The second pass is the one that pays
2026-07-22 · Method
Every extra wipe is worth less than the one before it. Here is what that costs a landlord who insists on a fifth.
A cleaner who has been doing this for a decade knows something the checklist does not say out loud: the first wipe does most of the work, the second does most of what is left, and by the fifth you are polishing your own reflection.
That is not a feeling. Soil comes off in fractions. If a pass removes 55 per cent of what is on a hard floor, then after one pass 45 per cent is left, after two 20 per cent, after three 9 per cent. The absolute amount removed by each pass falls every time, because there is less there to remove.
What it costs to ask for one more
We had a managing agent last spring who wanted a sixth pass written into a corridor spec. On vinyl at our measured rate, pass five takes the residual from 4.1 per cent to 1.9 per cent. The difference is real and it is also invisible from standing height. It added about eleven minutes per corridor, five corridors, twice a week — roughly £1,900 a year to move a number nobody could see.
We said so, in writing, with the arithmetic. They kept five passes and spent the money on having the bin store done properly instead, which was the thing every tenant had actually complained about.
Where it goes the other way
Grout is the opposite argument. It sits below the tile face and it is porous, so most of a pass lands on the tile and not in the joint. Our rate there is 31 per cent, which means six passes leaves nearly eleven per cent of the original soil in the joint — still visibly grey. It takes nine to reach the same finish line the floor around it hit in four.
That is why grout is on the rate card by the hour and the floor is by the square metre. It is not a pricing trick. It is the same law read in both directions.
The number we will not quote
Sealed limestone is on our card at a removal rate of zero, and that zero is a refusal rather than a measurement. Wet detergent cleaning strips the seal, and the seal is the thing doing the protecting. We turn that work down and tell the building to dry-dust it. Somebody else will take the job. They should not.