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CLEANING · 7 MIN READ

End-of-tenancy cleaning checklist: get your deposit back

In Dublin a deposit is a month's rent — €2,335 on average for a new tenancy. One in five disputes the RTB hears is about keeping it. Here is what the law lets a landlord deduct, what a tribunal threw out this year, and the room-by-room clean that leaves nothing to argue about.

Niamh Ward · Freelance writer · cleaning and home
19 Oct 2026 · 7 min read
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A kitchen clean on check-out day. Dublin cleaning companies' own checklists all start in the kitchen. Photo: iStock.
A kitchen clean on check-out day. Dublin cleaning companies' own checklists all start in the kitchen. Photo: iStock.

IN SHORT

  • A landlord may keep deposit money for two things only under the Residential Tenancies Act: rent arrears, and the reasonable cost of restoring the home after deterioration beyond normal wear and tear. Dirt counts; a faded wall does not. The onus of proof is on the landlord.
  • In April 2025 an RTB tribunal struck out a €388 cleaning deduction because the tenants had dated photographs from the day they left. Photos cut both ways: a Galway landlord kept €1,855 for cleaning on the strength of hers.
  • A professional end-of-tenancy clean in Dublin is roughly €120–€250 for a one-bed, €150–€290 for a two-bed and €180–€360 for a three-bed (published 2025–26 prices), with oven, carpets and inside windows often charged on top. The deposit at stake is around ten times that.

What the landlord is allowed to keep

The Residential Tenancies Act 2004 is short on this. Section 12 says the landlord must "return or repay promptly" the deposit, and may hold back only the amount of any rent arrears, or the reasonable cost of putting the home back to the condition it was in at the start, less normal wear and tear. If that cost is less than the deposit, you get the difference. Official guidance adds unpaid utility bills in the landlord's name and insufficient notice.

"Normal wear and tear" is defined by time and use: a flat lived in for ten years by a family looks different from one lived in for a year by one person, and the Act says so. The RTB's own page puts it plainly: scuffs and scrapes are unavoidable, paint fades, furniture has a lifespan, and upgrade costs cannot be charged to a tenant. Its 2025 landlord-and-tenant guide adds the one line that matters for cleaning: if the home is not left "reasonably clean and tidy", the landlord may arrange cleaning and deduct the cost.

So the target is not spotless. It is reasonably clean, with proof that it was.

What a tribunal decided this year

In April 2025 an RTB tribunal (TR0225-008497) heard a case where landlords had deducted €388 for cleaning from a €900 deposit. The tenants produced photographs taken on the day they moved out. The tribunal found the photos showed the home in good condition and disallowed the cleaning deduction in full, adding: "A tenant is not obliged to return a dwelling in exactly the same condition in which it was received." The landlords' decision to hire a cleaner was, it said, "their prerogative, but it does not mean that the tenants are responsible for the cost."

The evidence standard is the same in the other direction. In a Loughrea case reported in October 2024, a landlord's photographs of floors fouled by the tenants' dogs persuaded the tribunal to allow €1,855 in cleaning costs.

The numbers behind these two cases: the RTB received 9,564 dispute applications in 2024, and deposit retention was the reason in 19% of them, roughly 1,800 cases, up 65% on 2021. In the one year for which the RTB published a win rate, 2021, tenants got all or part of the deposit back in 94% of disputed cases. Adjudication costs €30 and took an average of 20 weeks in 2025. Hearings have been public since September.

Before you clean: the three things that decide it

  1. Find your check-in evidence. The inventory your landlord was obliged to give you, and the dated photos you took on day one. Threshold and the RTB both tell tenants to take them; if you did, the clean only has to get the home back to those photos.
  2. Ask for a joint final inspection. The RTB guide recommends it, with the inventory gone through item by item and both of you present. Agree in writing how cleaning will be handled before you move out, not after.
  3. Book the clean for the day after you move out, not the day of. You cannot clean round boxes, and a cleaner cannot do the inside of a wardrobe that still has coats in it.

Room by room: what the published checklists actually say

The lists below are drawn from four Dublin end-of-tenancy companies' own published checklists. They agree on almost everything, and the order they put things in tells you where deposits are won and lost.

Kitchen: the oven first. Every checklist starts with the oven: full interior degrease, racks, door glass. Then the hob and the extractor hood and its filter, the inside of the fridge and freezer (defrosted, dry), the microwave, cupboards and drawers inside and out, the dishwasher filter and door seals, the washing-machine drawer and seal, sink and taps descaled, wall tiles degreased, worktops, bins, skirting, floor.

