Most of the student HMO carpets I get called to in July should be thrown in a skip, and the landlord would be better off financially if I said so on the doorstep rather than after two hours of work.
That’s an odd position for somebody who charges by the room. It comes from watching the same sequence play out for years: a mid-grey contract twist goes down, three cohorts pass through it, and by the fourth summer the money spent on annual cleaning has quietly exceeded what a replacement would have cost.
Count the years left in the carpet. That single number decides the whole argument, and almost nobody does it before picking up the phone.
What Does A Carpet Look Like After Three Student Tenancies?
Different from a family carpet of the same age, in ways that matter to the decision.
Soil levels are roughly what you’d expect and they’re the easy part. What separates a student HMO is the concentration of one-off damage: iron burns in bedrooms, hair dye around desks, a scorch ring where somebody put a saucepan down, candle wax at the skirting, and the marks left by a cheap office chair on castors that has ground a circle through the pile to the backing.
In a six-bed house in New Cross, SE14, I counted nineteen separate damage points across five bedrooms and a hallway. Eleven of them were permanent.
Bathroom-adjacent landings are their own category. Six people sharing one shower produce a landing carpet that’s damp twice a day for three terms, and the tell is a dark band of soil about a metre outside the bathroom door with a stiff, slightly crisp feel to the pile.
Cleaning addresses the soil and does nothing for the other list. A landlord paying three hundred pounds to have the house cleaned and then looking at nineteen marks feels cheated, and they have a point, though the fault sits with the decision rather than the cleaning.
The three failures that end the argument early
Delamination first – pull a corner near the doorway and if the secondary backing separates from the primary in your hand, the carpet is finished, and no amount of restoration work changes that.
Bleach and dye damage second, because it’s colour loss and it needs recolouring per spot, which stops being economic past four or five marks in one room.
Odour third. Anything that’s soaked through to the underlay and sat there for a term needs the underlay up, and once you’re lifting the carpet to replace underlay you’re most of the way to a new floor covering.
How Do You Work Out Whether A Clean Is Worth The Money?
Arithmetic, done once, on the back of the check-out report.
Contract carpet for a student let runs somewhere around twelve to sixteen pounds a square metre fitted with a basic underlay, which puts a typical twelve-square-metre bedroom at roughly a hundred and eighty pounds. Cleaning that room professionally costs between forty-five and sixty. So one clean is about a third of a replacement, and the question becomes how many more summers you expect to get out of it.
Count the years left. Two summers and a clean is money well spent. One summer and you’re buying a slightly better-looking carpet that you’ll be skipping anyway.
The variable people forget is void time. A replacement in a six-bed house takes a day and needs the room empty, and in a summer turnaround that’s free time you have anyway. A replacement in November, when the new regime has left you with one room empty and five occupied, means fitters working around people and a tenant who has to move their belongings.
The four-year rule I use on the phone
Most contract carpet in a student house is finished at four years and struggling at three. So I ask when it went down, and if the answer is four or more I tell the landlord to price a replacement before booking me. About one in five of those conversations ends with no booking, which is the right outcome and costs me a few hundred pounds a summer.
Where the sum flips is wool. A landlord in Kilburn, NW6, had inherited an eighty-twenty wool twist in a house he’d converted, ten years old and still structurally sound because wool is wool. That carpet has been cleaned every summer since and it’ll take another five. Wool nearly always wins this argument, which is inconvenient for anybody trying to fit out a house cheaply, because the carpet that justifies annual cleaning is the one that costs three times as much to buy.
What Can Be Charged To The Outgoing Tenants?
Less than most landlords assume, and the rules are worth knowing before the deposit dispute rather than during it.
Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019 a landlord can’t require tenants to pay for professional cleaning at the end of a tenancy as a term of the agreement. What you can do is claim from the deposit for cleaning needed to return the property to its check-in condition, or for damage beyond fair wear and tear, with evidence.
Evidence means a dated check-in inventory with photographs taken at the start of the tenancy rather than the one before, a check-out report, and an invoice. Adjudicators at the deposit schemes are unimpressed by estimates and by claims for a new carpet where an old one was damaged.
That last point is the one that costs landlords money. A three-year-old carpet with a burn in it doesn’t entitle anybody to a brand-new carpet at the tenants’ expense – the scheme will apportion against the remaining life, so a carpet with two years left of an eight-year life might yield a quarter of the replacement cost at best. Count the years left, again, because the adjudicator certainly will.
What to photograph at check-in, from somebody who reads a lot of these
Photograph each room’s carpet from standing height in daylight, then photograph any existing mark close up with something for scale. Note the fitting date in the inventory. Keep the invoice from the last professional clean. Those four things win more deposit disputes over carpets than any amount of arguing about whose hair dye it was.
How Has The New Tenancy Regime Changed The Summer Turnaround?
Significantly, and the trade is still adjusting.
Since the first of May 2026, assured shorthold tenancies in England have become assured periodic tenancies under the Renters’ Rights Act, fixed terms have gone and Section 21 with them. Student HMOs got a dedicated possession route in Ground 4A, with the possession date needing to fall between the first of June and the thirtieth of September, so the summer window survives in a more procedural form for landlords who serve the right statement before the tenancy starts.
What’s changed on the ground is predictability. Tenants on a periodic tenancy can leave on two months’ notice, so a six-bed house can lose two rooms in February and have them relet by April, and the old model where the entire house empties in the last week of June is no longer something to plan around.
For carpets that means turnaround work spread across the calendar. I’ve cleaned more single bedrooms mid-term this year than in the previous three combined, usually at a week’s notice and usually on a Saturday, and the landlords who cope best are the ones who’ve stopped thinking of the carpet as a house-wide asset and started treating each room as a separate line with its own age and its own replacement date.
A room-by-room register beats a whole-house schedule
A house in Wood Green, N22, keeps a one-page sheet on the back of the meter cupboard door with the fitting date and last clean for each room. It took twenty minutes to make. When a room comes free in November, the answer to clean or replace takes thirty seconds instead of a site visit, and the landlord has stopped replacing five sound carpets to match one bad one.
What Would I Put Down If The House Were Mine?
Hard flooring in the kitchen, the hall and the lounge. Cheap polypropylene loop or a mid-tone flecked twist in the bedrooms, replaced every four years as a running cost rather than an emergency.
Polypropylene takes bleach without losing colour, releases most spills with a solvent and a rinse, and costs so little that replacement is a minor decision. It also means half the stain work I’d otherwise be doing in these houses disappears, and I’m fine with that.
The bit landlords get wrong about cheap carpet
Buying cheap and replacing often is a strategy rather than a failure, and it wants committing to properly. That means keeping a roll end in the loft for patch repairs, fitting with gripper rather than glue so the next replacement is a two-hour job, and accepting that a four-year carpet will look like a four-year carpet in year three. A landlord in Mile End, E1, runs eleven bedrooms across two houses on exactly this basis and spends less per bed per year than the landlord down the road with wool and a five-year refurbishment cycle.
What I’d avoid is a pale anything, a cut pile in a hallway, and the temptation to fit the offcut from a home refurbishment because it was free. A house in Acton, W3, had a very good wool twist in one bedroom, presumably a leftover, and it was the room that gave me the most work and the landlord the most grief.
In the New Cross house the decision went as follows: four bedrooms replaced at just under eight hundred pounds all in, one bedroom and the stairs cleaned for ninety, and the hall stripped back to the original boards by a floor sander in a day. The landlord asked what he should budget for next summer and I told him ninety pounds, which is what it will be, and then another eight hundred in 2030.
A skip in New Cross in July costs more than the cleaning does, and nobody ever puts that in the sum.