Quick answer: An Edinburgh checkout inspection is a room by room comparison of the flat against the check-in inventory, run by the letting agent or landlord around your move out date. Under a Private Residential Tenancy you give 28 days' written notice, so the inspection sits inside that window. The inspector marks two things: anything worse than the check-in record once fair wear and tear is allowed for, and anything left dirty. Oven interiors, extractor filters, the insides of kitchen units, bathroom sealant, sash and case window runners and the tops of wardrobes are where the money goes. Your deposit sits with SafeDeposits Scotland, Letting Protection Service Scotland or MyDeposits Scotland, lodged within 30 working days and capped at 2 months' rent, and any deduction you challenge is decided on the evidence both sides file. A full clean from us runs from £149 for a studio to £259 for a 3-bed, about £86 each shared three ways.
What is a checkout inspection, and who runs it?
The checkout is the final walk round. Someone opens every door, lifts every appliance shelf, and records the condition of the flat against what the check-in report said the day you got the keys. That report and its photographs are the only baseline a deposit scheme looks at later.
Edinburgh is unusual in how professionalised this has become. Much of the city's 55,000 private rented households (Scotland's Census 2022, Scotland's highest private rented share) sits with agents rather than a landlord doing their own paperwork. Umega works across Marchmont, Newington and the Southside. Cullen Property anchors the west corridor through Gorgie, Dalry and Polwarth. Clan Gordon and Grant Property both carry HMO-certified stock. King Sisters Lettings covers the Easter Road and Leith corridor, and Pure Property Management holds flats on Bonnington Road in EH6 and Gorgie Road in EH11.
These are active agents in the city, not firms we work for. An agent running hundreds of changeovers a year inspects to a written standard, which is harder to charm and easier to prepare for.
How does a Private Residential Tenancy change the timing?
Almost every Edinburgh tenancy signed since 1 December 2017 is a Private Residential Tenancy under the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016. A PRT is open-ended, with no fixed end date to count back from.
You end it with 28 days' written notice under section 49(3) of the 2016 Act. A different period is valid only if agreed in writing after the tenancy became a PRT, so a longer clause in what you signed on day one does not bind you. mygov.scot advises 2 extra days if you send notice by post or email.
The agent will usually propose the checkout for the last day or the morning after, so work backwards from the inspection, not from the van.
Book the clean the same week your notice goes in. Twenty eight days sounds generous until you are also packing and working. From late June to September the Edinburgh diary tightens hard, and the last slot before a checkout often goes a fortnight ahead.
Why is the check-in inventory the yardstick?
The inspector is not judging the flat against a show home. They are judging it against a document. If the check-in report photographed a scuffed skirting, that scuff is not yours. If it recorded the oven as clean and the oven now has carbonised grease on the door glass, that is a deduction.
So the first job at checkout has nothing to do with cleaning. Find the check-in report and note what it already flagged. People routinely pay for marks logged before they moved in.
Fair wear and tear is the second filter. It covers what you would expect from ordinary living: carpet flattened along the walking line, paintwork gone dull, a worn stair nosing in a top floor tenement. It does not cover dirt. Grease, limescale, mould, dust and pet hair are never wear and tear, because they come from not cleaning rather than from living somewhere.
What order does the inspector walk the flat in?
Kitchen first, bathroom second, then bedrooms, living room, hall, and finally your door and the shared stair. Those first two rooms carry most of the deduction risk, so an inspector running late still covers the expensive ones properly.
| Order | Room | What gets opened or lifted |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kitchen | Oven, extractor filter, fridge seals, inside every unit, under the sink |
| 2 | Bathroom | Sealant, shower screen, tap bases, plugholes, behind the pedestal |
| 3 | Bedrooms | Tops of wardrobes, inside drawers, mattress, window runners |
| 4 | Living room | Skirtings, carpet edges, light fittings, sash sills |
| 5 | Hall | Tops of door frames, meter cupboard, the walking line |
| 6 | Entrance and stair | Your door, your section of common stair, bin store |
That order tells you where to spend the last hour. Our Edinburgh cleaning checklist follows the same sequence.
What gets checked in the kitchen?
The oven sets the tone. The inspector opens the door, looks at the inner glass, pulls the shelves, checks the runners and lifts the grill pan. Carbonised deposit on the base and brown film on the glass get written down almost every time. Our oven cleaning guide covers the method that shifts baked-on carbon, and an oven deep clean is £55 as an add-on.
Extractor filters collect a grey grease that dries hard, and almost nobody touches them during a tenancy. Remove, degrease, dry, refit.
Every cupboard and drawer is opened, and the inspector is looking inside rather than at the doors. Crumbs, dried spills and the ring left by an oil bottle all get marked. Under the sink is its own category: the base beneath a weeping trap collects a dark residue that reads as damage rather than dirt.
Freestanding appliances get pulled forward, because behind the fridge and under the washing machine is where a year of dropped food and pet hair lives. Fridge and freezer get their own line: defrosted, seals cleaned, drawers washed. We charge £25 for those and £19 for other white goods.
