Cleaning Tenders and Contracts

Cleaning procurement covers school and academy trust cleaning, office and civic building cleaning, communal cleaning of housing blocks and sheltered schemes, and window and gutter cleaning. Void and reactive property cleans, kitchen deep cleans, and the cleaning of public toilets, bus stations and railway stations also come up. Specialist work such as tank and pipe descaling is let under chemical cleaning contracts.

Stotles brings public sector cleaning tenders into one search, from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder through to Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI and councils' own e-tendering portals. Larger contracts appear on Find a Tender. Lower-value council and school contracts often appear on Contracts Finder or only on a buyer's own portal, and framework mini-competitions go only to suppliers already on that framework.

Getting public sector cleaning contracts starts with being visible where buyers look: register on the portals above, set alerts for cleaning notices in your region, and bid first for single-site contracts that match the size of your team. Buyers score quality as well as price, so method statements on staffing cover, training and quality audits matter as much as the hourly rate. A place on a regional framework such as ESPO's total cleaning services or YPO's support services system opens up call-offs that are never advertised openly.

Requirements that come up in public sector cleaning notices include DBS-checked staff for housing and school sites, COSHH-compliant handling of cleaning chemicals, and the ability to respond to emergency or out-of-hours cleans. Some buyers, particularly in London, also require payment of the London Living Wage or the Real Living Wage. The full quality criteria sit in the tender documents, so read the specification before pricing.

Academy trusts, schools, councils, housing associations, universities and NHS trusts are the regular buyers of cleaning services. Larger estates often call off from ESPO's total cleaning services framework, the CPC building cleaning framework or YPO's building in use support services system. The Department for Education's Get Help Buying for Schools service also runs further competitions for schools under YPO's framework, while single schools and smaller councils run their own tenders.

Public sector cleaning contracts most often run for an initial three years, with options to extend for one or two years more. Short one- and two-year contracts are common for single buildings and interim cover, and larger council and university estates sometimes let five years or longer.

When a public sector cleaning contract moves to a new contractor, the cleaning staff usually transfer with it under TUPE, on their existing terms and conditions. Cleaning notices regularly flag that TUPE is likely to apply, so bidders need to price the transferring workforce rather than a new team.

Yes. Plenty of cleaning contracts are sized for a single school, care home or office building rather than a national estate, and some notices explicitly invite bids from smaller providers alongside larger contractors. A three-year contract at a single academy or NHS building is a realistic entry point before bidding for the bigger, multi-site frameworks.

The core code is 90910000 (Cleaning services), alongside 90911200 (Building-cleaning services) and 90911300 (Window-cleaning services), and 90919300 (School cleaning services). Notices often carry several of these at once, since one contract can cover general cleaning, window cleaning and office areas under a single specification.

Review corporate strategies, service reviews, commissioning plans, and expiry dates for existing contracts to identify cleaning work due before a notice. On Stotles, you can track those signals and the buyers behind them, then follow a notice from pre-tender through to award.