If you are on a joint tenancy, every housemate is liable for the whole deposit, not just their own share. One person's unwashed bedroom can reduce everyone's return. That single fact should decide how a Nottingham student house approaches moving out, and it is the one most groups discover too late.
The second thing to know is timing. Lenton, Dunkirk, Beeston and the Clifton campus fringe all empty inside about ten days at the end of June. Every cleaning company in the city is committed well before that. This is not a scarcity tactic, it is arithmetic: a few hundred houses want the same three days.
The short version
- Joint and several liability means the group is judged as one. Agree the approach in March, not in June.
- Book three weeks ahead for a late June or July move-out. Two weeks is already too late in Nottingham.
- The check-in inventory is the standard, not a general idea of tidy. Find it before anyone starts cleaning.
- Clean after the last person's furniture has gone, never around it.
- Split the cost equally and pay it from a house pot. Chasing one housemate in September rarely works.
Why joint liability changes the maths
Most student houses in Nottingham are let on a joint assured shorthold tenancy. Everyone signs one agreement, everyone is liable for the whole of it. The deposit is treated the same way: the scheme holds one sum for the property, not six separate amounts.
The practical consequence is that a deduction for a filthy oven comes out of the collective pot. If five people cleaned properly and one did not, the five subsidise the one. There is no mechanism in the deposit scheme to apportion blame between housemates; that is a private matter between you afterwards, and it is a miserable conversation.
Cleaning is the single largest cause of deposit deductions in the UK, at 29.38% of all claims and the top cause for five years running, according to Deposit Protection Service data reported in 2026. It beats damage, decoration and rent arrears every year.
Find the check-in inventory first
Before anyone buys a bottle of anything, find the document you were given when you moved in. You are required to return the property as clean as it was at check-in, allowing for fair wear and tear over the year. You are not required to return it better.
This matters more in student housing than anywhere else, because the stock has usually been let continuously for years and the check-in condition is rarely pristine. If the inventory records the oven as already marked, you are not responsible for making it new. If someone emailed the agent in October to say the shower screen was scaled, dig that email out; it is often decisive.
If there was no check-in inventory at all, that works in your favour. A landlord without a baseline struggles to prove the property was ever cleaner than you left it.
The Nottingham timing problem
Academic tenancies here run to the same calendar. The result is a bottleneck every June that catches out a new cohort each year.
| When you book | What you can expect |
|---|---|
| Early May | Free choice of date and time |
| Late May | Most dates still available |
| First week of June | Limited, and the good slots have gone |
| Mid June | Very little left anywhere in the city |
| Last week of June | Realistically nothing, at any price |
If your check-out is in that window, treat booking as an early-May job alongside sorting your storage and your van.
What actually gets inspected
Inventory clerks in student housing look at the same things every time, and they are rarely the things a group cleans first.
- Inside the oven, including the door glass. The single most cited item in cleaning deductions. Clerks open the door and look through it.
- The washing machine seal. Black mould sits in the fold at the bottom. Nobody has ever cleaned it.
- On top of the kitchen cupboards. A film of grease and dust that has been there since first year.
- Extractor filters. Kitchen and bathroom. Usually never removed.
- Limescale on shower screens and taps. Nottingham water sits at the harder end of the scale, so a year of daily showers leaves a real film. Check your postcode on Severn Trent's water quality checker.
- Behind and under beds and desks. Where a year of dust and lost items collects.
- Bins and the bin store, if they belong to the property.
- The garden or yard, which appears in more inventories than people expect.
Doing it yourself, honestly
It is entirely legitimate, and for a well-kept house it is realistic. Be honest about the hours.
| House | One person | Whole group working |
|---|---|---|
| 4 bed | 14 to 18 hours | A long day |
| 5 bed | 18 to 24 hours | A day and a half |
| 6 bed | 22 to 30 hours | Two days |
Those figures assume the property is empty. Cleaning around one housemate's remaining boxes roughly doubles the effort and misses the surfaces clerks photograph.
The oven alone can absorb two to three hours if it has not been touched all year, and most of that is waiting for caustic cleaner to work rather than scrubbing. Put it on first, then do something else while it works.
Splitting the cost
The arrangement that works, and it is worth agreeing in March:
- Decide early that the house pays for a professional clean, split equally, rather than debating it in June when everyone is stressed and half the group has already left.
- Collect the money into one pot before the end of term. Chasing a housemate who has gone home to another city in September is close to impossible.
- Everyone does their own bedroom to the same standard, ideally checked by someone else in the house.
- Book it for after the last van leaves, and at least a full day before the check-out appointment so anything flagged can be fixed.
- Keep the itemised checklist, not just the invoice. A receipt saying "cleaning" proves you spent money; a checklist proves what was covered, which is the thing in dispute.
For a typical Nottingham student house this lands somewhere between £250 and £450 depending on size and condition, split four to six ways, against a deposit that is usually several thousand pounds across the group.
If a deduction is proposed anyway
Do not agree immediately and do not ignore it. Reply in writing asking for three things: an itemised breakdown, a copy of the check-in inventory, and dated photographs of the specific items claimed for.
Most claims are reduced or dropped at that point, because a round number with no evidence rarely survives a polite request for detail. If you cannot agree, the deposit scheme's dispute service is free to tenants, decided on documents, and the burden of proof sits with the landlord. Schemes generally have time limits, commonly three months from the end of the tenancy, so do not let it drift over the summer.
Ask for the undisputed portion to be released while the rest is decided. There is no reason for six people to be out of pocket on the part nobody disagrees about.
Frequently asked questions
Can the landlord make us pay for professional cleaning? Not as a condition of the tenancy in England. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 stopped that. They can still propose a deposit deduction if the property is dirtier than at check-in, so the standard applies even though the method is your choice.
One housemate has already left and will not pay. What now? The scheme will not apportion between you. Practically, the rest of the group either covers it and pursues it privately, or accepts a deduction that hits everyone. This is exactly why the money should be collected before term ends.
Do we need the carpets done professionally? Only if the tenancy agreement requires it, which is common where pets were kept. Otherwise thorough vacuuming meets the standard, provided the carpets were not professionally cleaned at check-in.
What if we cannot get a slot in June? Ask about the days immediately after your check-out and negotiate a later key return with the agent, or split the job: do the general clean yourselves and pay for the oven and the carpets, which are the two where the equipment gap is widest.
Does the landlord have to give the deposit back within a set time? Deposit schemes require return within ten days of both parties agreeing the amount. If there is no agreement, the dispute process starts instead.
