Switching Cleaning Companies: a 7-Step Checklist

Most companies switch their cleaning provider two to three years too late. Not for lack of dissatisfaction — but because the switch looks like effort and the status quo looks like the lesser evil. In reality, an orderly provider switch can be done in six to ten weeks if you treat it as a project with seven steps rather than a gut decision. This checklist walks through all seven — from the honest stocktake to the first 90 days with the new provider. If you first want to know what a new contract should cost, our price calculator gives you a range; and what a well-organised maintenance cleaning service has to deliver is set out in the service description.

Step 1: Document the dissatisfaction — for four weeks

Before you give notice, collect facts. For four weeks, note every complaint: date, room, defect, reported to whom, response. This serves three purposes. First, it separates real performance failures from isolated annoyances — whoever remembers only last Tuesday's overflowing bin either overestimates or underestimates their problem. Second, the list is the basis for one final clarification meeting with the incumbent: sometimes the problem is one overloaded cleaner or a specification that was never adjusted, and switching would be the more expensive route to the same result. Third — if it does come to a switch — you know precisely what the new provider has to do better. "Cleaner" is not a tender criterion; "sanitary areas cleaned on Fridays too, meeting rooms ready before 8 a.m." is.

Step 2: Check the contract and notice period

Dig out the current contract — often for the first time in years — and check four points: the notice period (three months to quarter- or month-end is common, but annual terms with automatic renewal exist too), the form of notice (written form, provable receipt), special termination rights for documented performance failures after an unsuccessful formal warning, and ongoing entanglements such as deposited keys, supplied dispensers or leased mats. From the notice period and your desired start date, your timeline falls out backwards. Only give notice once step 4 is underway — a notice without a successor in progress creates exactly the time pressure under which bad contracts get signed.

A note on the formal warning: set a concrete deadline for rectification and name the defects from your documentation. Without that formality you lose the special termination right that could spare you the rest of the term.

Step 3: Refresh the specification

The switch is the right moment to redefine the target — not to copy the old scope document that produced the dissatisfaction. Create a current specification with a room register, intervals per room category and result-based descriptions; the complete instructions are in our guide to the cleaning specification. Pay particular attention to what has changed since the last contract: occupancy and home-office share, refurbished areas, new uses. Many buildings in 2026 still pay for the intervals of their pre-hybrid full attendance — which rhythms fit today's use is the subject of the interval guide.

Step 4: Tender and compare

Three to five providers are enough. Give all of them the same specification and the same deadline, and insist on a site visit before offers are submitted — a provider who offers without seeing the building is not calculating your building but an average, and will correct later. Then compare not the bottom line but the calculation: stated hours, productivity, wage group. How to spot a price below the collectively agreed reality — and why such offers belong in the reject pile — is worked through in our analysis of cleaning costs.

In the bidder meeting, ask the four questions glossy brochures do not answer: Does the business work exclusively with its own employed staff, or with subcontractors? Who is the fixed contact person for your building, and who deputises? How are services documented? And how does a complaint actually run — reporting channel, deadline, evidence? The answers belong in writing in the offer. Why the employment structure also matters to you legally is explained in the article on client liability.

Step 5: Secure the transition contractually

In the new contract, watch four points that specifically concern the switch. First, a realistic start date with a buffer against the old contract's notice period — a week of overlap beats a cleaning-free hole. Second, an onboarding phase with increased supervisor presence in the first weeks. Third, an initial deep clean as a separate position: otherwise the new provider inherits the accumulated condition of the old one as a permanent burden, and you pay for your predecessor's neglect in every future complaint. Fourth, short deadlines and a special termination right for the probation period — six months with monthly exit is negotiable at market and disciplines both sides.

A side note on staff: unlike in some industries, commercial cleaning in Germany has no general collective obligation to take over the predecessor's staff; a transfer of business under Section 613a of the Civil Code only comes into play where staff and organisation are actually taken over. If individual proven cleaners should stay, raise it actively — good providers gladly assess a takeover, but decide through their own selection process.

The timeline at a glance

So the seven steps add up to a project, here is the typical sequence counted backwards from the desired start — with a three-month notice period:

If you have to give notice earlier than the tender can run, pull step 4 ahead of the notice — never the other way round.

Step 6: Organise the handover week

The switch itself is logistics. A short checklist for handover week:

• Keys and transponders back from the old provider in full — against receipt, checked against the issue list — and issued to the new one with documentation; change alarm codes
• Three-way walk-through: old provider, new provider, you — record the condition, log existing damage so it is not attributed to the newcomer
• Materials and equipment separated: what belongs to the old provider, what to you (dispensers, mats, consumable stocks)?
• Internal communication: tell staff and reception who is in the building from Monday and how to report issues — otherwise complaints run to the wrong address for weeks
• Initial deep clean scheduled, ideally before the first regular cleaning day

Step 7: Steer the first 90 days

A new provider is onboarded after two weeks but assessable only after three months. Steer this phase actively: a short weekly walk-through in the first month, then fortnightly; report defects immediately through the agreed channel rather than collecting them; after six weeks a structured interim review with the supervisor against your documentation from step 1 — the same points that triggered the switch are the yardstick the new provider is measured by. And keep hold of the reins even when it goes well: the quality a provider shows during the observed early phase is their ability; the quality after a year is their organisation.

When switching pays off — and when it does not

An honest closing note: not every dissatisfaction justifies a switch. If your documentation from step 1 mostly shows communication problems, and the incumbent responds concretely in the clarification meeting, staying is often the more economical decision — a switch realistically costs you 15 to 25 internal working hours across all steps. But if the list shows recurring performance failures, unreachable contacts or doubts about the employment structure, staying gets more expensive with every quarter than the orderly cut. In that case: start with the specification, obtain comparable offers — and give the project the six to ten weeks it takes to do it exactly once.