A carpet can be knackered and spotless at the same time. It can also be pristine underfoot and filthy. Inventory clerks grade a property on two separate scales, and the two rarely agree. Confuse them and you’ll either pay for dirt that was never yours to answer for, or lose a deposit you should have kept. The line between fair wear and tear and cleaning neglect is where most end-of-tenancy money changes hands, and almost nobody knows where it sits.
Where do inventory clerks draw the line between wear and neglect?
One question sorts most of it. Would a clean sort it?
If a normal clean returns the item to the state it was in at check-in, the problem is cleaning, and cleaning is the tenant’s job. If no clean on earth brings it back – because the thing has physically aged, thinned, faded or worn through – that’s fair wear and tear, and fair wear and tear is the landlord’s cost, not yours. Deposit scheme guidance is blunt about this and both sides miss it constantly: fair wear and tear applies to condition, never to cleanliness. There’s no such thing as fair wear and tear on a greasy oven. Dirt doesn’t age. Somebody just left it there.
That’s why a clerk can mark the same carpet two ways in one breath. The pile in the hallway is flattened and greyed along the walking line – wear, three years of feet, no charge. But there’s a dull tide of soiling across the lounge because nobody ran a hoover over it for months, and that’s neglect, because a clean lifts it. Same carpet. Two verdicts.
And even when the mess is unmistakably yours, cleaning is usually still the remedy, not replacement. Drop a takeaway down the bedroom carpet – a proper curry stain, orange and spreading, entirely your doing – and the clerk doesn’t sign off a brand-new carpet. They note a stain needing specialist cleaning, and you pay for the clean that lifts it, or the honest attempt at it. Replacement only enters the frame once a cleaner has tried, failed, and put that failure in writing. Cleaning restores. Replacement is the landlord’s last resort, not the clerk’s opening bid.
Over sixty per cent of the disputes TDS handles come down to cleaning. Not damage. Cleaning. It’s the single biggest fight at the end of a tenancy and it turns almost entirely on this one distinction, which is why it’s worth understanding how a clerk records it.
The two columns a clerk actually fills in
A proper check-out report scores condition and cleanliness separately – two columns, in effect, running down the page beside each item.
The condition column runs from immaculate through good, then lightly worn, then signs of age, down to actual damage – stains, chips. The cleanliness column is its own ladder: fully clean and dust-free at the top, then clean, then “some cleaning evident, marks remain,” then “dusty or dirty, requires cleaning,” down to “not cleaned.” Every item lands somewhere on both. Your three-year-old sofa might be “lightly worn” on condition and “requires cleaning” on cleanliness in the same line, and only the second column costs you, because the first is the sofa getting older and the second is the crumbs down the side you never dealt with.
Take a kitchen window. A cracked pane is condition, and probably wear if it went of its own accord. A greasy film fogging the glass is cleanliness, and that one’s yours. The same sheet of glass, scored in two columns, and only one of them ever reaches your deposit.
A vague check-in wrecks all of it, mind. If the report at the start recorded condition and said nothing about how clean the place was, the clerk at the other end has a cleanliness column with nothing to measure against. No baseline, no cleaning claim. But that’s a whole argument of its own, and I’ve made it before.
What does fair wear and tear actually cover?
The trade leans on one definition: fair wear and tear is the deterioration that comes from reasonable use of the property and the ordinary action of natural forces. Time and gravity and daylight, in other words. Sunlight fades a south-facing curtain. Feet flatten a carpet. Hinges loosen and sealant yellows. Paint dulls where a sofa back has rested against it for two winters. None of that is a cleaning failure and none of it is chargeable, because you cannot scrub a property back to newer than it is.
Clerks don’t apply the allowance evenly, and they aren’t meant to. The forgiveness they extend for wear scales with the tenancy. A family of five with a dog over four years is expected to leave more behind than a single tenant six months into a let, and a decent report reflects it. A hallway wears faster than a box room. A cheap builder-grade carpet gives out years before a wool twist, so identical flattening means different things in different flats. A good clerk – the accredited ones work to AIIC or ARLA Propertymark standards – carries all of that before they write a word.
