I clean a lot of student houses in the first three weeks of July, and roughly one in five of those invoices ends up attached to a deposit claim.
That changes what the invoice has to be. A line reading “carpet clean, £180” is a receipt. A line reading “hot water extraction, four bedrooms plus stairs and landing, plus localised treatment of two dye stains in rear first-floor bedroom, £180” is evidence, and the difference decides several hundred pounds of somebody’s money six weeks later. The adjudicator wasn’t there. Everything they know about that house comes from paper.
What do carpet deductions in student houses typically come to?
Smaller than landlords expect and larger than tenants expect, which is how most of these things go.
A straightforward end-of-tenancy carpet clean across a four-bedroom terrace in New Cross runs £150 to £220 in London, depending on stairs, access and whether anybody has parked a sofa on the landing for the duration. Per room, £35 to £55 for a bedroom, more for a heavily soiled through-lounge. Spot and stain work on top: the deposit schemes have long worked to a rough figure of £15 to £35 for an individual mark treated as a localised job or as a tenant contribution towards cleaning the whole item, and that band still shows up in adjudications.
Full replacement claims are where the numbers jump and where they most often collapse. A mid-range 80/20 carpet fitted through a four-bed HMO is £1,400 to £2,200 supplied and laid at current London prices. Deposits are capped at five weeks’ rent, and the average protected deposit in England and Wales sits around £1,175, so a full replacement claim on a shared house frequently exceeds the entire deposit before you get to the state of the oven.
What my invoice looks like when it reaches an evidence pack
Room by room, dated, with the method named and the condition described in flat language. No adjectives. “Pile heavily soiled in traffic lane, restored to uniform appearance” is useful. “Filthy” is not, because it’s my opinion of a carpet nobody else can see and an adjudicator has no way to weigh it. I photograph before and after from the same corner of the room, and I put the time stamp on. It takes four extra minutes.
Why do so many carpet claims fail at adjudication?
Because the landlord can’t prove what the carpet looked like when the students moved in.
Cleaning is the single biggest source of deposit disputes, appearing in more than half of TDS cases, and the pattern the scheme’s own adjudication team keeps reporting is the same one every year: weak check-in evidence, and claims for full replacement where a repair or a clean would have done. The starting position is that the money belongs to the tenant, and the landlord has to shift it.
Evidence packs go in room-by-room with labelled photographs, both sides get fourteen days to submit, and a trained adjudicator decides on the balance of probabilities with no internal appeal afterwards. One pass. A landlord who submits a check-out report with no matching check-in report has effectively submitted nothing, because the adjudicator wasn’t there to see the difference and cannot infer it from a photograph of a dirty carpet taken in June.
Then there’s betterment. A landlord can’t come out of a tenancy better off than they went in, so the adjudicator apportions by age against expected life. A carpet with a ten-year life that’s been down five years attracts something in the region of half its replacement cost even where the damage is beyond argument. A carpet already at the end of its life attracts nothing, however comprehensively it’s been ruined.
Student HMO carpets are almost always old. That’s the whole problem with the category. Landlords letting to students carpet the house once, in a mid-weight polypropylene, and then run it for nine or ten years through six successive cohorts, at which point the claim for the burn in the second-floor bedroom is mathematically worth about eleven pounds. The adjudicator wasn’t there for the previous five tenancies either, but the fitting invoice has a date on it, and the date does the arithmetic.
The nine-year-old carpet in Camberwell
Landlord wanted £900 from four students for replacement of a stair carpet with cigarette burns and a spilled bottle of something purple. Carpet went down in 2016, receipt available, standard ten-year life, stairs universally accepted as wearing faster than bedrooms. Claim came out at under £120 after apportionment, and my cleaning invoice for the rest of the house was the only part of the pack that survived intact.
Which marks are damage and which are fair wear and tear?
Traffic lanes are wear. Flattened pile on the stairs is wear. Overall grey dulling across a bedroom floor is wear, and I say so in writing when I’m asked, even when the person asking is the landlord paying me.