Bathroom: limescale and grout. Toilet including behind and the hinges, bath and shower screen descaled, tiles and grout, sink, taps and mirror, extractor fan cover, inside the cabinet, radiator, floor and skirting.

Bedrooms and living room. Inside built-in wardrobes and drawers, light fittings and lampshades, switches and sockets, radiators and the pipes behind them, windows inside and the sills, blinds and curtain rails, doors and frames and handles, skirting, marks on walls, carpets vacuumed to the edges, hard floors mopped.

Hall, stairs, storage. Banisters and spindles, stair carpet, storage cupboards emptied and wiped, smoke alarms dusted, cobwebs.

The last hour. Rubbish gone, bins emptied and rinsed, meter readings photographed, keys counted, and a set of dated photographs of every room, every appliance open, every cupboard open. That set is what won the April tribunal.

If you'd rather book it

Published Dublin prices for 2025–26 cluster at roughly €120–€250 for a one-bed, €150–€290 for a two-bed and €180–€360 for a three-bed. Oven cleaning (€35–€45), inside windows (about €15) and carpet steam-cleaning (€40–€60 a room) are often extras, and some companies add surcharges for heavy soiling or pet hair. A team usually needs three to five hours for a one-bed and five to seven for a three-bed. Several companies advertise a "deposit-back guarantee"; read the terms, because in practice it is a free re-clean within one to three days if the landlord objects, not a refund.

Measured against a Dublin deposit, €2,335 on the RTB's latest index for a new tenancy and over €2,600 for a two-bed on Daft, the arithmetic is not close.

€150–€290
Locufy guide price, 2-bed, Dublin
4–6 h
typical 2-bed clean (published company checklists)
19%
of RTB disputes in 2024 were about deposit retention

By the numbers — figures from the sources listed at the end of this piece.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

Nearest first, with their score and rate — no account needed to look.
Find end-of-tenancy cleaners near me

WRITTEN WITH

The listed providers who gave their checklists and time for this piece. Real names, real listings — nobody is invented.

  • Sinéad WalshEnd-of-tenancy cleaner · Crumlin · ★ 4.9 · 120+ reviews
  • Bright & Co CleaningCleaning company · Tallaght · ★ 4.8 · 85 reviews
  • Aoife BrennanCleaner · Drumcondra · ★ 5.0 · 30 reviews

Questions this piece gets asked

How long does an end-of-tenancy clean take?

From the companies' own guides: about 3–5 hours for a one-bed, 4–6 for a two-bed, 5–7 for a three-bed. Longer if the oven or carpets are bad, or if belongings are still in the way.

Does the landlord have to give me the check-in inventory?

Yes. Where a rent book applies, the 1993 regulations require the landlord to list the furnishings and appliances provided, and Citizens Information and Threshold both say you should get a signed inventory. If you never got one, say so in your dispute application; it weakens any claim about condition.

Can I do it myself?

Yes. The standard is 'reasonably clean and tidy', and a tribunal this year held tenants to nothing more. Work from the room-by-room list above, start with the oven, and photograph everything when you finish.

Sources

FOLLOW CLEANING

One email a month — the cleaning piece, the day it goes out. One tap to stop.

Comments 3

0 / 600 · Links are rejected automatically. Be specific, be fair. The rules
  • REAoife M.Customer · Dublin 8EDITOR'S PICK2 h ago

    Moved out in July and did exactly this with the photos. Deposit back in nine days without a word said. The oven took the whole of a Saturday though.

  • PRMarta R.Provider · End-of-tenancy cleaner · Crumlin1 h ago

    From the other side: the oven, the extractor filter and the inside of the wardrobe doors are what we get called back for. Do those three and the rest is detail.

  • RECiara D.Customer · Cork40 min ago

    The tribunal report is worth reading in full. The tenants won on photos alone.

Signed-in Locufy customers and providers only. Comments close 30 days after publication. Report anything that names a person unfairly — we act on every report.

NEXT IN CLEANINGOven cleaning: what a professional does that you can't5 min read

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All cleaning →

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Pick your sections. The month's piece arrives the day it goes out.

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One email per section per month, the day the piece goes out. Stop in one tap. Privacy.