Why a longer tenancy earns more forgiveness
Length is the tenant’s friend on wear and their enemy on cleaning.
The longer you’ve been somewhere, the more deterioration a clerk waves through as inevitable. A five-year carpet is allowed to look like a five-year carpet. But length excuses nothing on a filthy oven – you don’t earn the right to leave grease behind by having tolerated it yourself for years. Wear accrues forgiveness. Dirt just accrues.
Where does it get genuinely difficult?
Limescale and mould. Nearly everything else is clean-cut; these two are where clerks earn the fee and tenants lose the plot.
Here’s a view that won’t make me popular with tenants. Limescale in a London flat is almost always the tenant’s problem, not fair wear and tear. London water is hard – chalk-fed, thick with calcium – and every kettle, tap, showerhead and cistern in the city scales up fast. Doesn’t matter. Limescale descales off with cheap acid and ten minutes, if you do it now and again. Would a clean shift it? For the white crust, yes – so it’s on you. Two years of never once touching a showerhead until it’s welded shut with scale isn’t the water’s doing. It’s neglect, and a clerk who knows this city marks it as neglect. The exception is the damage scale leaves behind once it’s ignored long enough – pitted chrome, shower glass etched permanently cloudy. That’s past cleaning. That’s wear. The crust itself, though? You had a sponge and a bottle of descaler and eighteen months of Sundays. It’s worse in some postcodes than others – the water drawn off the chalk through most of north and east London is about as hard as any in the country – but hard is hard, and no borough hands you a pass for a kettle furred white inside.
Limescale, mould, and the London flat
Mould splits along the same seam and it’s harder to call.
Surface mould on bathroom grout or a window reveal, the sort that wipes away, is usually a tenant not ventilating and not wiping – cleaning neglect, plain enough. Black mould pushing up through the plaster of a cold Victorian conversion with single glazing and no extractor is a building fault, and that one belongs to the landlord no matter what the check-out says. The clerk’s job is to tell one from the other, and the honest ones admit the line blurs. Condensation you could have wiped off the sill each morning sits with you. Damp coming through a wall you reported twice in writing does not, and this is exactly why you report it in writing.
How do you keep off the wrong side of the line?
Clean to the standard the property was let in, and mean it.
That means the jobs everyone skips: inside the oven and the grill pan, the extractor filter clogged solid with kitchen grease, behind and underneath the white goods, the limescale round every tap, the window tracks, the tops of the doors, the boiler nobody thinks to look at. A wipe-round is not the bar. The fridge-freezer catches people out more than anything – they defrost it and wipe it down, then leave it switched off with the door shut, and it grows a fur of mould inside a fortnight for the next clerk to find. Clerks have a set phrase for a flat that’s been tidied but not cleaned – “domestic clean only, professional clean required” – and it lands as a charge every single time.
The jobs tenants forget until the clerk arrives
I did a check-out on a first-floor conversion on Ravenslea Road in Balham a while back where the tenant had clearly tried and still got caught.
The flat looked fine. Then the clerk’s list landed. Hair in a bathroom plughole. Dust on top of the boiler in the airing cupboard, where the bloke swore blind he’d never once thought to look, and fair enough, who does. The outside of the kitchen windows marked dirty – he was furious about that one, said it had rained within the hour of him doing them, which was probably true and changed nothing, because a clerk records what’s in front of them, not your afternoon. Curtains washed but not ironed: noted, not charged. And a rusted venetian blind in the bathroom, which he’d braced himself to cover, marked down as fair wear and tear – because rust on an old blind in a steamy London bathroom is the ordinary action of natural forces doing precisely what it does.
He’d given up a Saturday to cleaning and still lost forty quid, on a plughole and the top of a boiler. The blind he’d worried about cost him nothing.
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