How to start a window cleaning business in the UK (2026 founder guide)

A UK window-cleaning round is one of the cheapest legitimate businesses you can start. The barrier to entry is about £600 of equipment, an afternoon of paperwork, and the courage to knock on doors. The barrier to making it pay properly is twelve months of learning what most operators only learn by losing money. This guide is the shortcut.

I run a small window-cleaning round in the East of England and I built a software tool called Squeegify that other UK and Irish window cleaners use to quote customers instantly. Everything in this guide is what I'd tell my own brother if he was starting tomorrow.

The legal setup, in the order to actually do it

Register as a sole trader with HMRC. This takes about ten minutes online at gov.uk. You'll get a Unique Taxpayer Reference within a few weeks. As a sole trader you keep things simple · you and the business are the same legal entity, you do a self-assessment tax return each January for the previous tax year. If you ever turnover more than £85,000 a year you'll need to register for VAT, but that takes most operators three to five years to hit so don't worry about it yet.

Get public liability insurance. This is the single most important purchase you make as a new window cleaner. The cheapest insurance for a one-person residential round is roughly £180 to £280 a year for £2 million of cover. Simply Business, Tradesman Saver, and Constructaquote are the three UK brokers most operators use. Don't quote without it. A smashed pane on a Victorian sash that the insurance doesn't cover will eat a month of round revenue.

Open a separate bank account for the business. You don't have to legally as a sole trader but the bookkeeping pain saved is worth twenty minutes setting up a free business account at Starling or Monzo. Customers paying you Direct Debit through GoCardless (most rounds settle on this within twelve months) want a sort code and account number; running them through your personal current account makes the self-assessment a nightmare.

Get a Companies House identifier for the business name even as a sole trader. You don't have to incorporate, but you can register a trading name with HMRC for £20 and use it on quotes, invoices, and your website. Customers trust "ABC Window Cleaning, registered with HMRC" more than "Dave's Windows." Worth the £20.

Sign up for the Federation of Window Cleaners (£60 a year) once you're confident the business is going. The directory listing and the FWC public liability scheme give you some credibility on quotes against unregistered competitors. The British Window Cleaning Academy also runs training courses · for new operators the Working at Height awareness course (£90, one day, online) is worth doing in your first month.

The kit you actually need

The water-fed pole versus traditional ladder-and-squeegee question gets argued endlessly on operator forums and the honest answer is that you need both, eventually. Start with one and add the other when revenue justifies it.

If you're starting solo with under £600 of capital, buy a water-fed pole setup. A 30-foot Gardiner SLX 30 carbon pole (around £350), a 25-litre purified water backpack tank with a battery-powered pump (around £180), a TDS meter (£15), a brush (£25), and a hose reel (£20). You're operational. The water-fed pole approach lets you clean ground and first-floor windows from the safety of the pavement, no ladder, no fall risk. You can do 30 to 40 houses a week on this kit working solo.

The water source matters. Most starting operators fill the tank at home from a Resin DI vessel (around £80 plus £30 a year of resin) that produces purified water from the mains tap. The water has to be sub-10 ppm TDS or you get hard-water spotting on the glass; tap water is typically 200 to 400 ppm. Skip this and your windows look streaky after they dry, customers complain, you do them again for free.

Once you have a recurring round of fifty plus customers, add a van setup. A second-hand Citroen Berlingo or Renault Kangoo (around £4,000 to £6,000), a 350-litre vehicle-mounted tank (around £450 plus £200 fitting), a Spring 100 pole pump (around £180), and a longer 45-foot pole for second-storey work (around £600). Now you're doing 80 to 120 houses a week and you can quote on premium properties with sash windows or detached homes.

Don't buy a ladder until you're earning enough to justify the training and risk. Ladder falls are the single most common cause of serious injury in the UK window-cleaning trade. A 4-section combination ladder (around £180), a stand-off bracket (£40), and proper Working at Height training (£90) is the minimum if you ever go up one. Most modern UK operators never use a ladder · they water-fed-pole everything reachable and decline anything that isn't.

Your first ten customers

The fastest way to land your first ten paying customers is to walk a single street and knock on every door. Pick a residential street in your area with detached or semi-detached houses, ideally somewhere with visible streaks on the windows so prospects can see they need the service. Knock between 5pm and 7pm on a weekday or 11am on a Saturday. Have a printed leaflet with your price (£18 monthly for a three-bed semi is a good opening number), your phone, your website, and your insurance reference. Say the same eight words at every door: "Hi, I'm starting a window-cleaning round in the area, would you like a quote?"

Out of twenty doors knocked you'll typically book two or three on the spot and pick up another one or two as callbacks over the next week. Repeat for ten streets and you have your first thirty customers, which is enough to break even on the kit and insurance.

The second source is Facebook neighbourhood groups and Nextdoor. Post a single non-spammy introduction in each: "Hi, I'm starting a window-cleaning round in [postcode]. £18 a month for a three-bed semi, fully insured, water-fed pole so no ladders. Reply if you'd like a quote." Don't push it; don't spam multiple groups; don't bid against existing operators. One honest post in three groups gets you four or five enquiries.

