Reference · Victorian tenancy law
No law in Victoria requires a renter to hire a professional cleaner at the end of a tenancy. The standard is that the property is returned reasonably clean, allowing for fair wear and tear. This page sets out what that means, what an agent can and cannot ask for, and when you genuinely do not need to buy anything.
The standard
The obligation a Victorian renter has at the end of a tenancy comes from section 63 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (Vic). In substance, it requires the property to be left reasonably clean, allowing for fair wear and tear over the time it was lived in.
Read the two halves of that separately, because the second one does most of the work. "Reasonably clean" is a standard about cleanliness. "Fair wear and tear" is an acknowledgement that a property which has been lived in will show it, and that a renter is not responsible for the ordinary consequences of ordinary occupation. Worn carpet, faded paint, scuffs at handle height on a hallway wall and a slightly tired kitchen are not cleaning failures and cannot be turned into one.
What section 63 does not do is name a method, a contractor or a receipt. It sets an outcome. How you reach that outcome, and whether you pay anybody to help you reach it, is your decision.
It is about residential tenancies only. A commercial lease is an entirely different regime: there is no reasonably clean standard, the obligation is whatever the make good clause in your lease says, and it is usually a great deal more onerous. That side is covered under make good and handover cleaning.
It also does not cover common property. Foyers, lifts, stairwells, corridors, bin bays and car parks in an apartment building are the responsibility of the owners corporation, not of an individual renter, and no renter can be asked to clean them on the way out. And if you are moving into a rental rather than out of one, a move in clean is priced as a deep clean under house cleaning in Melbourne.
We are a cleaning contractor, not a legal service. This page describes the effect of the law as we understand it so that you can go and check it. The authoritative source is Consumer Affairs Victoria at consumer.vic.gov.au, and the legislation itself is published at legislation.vic.gov.au. If a real dispute is under way, take advice.
Almost every end of lease cleaning page in Melbourne, including some belonging to businesses much larger than ours, runs on the assumption that the reader is frightened about their bond and will not check anything. Several state or imply that Victorian law requires a professional clean, or a professional carpet clean. It does not.
We sell exit cleans. Writing a page that tells you when you do not need one is a strange commercial decision on the face of it. We think it is the right one, because the alternative is selling on a misunderstanding, and because a business that will tell you when not to buy is easier to believe when it tells you anything else.
The regulator
Section 63 sets the standard. Consumer Affairs Victoria's Director's Guideline explains how it is read, and it is considerably more favourable to renters than most cleaning advertising suggests.
The guideline frames reasonably clean by reference to ordinary community standards rather than an ideal. It expressly says the standard is not one of perfection, and it uses two well known words to say so, both of which we have deliberately avoided here because we would rather you read them in the source than take our paraphrase for them.
The guideline states that a renter cannot be expected to leave a property in a cleaner condition than it was in when they moved in. If the oven was already marked, the grout already stained or the blinds already dusty at the start, returning the property in that state is not a failure. This is the single most useful sentence in the whole area and almost nobody quotes it at renters.
Which is why the entry condition report, and any photographs taken with it, matter more than anything else you will do at the end of a tenancy. It is the evidence of what "as you found it" actually was. If you still have yours, read it before you book anything.
Consumer Affairs Victoria publishes the Director's Guideline and a renters guide on its own site, and both are written to be read by people who are not lawyers. We would rather you read the regulator's words than ours. Go to consumer.vic.gov.au and search for the guideline on cleanliness and for the renters guide.
Regulation 12
This is the part that surprises people, and it is the part cleaning companies in this market are least likely to mention.
Regulation 12 of the Residential Tenancies Regulations 2021 (Vic) deals with when a professional cleaning requirement is permitted. In effect it allows one in two situations. The first is where the property was professionally cleaned immediately before the renter moved in, and the renter was told that. The second is where professional cleaning is what it would actually take to restore the property to its condition at the start of the tenancy, allowing for fair wear and tear.
Outside those two situations, a general requirement that a renter engage a professional cleaner does not have the effect the words appear to have. A blanket clause in a lease saying the property must be professionally cleaned, standing alone, is not the end of the argument. It is the beginning of one.
One important limit on all of this: regulation 12 governs what a rental provider may require of a renter. It does not govern what a rental provider or an agent chooses to pay for themselves between tenancies. Those are different questions with different answers.
Carpets
"Carpets must be professionally steam cleaned at the end of the tenancy" appears in a great many Victorian leases, and it is the single most profitable sentence in the exit cleaning industry.
It is also, standing alone, a requirement for professional cleaning, which puts it squarely inside regulation 12. If the carpets were professionally cleaned immediately before you moved in and you were told so, the clause has real force. If professional cleaning is genuinely what it would take to return the carpet to its entry condition allowing for fair wear and tear, it has force. If neither applies, a blanket clause does not become enforceable simply because it is printed in the agreement.
So the practical order is: read your entry condition report, then read the clause, then decide. If the carpets are genuinely soiled from your occupation, steam cleaning is probably the sensible thing to buy regardless of whether anyone can compel it. If they are simply older than they were three years ago, that is wear, and wear is not a cleaning problem.
What nobody should tell you is that the law obliges you to buy a carpet clean. If a cleaning company says that to you, they are wrong, and being wrong about it in trade is not a small thing under the Australian Consumer Law.
A bond is not a cleaning deposit. It sits against the whole tenancy: unpaid rent, damage beyond fair wear and tear, missing keys, abandoned goods, unpaid bills where the agreement makes them yours, and cleaning. Cleaning is one item on a list.
