Move-out & move-in
An empty house cleaned end to end against a written checklist — inside every appliance, cabinet and closet. One number agreed before we start, scheduled against your closing date.
The checklist
This is the list a landlord, a buyer’s agent or a closing walkthrough works from. It is published here so you can hold us to it — and so you can check it against whatever else you are being quoted.
How we price and schedule it
If the house is still occupied, the job you want is a deep clean instead — and if this is a rental turnover, that page also sets out the New Jersey lead rules that attach at exactly this moment.
An hourly quote on an empty house is a quote with no ceiling — and move-out cleans always take longer than anyone guesses. We price by bedroom and bathroom count after seeing the home or talking it through, so the number you agree is the number you pay.
Landlords and buyers look in specific places: inside the oven, inside cabinets, the tub grout, window tracks, and the closets. Those are where a deposit or a walkthrough is won or lost, and they are exactly what a cheap hourly clean skips when the clock runs long.
Move-out work is date-driven. Tell us the closing or handover date and we schedule backwards from it. If the date is too tight to do properly we will say so rather than take the booking and under-deliver.
Who books this
Homeowners preparing a house for closing. Tenants trying to leave nothing for a landlord to deduct against. Real estate agents who would rather hand a buyer a clean house than explain one. Property managers turning units between tenants are buying something different — a date inside a make-ready sequence, on a per-unit rate — and that is covered under common area cleaning and apartment turnover, along with the rest of the multifamily scope.
If the house was renovated before sale, the job is different again and belongs under post-construction cleaning. Staying in the area instead of moving? A move-out clean is a natural starting point for recurring house cleaning afterwards.
What it costs
The usual reason a cleaning price is not published is that it depends on the house. It does — which is an argument for publishing the market rather than for publishing nothing. Below is what cleaning companies and directories in North Jersey publish for a move-out or move-in clean, each figure read on its source’s own page on 12 September 2026, so you can decide whether to keep reading before spending a phone call finding out. Every source is linked at the foot of this page.
The national cost guides do not get a row, and the reason is worth knowing before you compare. Four were read — HomeAdvisor, Angi, HomeGuide and HireAHelper, with HomeAdvisor and Angi printing the same table — and none publishes a New Jersey, Bergen or zip-code move-out figure. Their studio and one-bedroom figures span $80 to $350, and the lowest of them sit under the starting prices of the New Jersey companies below.
Those are other businesses' published prices, each read on its own page, not this company's rate and not a quote. This company's figure will be fixed in writing after a walkthrough or a run-through on the phone, and once it is agreed it will not move. A quote from this company shows New Jersey sales tax as its own line rather than folding it into the number; the published prices above do not all say whether tax is included. Each range runs from the lowest to the highest figure its sources state for that size, with nothing averaged, and “and up” means the source’s own top is open-ended. How the New Jersey sales tax rate works, and the one place the published guidance is genuinely unclear about residential work, is on our credentials page rather than restated here.
What moves it
The published ranges above are sorted by size, but size is only one of the things that move a price. Five things decide where a particular house lands, and none of them is a negotiation — they are conditions of the property that can be seen on a walkthrough and written into the scope.
What does not move it: how quickly you need it, whether a closing date is tight, or how many other quotes you are holding. A price that moves for those reasons was not a price to begin with. The move-out figure is for a single visit; a recurring clean that follows it is quoted separately.
The deposit
A move-out clean removes cleaning as a reason to withhold a deposit. It does nothing about wear, damage or paint, and any company telling you otherwise is promising something outside its control. What is worth knowing is the part that does not depend on a contractor at all — New Jersey’s deposit section sets a clock, a method and a remedy, and most tenants find out about all three too late to use them.
None of that is advice about your tenancy, and none of it is something this company has any part in — it is the section itself, linked in the sources below so you can read it rather than take our word. The practical overlap is narrow and worth saying plainly: a dated, itemised scope and photographs of the finished condition are what turn “it was left clean” from an assertion into a record. The same statute read from the owner’s side, which is a different problem, is on our apartment common areas page.
Questions
As published by North Jersey cleaning companies and directories, and read on 12 September 2026: $100 to $320 for a studio or one-bedroom apartment, $150 to $520 for two or three bedrooms, and $450 to $750 and up for four bedrooms or more. Each is a figure another business publishes, not a rate or a quote from this company, whose own figure is fixed in writing after a walkthrough or a run-through on the phone and does not move afterwards. The size of the home, its condition and the appliance count drive it, and a home that has been maintained costs meaningfully less than one that has not. New Jersey sales tax appears as its own line on a quote from this company. The full table, with every source named, is set out above.
Yes, ideally completely. We can work around a few remaining boxes, but every item still in the house is a surface we cannot clean under, and furniture left behind means the floors and closets cannot be finished. An empty house also cleans faster, which keeps the price down.
It removes cleaning as a reason to withhold it. We clean to what landlords and property managers actually inspect — inside appliances, inside cabinets and closets, grout, tracks and trim. We cannot do anything about wear, damage or paint, and any company promising your deposit back is promising something outside its control.
Yes, and plenty of buyers prefer it. A house is cleaner to your standard than to the last owner's after we have been through it, and it is far easier to do before your furniture arrives. Same flat pricing, same checklist.
Two weeks where you can, and more in June and July — the moving season in Bergen is genuinely busy and the good dates go first. Shorter notice may well be possible — there is no booked calendar to work around yet — so ask rather than assuming.
Yes. New Jersey taxes residential cleaning at 6.625%, and any registered company must collect it. We show it as its own line rather than folding it into the quote. A quote with no tax on it is either unregistered or absorbing it silently.
Sources
Give us the address, the bedroom and bathroom count and the date. The flat number follows in writing after a walkthrough or a run-through on the phone.
