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 together cleaning tenders and contracts from 100+ portals into one search, so you do not have to check each portal separately, and you can set alerts for new opportunities across the UK and Ireland.

If you want to search the government portals directly, Find a Tender carries higher-value contracts across the UK and Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland's eTenders covers Irish public bodies, and many councils, NHS bodies and housing associations publish on their own e-tendering portals such as ProContract. Larger contracts appear on Find a Tender, lower-value council and school contracts often appear only on Contracts Finder or 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 main portals, 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.

Cleaning tenders usually set minimum insurance cover, check financial standing and ask for evidence of similar contracts at selection stage. Many ask for DBS-checked staff for school and housing sites and COSHH-compliant handling of cleaning chemicals, and some buyers, particularly in London, require payment of the London Living Wage or the Real Living Wage. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can be excluded for certain criminal convictions, insolvency or failure to pay tax.

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.

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.

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.