BREAKINGStorm Austen: yellow rain warning for every county from 7pm Thursday — what to do before it arrives20 Oct 2026Read

CLEANING · 7 MIN READ

End-of-tenancy cleaning checklist: get your deposit back

In Dublin a deposit is a month's rent — €2,335 on average for a new tenancy. One in five disputes the RTB hears is about keeping it. Here is what the law lets a landlord deduct, what a tribunal threw out this year, and the room-by-room clean that leaves nothing to argue about.

Niamh Ward · Freelance writer · cleaning and home
19 Oct 2026 · 7 min read
A kitchen clean on check-out day. Dublin cleaning companies' own checklists all start in the kitchen. Photo: iStock.
A kitchen clean on check-out day. Dublin cleaning companies' own checklists all start in the kitchen. Photo: iStock.

IN SHORT

  • A landlord may keep deposit money for two things only under the Residential Tenancies Act: rent arrears, and the reasonable cost of restoring the home after deterioration beyond normal wear and tear. Dirt counts; a faded wall does not. The onus of proof is on the landlord.
  • In April 2025 an RTB tribunal struck out a €388 cleaning deduction because the tenants had dated photographs from the day they left. Photos cut both ways: a Galway landlord kept €1,855 for cleaning on the strength of hers.
  • A professional end-of-tenancy clean in Dublin is roughly €120–€250 for a one-bed, €150–€290 for a two-bed and €180–€360 for a three-bed (published 2025–26 prices), with oven, carpets and inside windows often charged on top. The deposit at stake is around ten times that.

What the landlord is allowed to keep

The Residential Tenancies Act 2004 is short on this. Section 12 says the landlord must "return or repay promptly" the deposit, and may hold back only the amount of any rent arrears, or the reasonable cost of putting the home back to the condition it was in at the start, less normal wear and tear. If that cost is less than the deposit, you get the difference. Official guidance adds unpaid utility bills in the landlord's name and insufficient notice.

"Normal wear and tear" is defined by time and use: a flat lived in for ten years by a family looks different from one lived in for a year by one person, and the Act says so. The RTB's own page puts it plainly: scuffs and scrapes are unavoidable, paint fades, furniture has a lifespan, and upgrade costs cannot be charged to a tenant. Its 2025 landlord-and-tenant guide adds the one line that matters for cleaning: if the home is not left "reasonably clean and tidy", the landlord may arrange cleaning and deduct the cost.

So the target is not spotless. It is reasonably clean, with proof that it was.

What a tribunal decided this year

In April 2025 an RTB tribunal (TR0225-008497) heard a case where landlords had deducted €388 for cleaning from a €900 deposit. The tenants produced photographs taken on the day they moved out. The tribunal found the photos showed the home in good condition and disallowed the cleaning deduction in full, adding: "A tenant is not obliged to return a dwelling in exactly the same condition in which it was received." The landlords' decision to hire a cleaner was, it said, "their prerogative, but it does not mean that the tenants are responsible for the cost."

The evidence standard is the same in the other direction. In a Loughrea case reported in October 2024, a landlord's photographs of floors fouled by the tenants' dogs persuaded the tribunal to allow €1,855 in cleaning costs.

The numbers behind these two cases: the RTB received 9,564 dispute applications in 2024, and deposit retention was the reason in 19% of them, roughly 1,800 cases, up 65% on 2021. In the one year for which the RTB published a win rate, 2021, tenants got all or part of the deposit back in 94% of disputed cases. Adjudication costs €30 and took an average of 20 weeks in 2025. Hearings have been public since September.

Before you clean: the three things that decide it

  1. Find your check-in evidence. The inventory your landlord was obliged to give you, and the dated photos you took on day one. Threshold and the RTB both tell tenants to take them; if you did, the clean only has to get the home back to those photos.
  2. Ask for a joint final inspection. The RTB guide recommends it, with the inventory gone through item by item and both of you present. Agree in writing how cleaning will be handled before you move out, not after.
  3. Book the clean for the day after you move out, not the day of. You cannot clean round boxes, and a cleaner cannot do the inside of a wardrobe that still has coats in it.

Room by room: what the published checklists actually say

The lists below are drawn from four Dublin end-of-tenancy companies' own published checklists. They agree on almost everything, and the order they put things in tells you where deposits are won and lost.

Kitchen: the oven first. Every checklist starts with the oven: full interior degrease, racks, door glass. Then the hob and the extractor hood and its filter, the inside of the fridge and freezer (defrosted, dry), the microwave, cupboards and drawers inside and out, the dishwasher filter and door seals, the washing-machine drawer and seal, sink and taps descaled, wall tiles degreased, worktops, bins, skirting, floor.

