What Does a House Cleaning Service Include?

The Standard Clean

A standard house cleaning is a top-to-bottom maintenance clean of the living spaces you use every day. It's designed to keep a home consistently fresh — dusting, floors, surfaces, kitchens, and bathrooms — rather than tackling the once-a-year detail work of a deep clean. Most visits cover the same core scope every time, so your home stays reliably clean on a rhythm.

Room by Room

Kitchen: counters, sinks, stovetop, exterior of appliances, cabinet fronts, and floors. Bathrooms: toilets, showers and tubs, sinks, mirrors, fixtures, and floors — cleaned and sanitized. Bedrooms and living areas: dusting of surfaces and accessible fixtures, tidying, and floors vacuumed or mopped. Throughout: high-touch points, visible cobwebs, and trash. For the full task list, see our room-by-room house cleaning checklist.

Common Add-Ons

Some tasks fall outside a standard visit and are booked as extras: inside the oven, inside the refrigerator, interior windows, inside cabinets, wall washing, and laundry. These take extra time, so they're priced separately — just request them when you book. Our deep cleaning service bundles many of these for a first visit or seasonal reset.

What’s Not Included

Standard cleaning doesn't include specialty or heavy-duty work: carpet extraction, tile and grout restoration, exterior windows, gutter clearing, or post-construction dust — all of which are separate services. It also isn't a declutter or organizing service; the pros clean around your belongings. Anything requiring special equipment or safety gear is scoped on its own.

Recurring vs. One-Time

The scope above applies whether you book weekly, biweekly, monthly, or one-time — but recurring homes stay easier to clean, since less builds up between visits. That's why the recurring vs. one-time choice affects both price and results. New to it all? Here's what to expect from your first clean.

How long a standard clean takes

A standard clean is scoped to a home’s size and condition rather than a clock, but the typical range is predictable: a one-bedroom or small condo usually takes a single professional about two hours; a three-bedroom home takes one professional three to four hours, or two professionals roughly half that; larger homes scale from there. A first visit runs longer than the recurring visits that follow it, because the first visit is doing the catch-up work.

What a standard clean costs in Los Angeles

Maid VIP publishes its standard-cleaning rates by home size: $250 for homes up to 1,500 square feet, $300–$475 for 1,500–2,500, $475–$650 for 2,500–3,500, and $650 and up beyond that, quoted flat before the visit. For comparison, hourly cleaning in the Los Angeles market generally runs $30–$50 per cleaner per hour, with the final bill unknown until the work is done — the difference is explained in hourly vs. flat-rate cleaning. The full table by size and condition, and what moves a quote within a range, is in the house cleaning cost guide; the cost calculator gives an instant range.

The first clean vs. the visits after it

The first visit to a home is usually scoped as a deep clean — roughly twice the standard scope, because it resets baseboards, appliance exteriors, fixtures, and grime that a maintenance clean isn’t designed to lift. Once the home is at baseline, standard visits maintain it, and the recurring price is lower than the first. Which cadence keeps a home at baseline depends on household size, pets, and traffic; the trade-offs are laid out in weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

Where standard ends and deep begins

The short version: a standard clean cleans what you see and touch; a deep clean cleans what you don’t. Inside the oven and refrigerator, inside cabinets, interior windows and tracks, baseboards and door frames detailed, grout scrubbed, light fixtures and vents — those are deep-clean scope. The item-by-item comparison is in standard vs. deep cleaning.

Common questions

Does a standard house cleaning include inside the oven and refrigerator?

No. Appliance interiors are add-ons or deep-clean scope; a standard visit cleans the exterior and the surfaces around them.

Does it include windows?

Interior window glass is an add-on to a standard visit. Exterior windows are a separate window cleaning service.

Does it include carpet cleaning, grout, or organizing?

No. Carpets are vacuumed, not extracted; grout is wiped, not restored; and belongings are cleaned around, not organized. Each of those is its own service or add-on.

How often should a home be cleaned?

Most homes hold their baseline on a biweekly visit; households with pets, children, or heavy use do better weekly; monthly works for lightly used homes and often needs a longer visit.

How much does a standard clean cost?

From $250 for homes up to 1,500 square feet on Maid VIP’s published rates, rising by size; see the cost section above.