Stair carpet cleaning cost in London: what you’ll actually pay
People measure their stairs before they ring me. I find that genuinely charming, and it happens far more than you’d think.
Natasha counted hers out for me in an email: a square metre and a half at the bottom, twelve steps, another square metre landing, four more steps. Faye told me she had twenty eight stairs across two flights, one with a runner. Christine was precise about it – fourteen steps, no landing, Underwood Road in Woodford.
Nobody does this for a bedroom. Nobody emails me the dimensions of their living room. But stairs make people anxious about the bill, because stairs look complicated and complicated usually means expensive.
So let me take the guesswork out of it. Here’s what stair carpet cleaning actually costs in London, why it’s priced the way it is, and how to work out your own number before you even call me.
The short answer, before anything else
A standard flight of stairs with the landing at the top comes to £35 with us.
That’s the number most people are looking for, so there it is at the top rather than buried under six hundred words of preamble. If you’ve got one flight and a landing, budget £35. If you’ve got two flights, you’re looking at roughly £60 to £70 depending on the landings.
One thing to know: our minimum callout is £50. If stairs are genuinely all you need cleaning, it’s worth adding a bedroom or a rug to reach that threshold, because you’ll get considerably more done for very little extra. Most people do exactly that once they realise.
| What you need | Price from |
| Staircase and landing (standard flight) | £35 |
| Additional flight | £30–£35 |
| Landing only (no stairs) | £15 |
| Small hallway | £10 |
| Stairs plus one double bedroom | £65 |
| Stairs, landing and two bedrooms | £95 |
Every price includes the pre-treatment of any stains, all the equipment, and the Prochem solutions. Nothing gets added on afterwards.
Why stairs cost more per square metre than a bedroom
This is the question I get asked, usually politely and slightly suspiciously, and it’s a fair one. A staircase has less carpet on it than a double bedroom. So why isn’t it cheaper?
Three reasons, and none of them are about squeezing more money out of you.
Stairs take a beating no other carpet takes
Think about how you walk up a flight of stairs. Your foot lands on the nose of each tread – that front edge – with most of your body weight driving down and forward. Every single time. In a family home that’s happening a few hundred times a day.
The result is that the nosing wears differently and soils far more heavily than the flat run of the tread. Dirt gets driven into the pile at the exact point where the fibres are already under the most stress. A bedroom carpet gets walked across. A staircase gets hammered.
Cleaning that properly means working the nosing separately, at a different angle, with more passes. It’s slower work than running a wand across an open floor.
There’s no such thing as a straight run on a staircase
On a bedroom floor I can pull the machine head in long, even strokes. Efficient. On stairs, every tread and riser is a separate small surface, most of them at awkward angles, many of them with a spindle or a newel post in the way.
A twelve step flight isn’t one job. It’s twenty four small jobs – twelve treads and twelve risers – plus the edges, plus the landing. Then there’s the physical reality of working on a staircase, which involves a lot of kneeling, reaching and repositioning that flat floors simply don’t require.
The edges matter more here than anywhere
On a staircase, the carpet edges are visible from below in a way that bedroom edges never are. Anyone standing in your hallway is looking directly at the side of every step. If the edges haven’t been cleaned properly, it shows immediately – you get a clean centre strip with grubby margins either side, which somehow looks worse than not cleaning at all.
So the edges get done by hand with a detail tool. That’s time, and time is what you’re actually paying for on a staircase.
Runners and fitted carpet are priced the same, but cleaned differently
Here’s where it gets interesting, and it’s something two of my enquiries this year specifically asked about.
A stair runner sits on top of the timber with the wood exposed either side. Fitted stair carpet covers the full width, wall to wall or wall to spindle. They cost the same to clean with us, but the job is not the same.
With a runner, I have to be careful about moisture reaching the exposed timber at the edges. Too much water on a varnished or painted tread and you risk marking it. So I work with tighter control and more extraction passes at the margins.
With fitted carpet, the risk moves to the edges and the gripper rods underneath. Over-wetting there can cause the carpet to lift slightly at the perimeter, and on older fittings it can loosen the grip entirely.
Either way, the answer is the same: less water, more extraction. The Ninja 400 PSI machine we use pulls the vast majority of moisture back out as it goes, which is exactly what stairs need. A hired machine from the supermarket doesn’t have anywhere near that suction, which is why so many DIY stair cleans end up damp for two days.
What actually happens when I clean your stairs
Worth knowing what you’re paying for, because the process on stairs differs from a standard room.
First, the inspection
I look at the fibre type, the fitting, the condition of the nosings, and any specific stains. Wool behaves completely differently to polypropylene, and getting that wrong on a staircase is expensive to put right. I also check whether the carpet is sound – on older stairs, the carpet is sometimes doing more structural work than the homeowner realises.
Then a proper vacuum
Dry soil comes out first. This matters more on stairs than anywhere because that ground-in grit at the nosings needs loosening before any water touches it. Skip this and you’re just turning dry dirt into wet dirt.
Pre-treatment on the traffic lanes
The centre of each tread is where the soiling concentrates. That gets a targeted pre-spray and a few minutes to work before extraction.
