Daily cleaning keeps an office presentable. Deep cleaning keeps it healthy. The two get conflated constantly — and the result is usually a space that looks fine at desk height while carpets, vents and upholstery quietly accumulate what the nightly vacuum can't reach.

The honest answer to "how often?" depends on three variables: headcount density, foot traffic from outside, and food. Here's the schedule we run across 2.4 million square feet of managed space.

The baseline: quarterly

For a standard office — under one person per 150 sq ft, limited visitor traffic — a quarterly deep clean holds the line. That covers carpet extraction in traffic lanes, upholstery vacuuming with agitation, high dusting above 6 feet, and a full kitchen degrease.

“If your carpet's traffic lanes are visibly darker than the area under desks, you're not overdue for a deep clean — you're overdue for two.

When to go monthly

Some spaces burn through cleanliness faster. Move to a monthly deep-clean cycle if any of these apply:

• Client-facing floors- Reception, boardrooms and showrooms are judged at handshake distance.

• Dense seating- Above one person per 100 sq ft, soft surfaces load up roughly three times faster.

• Free food programs- Catered lunches move crumbs and grease well beyond the kitchen — into fabric, vents and carpet.

Put it in the contract, not the calendar

The failure mode isn't choosing the wrong frequency — it's leaving deep cleans as ad-hoc extras that get deferred every quarter. Write the cycle into your cleaning contract with named scope and completion dates, and make it show up on the same monthly audit as your daily program. What gets audited gets done.