Bathroom: limescale and grout. Toilet including behind and the hinges, bath and shower screen descaled, tiles and grout, sink, taps and mirror, extractor fan cover, inside the cabinet, radiator, floor and skirting.

Bedrooms and living room. Inside built-in wardrobes and drawers, light fittings and lampshades, switches and sockets, radiators and the pipes behind them, windows inside and the sills, blinds and curtain rails, doors and frames and handles, skirting, marks on walls, carpets vacuumed to the edges, hard floors mopped.

Hall, stairs, storage. Banisters and spindles, stair carpet, storage cupboards emptied and wiped, smoke alarms dusted, cobwebs.

The last hour. Rubbish gone, bins emptied and rinsed, meter readings photographed, keys counted, and a set of dated photographs of every room, every appliance open, every cupboard open. That set is what won the April tribunal.

If you'd rather book it

Published Dublin prices for 2025–26 cluster at roughly €120–€250 for a one-bed, €150–€290 for a two-bed and €180–€360 for a three-bed. Oven cleaning (€35–€45), inside windows (about €15) and carpet steam-cleaning (€40–€60 a room) are often extras, and some companies add surcharges for heavy soiling or pet hair. A team usually needs three to five hours for a one-bed and five to seven for a three-bed. Several companies advertise a "deposit-back guarantee"; read the terms, because in practice it is a free re-clean within one to three days if the landlord objects, not a refund.

Measured against a Dublin deposit, €2,335 on the RTB's latest index for a new tenancy and over €2,600 for a two-bed on Daft, the arithmetic is not close.

Locufy guide price, 2-bed, Dublin€150–€290
typical 2-bed clean (published company checklists)4–6 h
of RTB disputes in 2024 were about deposit retention19%

By the numbers — figures from the sources listed at the end of this piece.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

Nearest first, with their score and rate — no account needed to look.
Find cleaners near me

WRITTEN WITH

The listed providers who gave their checklists and time for this piece. Real names, real listings — nobody is invented.

  • Sinéad WalshEnd-of-tenancy cleaner · Crumlin · ★ 4.9 · 120+ reviews
  • Bright & Co CleaningCleaning company · Tallaght · ★ 4.8 · 85 reviews
  • Aoife BrennanCleaner · Drumcondra · ★ 5.0 · 30 reviews

Questions this piece gets asked

How long does an end-of-tenancy clean take?

From the companies' own guides: about 3–5 hours for a one-bed, 4–6 for a two-bed, 5–7 for a three-bed. Longer if the oven or carpets are bad, or if belongings are still in the way.

Does the landlord have to give me the check-in inventory?

Yes. Where a rent book applies, the 1993 regulations require the landlord to list the furnishings and appliances provided, and Citizens Information and Threshold both say you should get a signed inventory. If you never got one, say so in your dispute application; it weakens any claim about condition.

Can I do it myself?

Yes. The standard is 'reasonably clean and tidy', and a tribunal this year held tenants to nothing more. Work from the room-by-room list above, start with the oven, and photograph everything when you finish.

Sources

FOLLOW CLEANING

One email a month — the cleaning piece, the day it goes out. One tap to stop.

Comments 3

0 / 600 · Links are rejected automatically. Be specific, be fair. The rules
  • REAoife M.Customer · Dublin 8EDITOR'S PICK2 h ago

    Moved out in July and did exactly this with the photos. Deposit back in nine days without a word said. The oven took the whole of a Saturday though.

  • PRMarta R.Provider · End-of-tenancy cleaner · Crumlin1 h ago

    From the other side: the oven, the extractor filter and the inside of the wardrobe doors are what we get called back for. Do those three and the rest is detail.

  • RECiara D.Customer · Cork40 min ago

    The tribunal report is worth reading in full. The tenants won on photos alone.

Signed-in Locufy customers and providers only. Comments close 30 days after publication. Report anything that names a person unfairly — we act on every report.

NEXT IN CLEANINGOven cleaning: what a professional does that you can't5 min read

More in Cleaning

All cleaning →

FOLLOW A SECTION

Pick your sections. The month's piece arrives the day it goes out.

Nothing is pre-ticked. Choose one section or all 20; you get at most one email per section per month.

Show all 20

One email per section per month, the day the piece goes out. Stop in one tap. Privacy.