Bathrooms take roughly seven times longer per square metre than open-plan office, and they generate more complaints than everything else combined. Worth getting right.
Work top-down, dirty-last
Order matters more here than anywhere else:
- Restock consumables (so you’re not touching dispensers with dirty gloves later)
- Empty bins
- Mirrors and glass
- Basins, tapware, vanity
- Partitions and doors
- Toilets and urinals
- Floor, working back toward the door
Toilets after basins, always. Doing it the other way spreads contamination onto surfaces people touch with their hands.
Every visit
Consumables
- Toilet paper restocked to full, plus spare
- Hand soap topped up
- Paper towels restocked
- Sanitary bins serviced per contract
Mirrors and glass
- Cleaned streak-free
- Checked at an angle, not head-on
- Edges and corners done
- Frame and top edge dusted
Basins
- Bowl scrubbed including the overflow
- Tapware cleaned and polished dry
- Behind and around the tap base
- Plughole cleared
- Vanity top and front panel
- Splashback
Toilets and urinals
- Bowl inside, including under the rim
- Seat, both sides
- Seat hinges, the most commonly missed spot in any bathroom
- Cistern top and front
- Flush button or handle
- Pedestal and base
- Behind the pan
- Urinal bowl and drain
Partitions and fittings
- Doors, both sides
- Handles, locks and coat hooks
- Partition feet and floor brackets
- Grab rails
- Baby change table (both surfaces, plus underneath)
Floor
- Swept or vacuumed first
- Mopped including behind pans and into corners
- Around partition feet
- Under the basin vanity
- Floor drain checked and cleared
- Left dry, with signage while wet
Waste
- All bins emptied and re-lined
- Bin lids wiped
- Bin exterior wiped
Weekly
- Tiles scrubbed, walls and floor
- Grout scrubbed
- Descale tapware and any shower heads
- Partitions washed rather than wiped
- Skirtings
- Door frames
- Under and behind the vanity unit
Monthly
- Extractor grille removed and cleaned
- Light fittings and diffusers
- Ceiling vents
- Silicone checked for mould
- Deep descale of all fittings
- Drain treatment
The spots that get missed
From auditing a lot of bathrooms, these are the reliable indicators of a rushed clean:
- Toilet seat hinges. The single best tell. Nobody who is rushing lifts the seat.
- Behind the pan. Requires getting down and reaching. Usually skipped.
- Partition feet. Where floor dirt accumulates in a visible ring.
- The overflow hole in the basin. Goes black and nobody looks.
- The underside of the baby change table.
- Floor corners. Mop heads don’t reach into corners; corners need a cloth.
- The top edge of the mirror.
- Around the base of taps. Limescale builds where nobody wipes.
Check those eight and you’ll know within two minutes whether your bathrooms are genuinely being cleaned or just visited.
Colour-coded equipment
Non-negotiable in a commercial bathroom:
- Red for toilets and urinals
- Yellow for basins and bathroom surfaces
- Never the cloth used anywhere else in the building
Cross-contamination from shared cloths is the most common hygiene failure in commercial cleaning, and it costs nothing to prevent.