What gets checked in the bathroom?
Edinburgh runs on soft water, 30 to 31 mg/l as calcium carbonate from Scottish Water's Glencorse works, which matters because most national cleaning advice is written for hard-water England. Scale here is thin. It forms on shower screens, tap spouts and around the plughole, and lifts with far less work.
The real marks are soap scum and sealant. Soft water and soap leave a dull grey film across glass and tile, and because it is not chalky a limescale product does nothing to it. Black spotting in the silicone between bath and tile is mould, and an inspector will photograph it. Light mould cleans off, established staining inside the silicone does not.
The rest is short and specific: extractor vent free of dust, plugholes clear of hair, tap bases clean where they meet the basin, the cistern top, and behind the toilet pedestal, the most skipped spot in any flat.
A shower screen you can see through beats a scrubbed floor. Inspectors photograph glass, because glass shows dirt in a picture and a floor does not. With twenty minutes left, spend them on the screen, the taps and the sealant.
What do agents check on windows and woodwork?
Most flats in the rental belt (Marchmont, Bruntsfield, Newington, Tollcross, Leith Walk, Gorgie and Dalry) are 19th century tenements with original sash and case windows. A sash window has a runner channel each side, and that channel collects dust, flaking paint and dead insects.
Check-in photographs usually show those runners clean, because the flat was prepared before you moved in. So a channel packed with grit is a mark against you. Vacuum both channels with a crevice tool, wipe them, then do the sills. Cast iron radiators sit under those windows in most tenements and the gap behind holds the same debris.
Woodwork is the companion category: tops of door frames, tops of skirtings, the picture rail where a room has one. Nobody dusts a door frame during a tenancy and every inspector runs a finger along one.
Which spots get missed in the bedrooms and hall?
The tops of wardrobes are the classic. A freestanding wardrobe under a high tenement ceiling is invisible from the floor and holds thick dust, and inspectors carry a step or raise a phone camera. Inside drawers and wardrobe bases come next. Mattresses are checked for staining, and a protector listed on the inventory needs to still be there.
In the hall it is the carpet along the walking line and the meter or storage cupboard. That cupboard is where the vacuum, the mop bucket and a bag of unsorted stuff ends up on moving day, and leaving it full turns a clean flat into a failed checkout. Where carpets have taken a year of shared living, shampooing is £35 per room and £25 for the hall, stairs and landing. We shampoo, because a soaked carpet in a ground floor flat in October will not dry before the inspection.
What is different about an HMO checkout?
Edinburgh holds 6,797 licensed HMOs, 44% of Scotland's entire licensed stock (gov.scot Housing Statistics 2025). Nothing else in the country is close. If you share a flat in Marchmont, Polwarth, Gorgie or the Leith Walk corridor, this is probably you, and three things change.
The licensing standard means the flat must come back fit for the licence to keep working, so agents with HMO books inspect communal areas as closely as bedrooms. Second, a joint tenancy means a joint deposit: the scheme holds one sum for the flat, so one flatmate's wrecked room comes out of everyone's money and no adjudicator will apportion blame. Third, shared space belongs to nobody, so nobody cleans it.
Agree the clean before you agree who packs the van. One person paying and four arguing afterwards is the commonest way a shared flat loses money. Split it the day notice goes in. Our 3-bed price of £259 is about £86 each across three tenants, less than one contested deduction.
Shared flats are much of what we do, and the student cleaning page covers flats where four people leave on four different days.
What happens to your deposit when an inspection fails?
Your deposit is not held by the landlord. It must be lodged with one of three approved Scottish schemes: SafeDeposits Scotland, Letting Protection Service Scotland or MyDeposits Scotland. The deadline is 30 working days from the start of the tenancy, and the deposit is capped at 2 months' rent.
At the end of the tenancy the landlord or agent proposes a repayment. Agree it and the money is released. Disagree and the scheme's free adjudication takes over: an independent adjudicator reads both submissions and decides, with no solicitor needed.
If the deposit was never lodged, that is a separate and more serious matter. You can apply to the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland (Housing and Property Chamber), which can order the landlord to pay you up to 3 times the deposit.
Cleaning is consistently reported as one of the leading causes of deposit deductions in Scotland. We will not attach a percentage to that, because no scheme publishes a reliable one. The practical answer sits on our deposit back page.
What evidence wins a deposit adjudication?
Adjudicators decide on documents, not on who sounded more reasonable. The tenant with a file wins.
Four things carry weight. The check-in report with its dated photographs, which fixes the starting condition. Your own dated photographs from the day you handed the keys back, in daylight, showing whole rooms rather than close ups. Receipts, because a paid invoice proves the work was commissioned and shows what it covered. And any written exchange with the agent about condition during the tenancy.
This is where a professional clean earns its keep beyond the cleaning. Every job we do comes with a timestamped photo record of the finished flat and an itemised receipt naming the rooms and add-ons covered, so a proposed oven deduction meets a dated photograph of that oven, clean, and an invoice line saying oven deep clean. Our 48-hour re-clean guarantee covers the rest: if the agent flags something within two days, we come back and put it right.
