You’ve probably had this experience: you get three quotes for the same job, and they’re nowhere near each other. One’s £60, one’s £110, one’s £150. Same house, same carpets — so what’s actually going on?

Here’s the honest breakdown.

Your carpet isn’t the same as the last person’s

This is the bit that gets missed a lot. Two carpets can look roughly similar and still be completely different jobs. General wear, sun fading, how much foot traffic they’ve had, whether they’ve been cleaned before (and how well), pets, kids, spills that were “cleaned up” with whatever was under the sink at the time — it all changes what the carpet actually needs.

A carpet that’s had a proper maintenance clean every year or so is a different job to one that hasn’t been touched in five. More soiling means more pre-treatment, more time, and sometimes more than one pass to get it right. A quote that doesn’t account for the actual condition of your carpet isn’t really a quote — it’s a guess.

That’s why I always want to see the carpet, or get decent photos and a proper description, before I put a number on it. Anyone quoting you a fixed price over the phone without seeing anything is either padding the number to cover themselves, or hoping the job turns out easier than it looks.

I’m not part of a franchise — and that matters more than people realise

This one doesn’t get talked about much, but it’s worth knowing.

A lot of the bigger names you’ll see advertised are franchises. That means the person turning up at your door is running a franchise territory, and a chunk of what you pay goes back to head office — a percentage of every job, off the top, before the franchisee’s even covered their own costs.

On top of that, franchise pricing is often set centrally. Someone in an office, working from a national pricing model, decides what a “standard” clean costs across the whole country — not based on your carpet, your house, or your area, just a blanket figure designed to work everywhere in general and nowhere in particular.

I’m not part of that. The Clean Mile is just me. There’s no percentage disappearing to a head office, and there’s no national pricing sheet I’m working from. What I quote you is based on your job, in your home, priced by the person who’s actually going to be doing the work — because that person is me.

That’s not a dig at every franchise out there — some do a genuinely good job. But it’s a structural difference that affects your price whether you realise it or not, and I think you should know why the number in front of you is the number it is.

So why do quotes vary?

Put simply: different carpets need different amounts of work, and different businesses are built differently — some with layers of cost baked in before they even get to your door. When I quote a job, you’re paying for the work in front of me, not a national average and not somebody else’s cut.

Want to know what your job would actually cost? Send me some photos and a bit of detail, and I’ll give you a real number — not a guess, and not a franchise formula.

Much love 😘

Russ