How many hours of cleaning for 100 m²?

The question comes up at every first appointment: how many hours does 100 m² take? Almost every site answers three to four hours. That figure is not wrong, it is simply incomplete — it says neither which service is meant nor who performs it, and those two variables move the same surface from 2h15 to 12 hours.

We schedule home visits every week across Paris, Hauts-de-Seine and Yvelines. The durations below are not averages borrowed from elsewhere: they are our planning ratios, the ones used to build quotes and assign cleaners. We also explain where they come from, so you can adapt them to your own home.

The three possible answers for 100 m²

"Cleaning" covers three different jobs, with three unrelated durations. Identifying which one applies to you is the only way to get a useful estimate.

These durations are per cleaner: a 10-hour reset is one day with two people, or two days with one. The same 100 m² home can therefore legitimately be quoted at 2h15 or at 12 hours. When a provider gives you a duration before asking which service you need, that is the first warning sign.

Why almost every site answers "3 to 4 hours"

That figure reflects a specific reality, rarely spelled out: the time it takes someone who lives there. It is accurate in that context. It becomes misleading the moment it is applied to a professional service, because the gap between a private individual and a trained cleaner on the same surface runs between 30 and 45%.

That gap has nothing to do with pace or energy. It comes down to three concrete things, all of which can be described and reproduced.

Where the gap between amateur and professional comes from

Three measurable factors account for nearly all of the difference:

• Order of operations. Work runs top to bottom, and from the furthest room towards the exit. A private individual goes over the same area two or three times on average, because dust falls back onto a floor already washed.
• Dwell time put to use. A sanitary product or degreaser needs several minutes to act. A professional applies it, moves to another zone, comes back. A private individual waits in front of it, or scrubs too early and has to start again.
• Equipment. Flat mop and microfibres changed by zone, against a single bucket and cloth. On 100 m² of flooring the difference runs to tens of minutes.

Routine upkeep: the room-by-room breakdown

100 m² generally means a three or four-bedroom home: kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, a bathroom, a separate WC and circulation space. These are the durations we use in scheduling, excluding final floor work which is done in one pass at the end.

Total for one cleaner in an already maintained home: 2h15 to 2h30, consistent with the 45 m² per hour, per person ratio. In a standard situation — family, pet, two storeys, textile flooring — we allow 3 hours, and that is the duration that appears most often on our weekly quotes for this surface.

The four factors that actually move the needle

At identical floor area, these elements weigh far more than square metres:

• Clutter level. Every object to move and put back costs a few seconds, multiplied by several hundred surfaces. This is the leading factor, well ahead of the others.
• Number of wet rooms. A second bathroom adds 20 to 25 minutes regardless of total floor area.
• Floor coverings. Carpet and rugs require slow, cross-directional vacuuming; allow 25 to 30% more time on those zones than on tiling.
• Regularity. A home cleaned weekly sits at the bottom of the range. Past three weeks without a visit, limescale and grease become deep-clean tasks again.

Deep clean: what gets added and how long it takes

A deep clean is not a longer routine visit: it is a list of additional tasks, not done weekly, each with its own duration. On 100 m², the added items are as follows:

• Interior and exterior window cleaning — 8 to 12 minutes per window including frame and track. Across 12 openings that alone is 1h30 to 2h30.
• Skirting boards and door frames — 45 to 60 minutes for the whole home, on your knees, with no way to speed it up.
• Inside cupboards and drawers — 60 to 90 minutes, provided they have been emptied beforehand. If they have not, the duration doubles.
• Oven and microwave — 1 to 2 hours depending on build-up, mostly dwell time (see below).
• Fridge and extractor hood — 30 to 40 minutes for the first, 20 to 30 for the second if the filters are dishwasher-safe.

Added to the routine baseline, these items bring the total to 6 to 8 cleaner-hours for 100 m². In practice: a full day for one person working alone, or half a day with two.

After building work: why it jumps to 8-12 hours

Construction dust bears no resemblance to household dust. It is fine, mineral and electrostatic, and it settles again several times after the first pass. This is the only situation where the same zone must be treated two or three times to be genuinely clean — and that is what pushes the duration up.

Real case: 124 m² in Paris after moving in

On a recent job in a newly renovated 124 m² Paris flat, the brief covered full cleaning of corners and skirting boards, the inside and outside of every cupboard and drawer, and thorough degreasing of the oven and microwave. Estimated and then confirmed duration: 8 to 10 cleaner-hours, i.e. one day with two people.

On this type of job, the kitchen alone takes around 3 hours — more than a complete routine clean of the same home. Scaled to 100 m², the range sits between 8 and 12 hours depending on the extent of the work: a simple repaint stays at the low end, floor sanding or partition removal at the high end.

What actually takes the longest in a home

Contrary to intuition, it is not the large surfaces that consume the hours. It is three specific items, all concentrated in a few square metres.

The oven, by a wide margin

This is the most underestimated item of all. Oven degreaser does not work through scrubbing but through dwell time: allow 30 to 45 minutes of action per cycle, and on a genuinely soiled oven, two to four cycles are needed. This step cannot be accelerated or compressed: the chemistry sets the pace. A heavily soiled oven can therefore account for two hours on its own, most of it spent waiting. That is precisely why it never forms part of routine upkeep.

The kitchen as a whole

Oven aside, the kitchen remains the room with the highest density of points to treat: worktops, splashback, hob, sink, taps, cupboard fronts, handles, appliance exteriors. Many small surfaces, many changes of tool and product. On 100 m² it rarely exceeds 12 m² yet consumes close to a quarter of the visit.

Floors, but not for the reason you expect

Washing 100 m² of flooring is quick. What takes time is everything before it: clearing, moving, vacuuming corners and skirting properly. The washing itself accounts for less than a third of the time spent on floors. This is why an uncluttered home cleans far faster than a cluttered one of identical size.

What those hours represent after the tax credit

Once the duration is settled, the next question is mechanical. Here is the full calculation for three hours of weekly routine upkeep on 100 m², based on our reference rate of 26 € excl. VAT per hour, per cleaner, or 31.90 € incl. VAT:

• Per visit: 3 h × 31.90 € = 95.70 € incl. VAT, or 47.85 € actually debited after the 50% tax credit.
• Per month: weekly service averages 4.33 weeks per month, or 13 hours — around 414.70 € incl. VAT, of which 207.35 € actually falls to you.
• With the Urssaf immediate advance, that 50% is deducted at the point of payment rather than refunded the following year: you never front the cash.

The home employment tax credit applies up to 12,000 € of annual spending, increased according to household composition. It is a credit and not a reduction: non-taxable households benefit too, in the form of a payment.