Damage is discrete and attributable to an event. The five things I see most in student houses, in order of how often they turn up: hair dye down a bathroom-adjacent hallway, fake tan trodden through a bedroom, red wine or cheap fruit cider, hot iron marks in a rectangle the exact size of a soleplate, and nail varnish. Of those, iron burns and bleach are permanent by definition, because the fibre or the dye is destroyed rather than dirty, and no amount of extraction touches them.
Vomit sits awkwardly between the two categories and generates more argument per square foot than anything else on the list. Extracted within a day it’s a cleaning job. Left in a carpet over a reading week it goes through the backing into the underlay, at which point the honest recommendation is replacement of the underlay in that room and the landlord has a defensible claim for materials and labour rather than a cleaning charge.
Hair dye is the one people fight hardest about. Semi-permanent dye on polypropylene will often reduce a long way with a reducing agent and heat, and on a nylon carpet with an acid-dye site it’s frequently there for good. Same stain, two outcomes, entirely dependent on a fibre nobody in the dispute has identified.
I’ll say the thing landlords don’t like hearing. If you have carpeted a student HMO in the last five years, that was a poor decision and the deposit system will not rescue you from it. Six unrelated young adults, a shared kitchen, one hallway and a nine-month contract are conditions that destroy textile flooring on a schedule you can set your watch by, and the deposit that’s meant to cover it is capped at five weeks’ rent split across the household.
The four that always get paid
Iron burns, bleach spots, pet stains where there was no pet permission, and anything with a distinct smell surviving a professional clean. Those four get deductions allowed on the balance of probabilities more consistently than anything else in my experience of what comes back, because they’re incontestably not the product of walking on a floor.
What has changed since the Renters’ Rights Act came in?
The deduction rules haven’t moved. The calendar has, and for a contractor that’s the bigger deal.
Section 21 went on 1 May 2026, fixed terms with it, and student HMO landlords now rely on Ground 4A to recover possession in line with the academic year – a ground that needs at least four months’ notice expiring between 1 June and 30 September, and which only applies where the property is a genuine student HMO. University halls and purpose-built accommodation sit outside the regime on licences, so the deposit position there is a separate conversation.
What that means on the ground in Wood Green and Hendon is that the neat, universal “tenancy ends 30 June, cleaner in on 1 July, new lot in on 1 September” cycle has loosened. Students can now give two months’ notice and leave when they like, which means voids opening in odd weeks and clean-downs that used to cluster into one predictable fortnight arriving across April and August instead. My diary looks different. So does the state of the carpets, because a house vacated in stages gets cleaned in stages, and half-empty houses accumulate damage nobody will own.
Book the check-out clean against the actual date, not the traditional one
Landlords still ring me in March to book the first week of July. Some of those houses will be empty in May now. Book late, book flexible, and get the check-out inventory done within a day of the last person leaving, because the gap between vacation and inspection is where deductions go to die.
Who pays when six students share one carpet?
Joint and several liability means all of them, in law, and it means the wrong one in practice.
The lad who spilled the dye has graduated and moved to Manchester. The remaining five split a deduction between them from a deposit they paid individually, and the scheme has no interest in refereeing the household’s internal politics. If you’re a student reading this, photograph your own room on the day you move in, and again on the day you leave, and keep the file with the metadata intact rather than a screenshot of it.
Room-by-room invoicing helps everybody here
I itemise per room by default now for student properties, so the £40 of stain work in the front bedroom lands on the front bedroom rather than being smeared across six people. Landlords occasionally ask me not to break it down. I break it down anyway.
The advice that costs me the work: if you own a student HMO in Whitechapel or Acton and the carpet is over six years old, don’t clean it and don’t claim for it. Rip it out, put down a mid-spec LVT for about the price of two more carpet replacements, and take the deduction argument off the table for a decade. I’d rather quote you for the two remaining bedrooms than sit in another dispute pack on a floor that was finished in 2019.
The carpets I cleaned in New Cross last July are due again next week. Same house, different names on the tenancy.