That is exactly why nobody can honestly promise you your bond back. A cleaning company controls the cleaning and nothing else on that list. A guarantee that spans the whole bond is either a guarantee about things the person giving it has no control over, or it is not really a guarantee at all once you read the conditions.
If your bond is claimed against and you disagree, the bond is held by the Residential Tenancies Bond Authority and is not released to either side simply because one side says so. A disagreement that cannot be resolved goes to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which decides it on the evidence. The evidence that matters is almost always the entry condition report, the exit condition report, and photographs. Not the volume of the emails.
Honestly
There are plenty of situations where the right answer is a weekend, a bucket and no invoice. Here are the common ones.
If you have been somewhere twelve months, cleaned as you went, and the property is in much the state you received it, you are already close to the standard. A methodical weekend, working room by room with the entry condition report beside you, will usually get you there.
If the condition report records marks, staining or grime at entry, you are not required to remove them now. Bring the property back to the recorded condition and no further. This is the situation where reading the report first saves the most money.
Worn carpet in a traffic path, faded paint, a scratched benchtop, tired grout, marks at handle height on a hallway wall. None of those are removed by cleaning, and buying more cleaning will not change the outcome. They are wear, and wear is allowed for.
A one bedroom apartment in reasonable condition is a long day for one person or half a day for two. If you have the time and you would rather keep the money, keep the money. Hire the oven and shower off to somebody if those two beat you, and do the rest yourself.
The other side of it
None of the above means hiring a cleaner is a mistake. It means the reason to hire one is practical rather than legal, and the two get conflated constantly in this market.
People book us because moving is already a fortnight of work and a full exit clean is another eight to eleven hours at the end of it. Because the oven, the shower screen and the window tracks are genuinely unpleasant and slow without the right chemicals. Because the handover date is fixed and there is no room for the clean to take longer than planned. And most of all because if the agent raises something in the first week, we go back and deal with it instead of them arguing with you about it.
That last one is what we actually sell: not a legal necessity, but speed and the transfer of a small risk. It is worth paying for or it is not, depending on your week, and we would rather you make that call with the law in front of you.
If your agent or rental provider raises a cleaning issue within seven days of the final inspection, we return and rectify it at no charge. That is the whole thing. We call it the 7 day re-clean guarantee.
We do not call it a bond back guarantee, and we will not, because a bond depends on rent, damage, keys and other matters that have nothing to do with cleaning. Nobody can honestly guarantee an outcome they do not control.
Our prices, the full inclusion list and the honest exclusions are on our end of lease cleaning in Melbourne. A 3 bed 2 bath is $560 including GST, fixed before we start.
If you are moving into a rental rather than out of one, the thing worth doing on day one is the condition report: fill it in properly, photograph everything including the things that seem trivial, and keep it somewhere you will find it in three years. It is the single best protection available to a Victorian renter and it costs nothing.
Questions
No. Section 63 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (Vic) requires the property to be left reasonably clean, allowing for fair wear and tear. It does not require a contractor, a method or a receipt. A professional cleaning requirement is only permitted in the narrow circumstances set out in regulation 12 of the Residential Tenancies Regulations 2021, and outside those, a general requirement does not have the effect it appears to have.
Not because a clause in the lease says so, standing alone. A carpet steam cleaning requirement is a professional cleaning requirement and sits inside regulation 12, which permits one where the property was professionally cleaned immediately before you moved in and you were told, or where professional cleaning is what it would take to restore the entry condition allowing for fair wear and tear. Read your entry condition report first, then decide. If the carpet is genuinely soiled from your occupation, cleaning it is probably sensible anyway.
Consumer Affairs Victoria's Director's Guideline frames it by reference to ordinary community standards rather than an ideal, and expressly says it is not a standard of perfection. It also states that a renter cannot be expected to leave a property cleaner than it was when they moved in. Those two sentences do most of the work in most disputes. Read them at consumer.vic.gov.au rather than relying on anybody's paraphrase, including ours.
Considerably, if it is recorded. The entry condition report is the reference point for what the property was like at the start, and the guideline says you cannot be required to leave it cleaner than you found it. Bring the property back to the recorded condition and no further. This is the situation where five minutes reading your own condition report saves the most money.
The bond is held by the Residential Tenancies Bond Authority and is not released to either side just because one side claims it. If the disagreement cannot be resolved, it goes to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which decides on the evidence. The evidence that matters is nearly always the entry condition report, the exit condition report and photographs. Keep all three, and take photographs on the day you hand back the keys.
Because we could not honour it honestly. A bond covers rent, damage beyond fair wear and tear, keys, abandoned goods and cleaning. We control the cleaning and none of the rest. What we can guarantee is our own work, so we do: if the agent or rental provider raises a cleaning issue within seven days of the final inspection, we come back and fix it at no charge. That is the 7 day re-clean guarantee, and it is the whole of it.
Sometimes, and the reason is practical rather than legal. A full exit clean on a three bedroom property is eight to eleven hours of genuinely unpleasant work at the end of a fortnight of moving, and the handover date does not move. If you have the time and the property is small and in reasonable condition, do it yourself and keep the money. If you do not, the thing you are buying is speed and the transfer of a small risk, not compliance with a law.
An agent can ask for anything. What matters is whether the underlying requirement is one the law supports. A receipt is evidence that a service was purchased. It is not evidence that the property is clean, and the standard in section 63 is about the state of the property. Where professional cleaning genuinely is required under regulation 12, keeping the invoice is sensible. Where it is not, a receipt is not a substitute for the actual test.
If you do want help
Fixed prices by property size, the full inclusion list, honest exclusions and a 7 day re-clean guarantee. If this page has convinced you that you do not need us, that is a fine outcome too.