — from 936 cleans in February to 439 in April. Recovery was quick, but the pattern repeated with eerie precision during Sydney's Delta lockdown: bookings fell about 45% from June to August 2021, then snapped back above pre-lockdown levels by November as locked-down households celebrated freedom with, apparently, a professionally cleaned house.

9. Loyalty Runs Deep: One Home, 247 Cleans

Professional cleaning is a repeat relationship: 43% of homes that book once book again, and the average customer goes on to have 6 cleans. But the tail is where it gets remarkable:

• 1,346 homes have had 10 or more professional cleans

• 208 homes have passed fifty

• 39 homes have passed one hundred

• The record: a single Sydney home with 247 professional cleans

• The longest relationship in the dataset began in early 2018 and is still active more than 8.4 years later

10. The Average Australian Clean, in One Sentence

The statistically average Australian professional clean is a two-bedroom home, cleaned fortnightly, on a Friday, starting at 9am, taking 1 hour 41 minutes, and costing about $195.

Two- and three-bedroom homes make up two-thirds of all cleans (39% and 27% respectively), and the average job runs 101 minutes of scheduled cleaning time. Stack the decade end-to-end and it comes to 95,772 hours — if one cleaner had done every job in this dataset back-to-back, they'd have started scrubbing in 2015 and would still be going today without ever putting the mop down.

About This Study

All figures are drawn from 56,712 completed, verified bookings on the Simply Maid platform between August 2015 and 2025, across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and the Gold Coast. Cancelled and unfulfilled bookings are excluded. Prices are nominal Australian dollars including GST and cover all service types (standard, deep, end-of-lease and hourly cleans); averages exclude a small number of records outside the $30–$2,000 range. Day-of-week and seasonality figures are computed on the service date in local time, with the seasonality index built on calendar years 2017–2024. Suburb rankings use the postcode of the serviced address. City price comparisons use completed cleans from FY2022–23 through late 2024. Repeat-customer figures are based on completed cleans linked to a unique household record.

Journalists, researchers and publishers are free to reproduce any statistic or table from this study with attribution and a link to this page. Suggested citation: Simply Maid, "The Great Australian Clean: A Decade of Home Cleaning Data", 2026. For media enquiries or the full data tables, contact hello@simplymaid.com.au.