The third source is a website with an instant quote engine. This is where Squeegify fits · the customer types their address, the engine reads the property from satellite, locks a £ figure, and books a slot. The advantage versus a contact form is the speed: enquiries arrive at 11pm and they're booked by 11:01pm rather than waiting in your inbox until you reply the next morning. For a brand-new operator with no existing round to occupy their attention this matters less; for a growing operator it's transformative.

The slowest but most lucrative source is referrals from existing customers. Tell every customer at every visit "if you know anyone on the street who'd like a quote, send them my way and you get £5 off your next clean." Roughly one in three customers will, eventually. The customers that come through referrals close at 70%+ versus 30% on cold leafleting, and they stay on the round longer because they were vouched for.

What to charge

UK residential window cleaning prices in 2026 sit between £15 and £45 a month for the typical home. A one-bed flat is £15 to £20. A two-bed terrace is £18 to £25. A three-bed semi is £22 to £32. A four-bed detached is £28 to £45. London and the South East price 20% to 30% higher across the board; the Midlands and East price in the middle; Scotland and the North price slightly lower.

A useful starting framework: charge a £6 to £10 base call-out fee, plus £1.50 to £2.25 per window, plus an upper-floor multiplier of 1.25 (so windows above the first floor count for 25% more), plus extras for conservatory (£8 to £15), bay window (£3 to £5 per bay), French doors (£3 to £5), and fascia/soffit (£30 to £80 as an annual one-off). Apply a 15% recurring discount for monthly schedules and 5% to 10% for bimonthly or quarterly.

For a typical 12-window two-floor semi: £8 base + £21 per-window + £5.25 upper-floor uplift = £34.25 one-off, or £29.11 a month after the 15% recurring discount. This is approximately what Squeegify quotes by default and it lands in the live UK market range for that property.

Don't price below £14 a month for any residential property regardless of size. Below that you're undercutting the basic call-out cost of arriving, the insurance, and the equipment depreciation. Cheap quotes are a race to the bottom that you don't win even if you do win the customer · cheap customers leave first and complain most.

The economics of a recurring round

The single biggest financial fact about UK window cleaning is that 70% of homes that go on a round stay on it for two or more years. The cleaner who quotes the customer once gets paid 24 to 36 times for that single quoting cost. This is why the trade is worth doing solo: the revenue compounds.

A round of 100 monthly customers at an average of £22 a month is £26,400 a year of revenue. After £400 of insurance, £600 of water + resin, £1,200 of fuel, £100 of FWC membership, £200 of equipment replacement, you net around £24,000 a year working roughly 25 hours a week. That's £18.50 an hour, comparable to UK skilled trades for someone with no employees and no formal qualifications. Scale to 250 customers and net income hits £55,000 working full-time. Hire one cleaner at £14 an hour for a second van and net rises to £85,000 to £100,000.

The two failure modes for new operators are quoting too cheap (small margin per house means you have to scale faster than you can service to net anything) and round abandonment (customers ghost the recurring schedule because the operator isn't reliable). Both are solved by the same discipline: charge a fair market rate from the start, and turn up every four weeks at the slot you said you would.

The mistakes new operators make in year one

The most expensive mistake is not getting public liability insurance. I've covered this above; please don't skip it.

The second most expensive is taking on one-off jobs at flat-round prices. A customer who calls and says "I'd like a one-off clean before my daughter's wedding" is a one-off customer; charge them 1.6× to 2.5× the recurring monthly figure to reflect that the round-density discount doesn't apply. Operators who quote one-offs at the recurring price burn the time but never see the customer again, and they're left with a cancelled slot they can't refill at short notice.

The third is undercharging conservatories. Conservatory glass is fiddly, the cleaner usually can't reach the roof safely, customers expect it included free, and operators routinely lose money on every conservatory clean they quote without a separate line item. Charge £10 to £15 per visit explicitly for conservatory wall glass, and decline the roof glass unless you have a flat-roof ladder access and the right training.

The fourth is taking deposits or pre-payment from new customers. Most rounds run on monthly Direct Debit billed in arrears after the clean. Taking a pre-payment looks careful but feels off to customers, kills your conversion rate on quotes, and creates a refund obligation when the schedule slips. Send a Direct Debit mandate via GoCardless on the first visit; you'll get paid on the same day every month with zero chasing.

The fifth is round abandonment in winter. UK window cleaning rounds slow down in December and January because of weather and customer holiday schedules. New operators panic-take low-paid commercial contracts in winter and end up regretting them when residential picks up in March. Build a six-month cash buffer before you take winter commercial work; it'll be there waiting for you if you genuinely need it.

A word on Squeegify

If you're starting a UK window-cleaning round in 2026 and you have any kind of website (Carrd, Wix, WordPress, even just a Facebook page), the single highest-ROI tool I'd add is an instant-quote widget. I built Squeegify because I lost six out of every ten enquiries to slow callbacks on my own round, and the fix · a 10-second quote engine that books the slot before the customer has finished their coffee · cost me twelve quid a month at the smallest plan.

The 7-day free trial is real. No card required to start · you get full dashboard access for 7 days. Add payment to keep going after that, or walk away. The first ten operators get 25% off for life with the founder code FOUNDER25, which drops Solo to £11.24 a month. Start at squeegify.co.uk/signup or just try the demo at /demo to see what your own house quotes at.

If the demo gets your real address wrong by more than two windows, email me at robin@squeegify.co.uk before you sign up. The model improves on every miss someone reports back.