Everyone asks this, and the honest answer is that it depends on far fewer things than people expect. Not the size of the home, mostly. What actually sets the frequency is how many people live there, how much of the day they are in it, whether there are pets or small children, and how much outside comes in on shoes.
Weekly suits a full household — a family with children, two or more people working from home, or anywhere with a dog. In those homes a week is roughly how long it takes for the kitchen and bathrooms to go from clean to needing real work rather than a wipe. Stretch it to a fortnight and each visit has to spend its first hour catching up, which means less of it goes on the things you actually wanted done.
Bi-weekly is the most popular plan we run, and for good reason. A couple, a small family with school-age children, or anyone out of the house most of the day generally finds a fortnight holds fine, especially with a bit of surface tidying in between. It is also the point where the price per visit stops being the deciding factor and the result starts being consistent — the home never fully slides back, so every visit is spent maintaining rather than recovering.
Monthly works for one or two people in a home that is not heavily used: no pets, no small children, out at work all day. Be realistic about it though. A month is long enough for bathrooms and kitchens to need genuine scrubbing, so a monthly visit is a longer visit, and it is worth pairing with a deep clean once or twice a year rather than expecting the monthly to absorb everything.
A few things push any household up a tier. Pets, obviously — hair and dander move the floors and soft furnishings from a weekly job to a constant one. Small children, for the same reason plus the kitchen. Allergies or asthma in the house, where dust is not cosmetic. Open-plan layouts, where cooking grease travels further than people think. And street-level entrances in a city, where far more comes in on shoes than in a house with a driveway.
One suggestion that saves people money: rather than picking a frequency in the abstract, start with a deep clean and a single regular visit, then look at the state of the house two weeks later. That tells you more than any calculator. If it still looks good, fortnightly is your answer. If the kitchen and bathrooms have already gone, go weekly. And if you are somewhere in between, ask us — we would rather put you on the cheaper plan and be right than on the dearer one and be resented.
Nissi's Cleaning Service runs weekly, bi-weekly and monthly plans across Yonkers, Westchester County, the Bronx, New York City and lower Connecticut. Recurring plans are priced below one-off visits — call (914) 226-7822 for a free quote.