Cleaning the house can seem like a never-ending job. What’s more, it can feel like you spend too much time (or not enough) cleaning if the day-to-day jobs start piling up and you don’t have your own house cleaners.

So, how many hours a day should you spend cleaning? That’s what we’ll discuss below, so read on to find out.

How Many Hours a Day Should You Clean Your House?

The exact number of hours will vary depending on factors such as the size of your house, your family dynamics, and your personal cleaning preferences.

However, the short answer is that you should aim to spend no more than an hour cleaning your house on a weekday. Very few people like cleaning, and it’s the last thing you want to do after being at work all day.

To clarify, cleaning the house includes (in this context, at least):

  • Hoovering and mopping
  • Dusting
  • Cleaning specific rooms

It doesn’t include jobs such as washing up or tidying away kids’ mess, as these are things that are generally done daily anyway.

How to Break Down Your Cleaning Time

There are a few ways to break down the time you spend cleaning. How long you spend on tasks will change, but some options include:

Big Weekend Cleans

If you don’t want to clean every day, save most of it for the weekend. It’s an opportunity to get everyone in the family involved, provided you’re all around. Alternatively, you could blitz out larger cleaning jobs while the kids are at weekend clubs.

Pros:

  • Saves you having to spend lots of time cleaning throughout the week
  • Shares the load between family members

Cons

  • Risks losing most of a day at the weekend to cleaning

Individual Room Cleans

If you want to break the cleaning up throughout the week, doing a room each day is a good way to space it out. For example, you could clean the living room on Monday, the bathroom on Tuesday, etc.

Aim to get each room down to a maximum of 1 hour’s cleaning time. With a bit of practice (and regular cleaning) this should be entirely possible.

Pros

  • Spreads the workload out across the week
  • Saves you having to devote a whole day at the weekend

Cons

  • Can be a lot of effort after a day of work
  • Doesn’t factor in cooking, washing up, putting the kids to bed, etc.

20/10 Rule

The 20/10 rule involves 20-minute bursts of cleaning with 10-minute breaks in between. In theory, it makes cleaning jobs more manageable and means you don’t end up losing your evening to an in-depth cleaning job.

You’ll need to break larger jobs, such as cleaning the living room, down into smaller ones. For example, cleaning the living room involves:

  • Dusting
  • Hoovering
  • Straightening the sofa
  • Cleaning windows

Each of these jobs is fairly small, so do one and then take a break. If you’re feeling energetic, you could do the whole room in this way in an evening.

Pros

  • Makes cleaning feel more manageable
  • Ideal for tackling the job if you’re tired

Cons

  • It could take longer to do it this way than just doing the whole room in one go

Tips for Minimising Cleaning Time

An hour of cleaning a day might seem like too much, or it might not sound like enough. Below are some tips for making it work in your home:

1. Don’t aim for perfection. Do things little and often to keep everything tidy, and then focus on a bigger clean at the weekend.

2. Try grouping tasks together that use the same products. For example, do all your dusting in one go.

3. Aim for consistency. Doing the same task at the same time each week will make it feel more manageable.

4. Focus on the most impactful jobs. For example, hoovering and mopping a messy floor will be more noticeable than removing a week’s worth of dust.

Final Thoughts

Unless you live in a mansion, you probably don’t need to do an hour of cleaning every day. However, setting aside this time around your other jobs at least means you can take care of anything that needs doing. Having a dedicated cleaning hour should keep things more manageable and stop the larger jobs spilling over into your precious weekend!