Which deductions come up most, and how do you stop each one?
The marks that recur on Edinburgh checkout reports, in inspection order.
| What gets marked | Why it fails | How to prevent it |
|---|---|---|
| Oven interior and door glass | Carbonised grease will not wipe off | Shelves, runners and inner glass, or the £55 add-on |
| Extractor filter | Never touched, so it is original grease | Remove, degrease, dry, refit |
| Insides of units and drawers | Every one is opened | Empty, vacuum, wipe with a degreaser |
| Behind and under appliances | They get pulled forward | Clean the floor and wall behind |
| Fridge and freezer | Ice, residue, stale smell | Defrost a day ahead, wash seals and drawers |
| Bathroom sealant | Black spotting reads as mould | Treat spotting when it appears |
| Shower screen and taps | Soap scum shows in photos | Mild acidic cleaner and a squeegee |
| Sash and case runners | Grit against a clean check-in photo | Crevice tool along both channels |
| Tops of door frames and wardrobes | Invisible from standing height | A damp cloth and a step |
| Carpet along the walking line | Flattening is wear, staining is not | Shampoo at £35 per room, £25 hall and stairs |
Why is the summer changeover so tight?
Edinburgh student HMO tenancies mostly run to the end of June or early July, with the new intake arriving in August and September. About 62,000 full-time students study in the city and roughly 27,000 live in shared private flats and other HMOs, per the universities' joint Student Living report. That packs thousands of changeovers into a ten week window.
Two things follow. Your preferred date goes first, so book as soon as notice is in. And an agent inspecting six flats in a day has less patience for a borderline result.
If you have left it late, book by 12 noon and we can usually fit you in the same day, with no surcharge when a crew has a free slot. Where booked jobs must move, an additional charge applies and it is quoted before you book, never added after. Detail on the same day page.
Outside the student belt the pattern flattens: Gorgie and Dalry turn over year round and Leith runs studios through to six bed HMOs, while Marchmont and Polwarth follow the academic calendar.
What does it cost to pass first time?
Prices are fixed by size, not by the hour, so you have the figure before anyone starts.
| Property | Price |
|---|---|
| Studio | £149 |
| 1-bed | £179 |
| 2-bed | £219 |
| 3-bed | £259 |
| 4-bed | £299 |
| 5+ bed | from £349 |
Add-ons: oven deep clean £55, fridge and freezer £25, other white goods £19, pet surcharge £20, carpet shampoo £35 per room and £25 for hall, stairs and landing.
For context, local independents in Edinburgh advertise from around £150, national brands from about £235, and the Checkatrade cost guide puts the UK average at £260. Full breakdown in the Edinburgh cost guide and on the pricing page. Landlords and agents: see the landlord page. The quote form takes about a minute.
FAQ
Do I have to be there for the checkout inspection? No, and many Edinburgh agents prefer an empty flat. Attend if you can, because you can point at the check-in report on the spot. Otherwise email the agent your own dated photographs the day you hand the keys back.
How much notice do I have to give in Scotland? Twenty eight days in writing, under section 49(3) of the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016. A longer period applies only if you agreed it in writing after the tenancy became a PRT. mygov.scot advises 2 extra days for post or email.
Can my landlord insist on a professional clean? A clause demanding one regardless of condition is not enforceable in the way landlords sometimes suggest. The enforceable standard is that the flat comes back as clean as the check-in report recorded it, allowing for fair wear and tear.
Where is my deposit actually held? With SafeDeposits Scotland, Letting Protection Service Scotland or MyDeposits Scotland, lodged within 30 working days of the tenancy start and capped at 2 months' rent. All three let you check online that it is there.
What if my landlord never protected the deposit? Apply to the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland (Housing and Property Chamber). It can order the landlord to pay you up to 3 times the deposit, separately from any argument about cleaning.
Does limescale matter in Edinburgh? Edinburgh's water is soft, 30 to 31 mg/l as calcium carbonate from Scottish Water's Glencorse works, so scale is light. The film on your shower screen is more likely soap scum.
One flatmate has left the place in a state. Am I liable? On a joint tenancy, in practice yes. The deposit is one sum for the flat and the scheme will not divide blame between tenants. Settle it before the checkout, not after the deduction lands.
What if the agent is not satisfied after we have cleaned? Tell us within 48 hours and we return and re-clean the item at no cost. That is why we log a timestamped photo record of every finished flat.
Are you insured and checked? Yes. Our cleaners are DBS-checked and we carry £1m public liability cover. We hold 5.0 across 50+ Google and Bark reviews.
Sources and official bodies
- Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 (the PRT, and the 28 day notice at section 49)
- mygov.scot: ending a private residential tenancy
- mygov.scot: tenancy deposits
- SafeDeposits Scotland
- First-tier Tribunal for Scotland, Housing and Property Chamber
- gov.scot: housing statistics and HMO licensing
- Scotland's Census 2022
- Scottish Water: water quality and hardness