Extraction, tread by tread
Hot water and Prochem solution injected under pressure, extracted immediately. Each tread, each riser, then the edges by hand.
A walk through with you at the end
I show you the result before I pack up. If there’s a mark you’re not happy with, I treat it again there and then. That’s not a customer service line – it’s just easier to fix something while the machine is still out.
How long stairs take to dry
Faster than you’d expect, and faster than most rooms.
Stairs are usually the best ventilated part of a house. Warm air rises through the stairwell, there’s constant air movement between floors, and the carpet on stairs is generally a shorter, denser pile than a bedroom. In the warmer months you’re looking at two to four hours. Through autumn and winter with the heating on, allow four to six.
You can use the stairs almost immediately in clean shoes or bare feet. Avoid socks on damp carpet – not for safety reasons, but because socks pick up lint and leave fluff behind on a freshly cleaned surface. Everyone finds this out the hard way once.
When stairs need doing more often than the rest of the house
Most of the advice you’ll read online tells you to have your carpets professionally cleaned every twelve months. The National Carpet Cleaners Association suggests annual cleaning as a baseline for domestic carpets, and for a bedroom that’s about right.
For stairs, I think annual is too long in most family homes, and I’ll tell customers that even though it’s not in my interest to schedule people less often.
Here’s the reasoning. The stairs and hallway in a typical house carry somewhere between five and ten times the foot traffic of a bedroom. If your bedroom carpet is fine on a yearly clean, your stairs are doing five years of equivalent wear in that same period. The soiling isn’t just cosmetic at that point – embedded grit acts like sandpaper on the fibres every time someone walks up.
| Household | Suggested stair cleaning interval |
| No children, no pets | Every 9–12 months |
| Family with children | Every 6–8 months |
| Household with dogs | Every 4–6 months |
| Shared house or HMO | Every 4–6 months |
| Allergy or asthma in the household | Every 4 months |
A word on cleaning your own stairs
I’m not going to tell you never to do it. Plenty of people manage a decent job with a hired machine, and if money is tight that’s a perfectly reasonable choice.
But stairs are genuinely the worst place to attempt it, and I’d rather explain why than pretend otherwise.
Hired machines have a fraction of the extraction power of professional equipment. On a flat floor, that mostly means longer drying. On stairs, water runs downhill – it migrates through the pile and pools in the backing at the base of each riser, where the machine can’t reach it. That trapped moisture is what causes the musty smell people notice a week later, and in bad cases it’s what causes wicking, where the stain you thought had gone reappears as the carpet dries from the bottom up.
I’ve written more about that in our post on why stains reappear after carpet cleaning, and it’s the single most common thing people ring me about after a DIY attempt.
The other issue is simply physical. Cleaning a flight of stairs on your hands and knees with a heavy machine is genuinely hard work. Two flights will take you most of a Saturday.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to clean stairs and landing in London?
A standard flight of stairs with the landing costs from £35. Two flights typically comes to £60–£70. Our minimum callout is £50, so if stairs are all you need, it’s usually worth adding a bedroom or a rug to make the visit worthwhile. All prices include stain pre-treatment and equipment.
How long does it take to clean a staircase?
A standard twelve to fourteen step flight with a landing takes around forty five minutes to an hour, including inspection and pre-treatment. Two flights takes roughly an hour and a half. Stairs take longer per square metre than open floors because every tread, riser and edge is worked separately.
Do you clean stair runners as well as fitted carpet?
Yes, both, at the same price. Runners need more careful moisture control because the timber either side is exposed, so we use tighter extraction at the edges. Fitted stair carpet needs care around the gripper rods. The method adapts, the cost doesn’t.
Will my stairs be safe to walk on straight after cleaning?
Yes, in clean shoes or bare feet. Avoid socks on damp carpet as they pick up lint and leave fluff behind. Stairs usually dry in two to four hours in warmer months, four to six in winter, because stairwells are naturally well ventilated.
Can you get rid of the dark patches on the front edge of each step?
Usually yes. That darkening is soil driven into the nosing by foot pressure, and it responds well to pre-treatment and hot water extraction. Very old nosing wear where the fibres themselves have flattened or worn through won’t come back – that’s physical damage, not soiling, and I’ll tell you honestly which one you’ve got.
Do I need to move anything before you arrive?
Clear anything sitting on the stairs or landing – shoes, laundry baskets, the pile of things waiting to go upstairs. That’s all. I’ll work around bannisters and furniture on the landing myself.
Book your stairs in and stop looking at them
Stairs are the part of the house nobody thinks about until they’re carrying shopping up them and suddenly notice how grey the middle of each step has gone. Then you can’t stop noticing.
It’s a £35 problem and a forty five minute fix. I’ve been doing this across London for seventeen years, I turn up when I say I will, and every job comes with our satisfaction guarantee – if you’re not happy, I come back and do it again at no charge.
Get your stairs sorted this week Tell me how many flights and I’ll give you a price on the phone. Same day and weekend appointments available across North and East London, and I cover all of Greater London.
➤ Call Velko on 07386 725 651 | perfect.carpetcleaning@yahoo.com | Request a quote