Moving is stressful enough without losing your deposit over a dirty oven. After years of doing move-out cleans across the Greater Toronto Area, the pattern is always the same: tenants either over-pay for a service they didn't need, or they DIY it, miss the five things landlords actually check, and lose hundreds. Here's how to get it right in 2026.
What landlords and property managers actually inspect
They don't walk in with a white glove looking at everything. They check the same handful of spots every single time: inside the oven, the fridge (including the gaskets and the drip tray), bathroom grout and the toilet base, baseboards and window tracks, and inside every cabinet and closet. If those are clean, you pass. If the oven is greasy, they assume the whole place was neglected and start hunting for reasons to keep your money.
What it costs in 2026
A professional move-out clean in the GTA generally runs from around $269 for a small one-bedroom up to $450-600+ for a larger or heavily lived-in home. The price moves with size, condition, and whether you need extras like inside-cabinet detailing or wall spot-cleaning. Pricing is fairly consistent across the region — you can see the breakdowns for a move-out clean in Toronto, and the same structure holds whether you're in Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke, or out in Mississauga. If you want a firm number for your specific place, it's faster to just get a flat-rate quote than to guess.
DIY or hire it out?
If your place is small and was kept up, a focused DIY day in the order above (oven first, it takes the longest) is very doable. Where people get burned is the bigger or long-neglected unit — that's 5-7 hours of real work, and halfway through most people give up and call someone anyway, now under deadline and paying a premium. If your time is worth more than about $25 an hour, hiring it out for a few hundred dollars usually pays for itself before you even count the deposit you protect.
The one timing rule that matters
Do the clean after the place is empty, not while boxes are still everywhere. Cleaning around furniture and bins guarantees you miss spots, and missed spots are exactly what cost you the deposit. Empty first, clean last, hand over the keys. For a fuller picture of cleaning costs across services, this GTA cleaning cost guide is a useful reference before you book anything.
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