The clerk is in the flat for somewhere between forty minutes and two hours, and roughly a fifth of that time goes on the floors. I’ve stood in enough hallways waiting for one to finish before I could get the machine in that I’ve watched the routine develop into something close to a fixed liturgy. Wide shot from the doorway. Two corners. Down on one knee at the threshold strip. Then the tape measure comes out and things start getting written down in a vocabulary that will decide whether you keep £180 of your deposit.
Most tenants have never read their check-in report. That single fact costs more money at the end of London tenancies than anything a cleaning contractor can put right.
What is the clerk comparing your carpet against?
Nothing in the check-out report means anything on its own. A photograph of a stain proves a stain exists on the day of check-out; it proves nothing about who put it there. The document that carries the weight is the check-in inventory, and the check-out is only ever read alongside it.
Deposit scheme adjudicators – TDS and the DPS between them hold most London deposits – work by comparison. They want a dated check-in condition schedule, ideally signed or acknowledged by the tenant, and a check-out done to the same standard. Where the check-in is thin, the landlord loses. I’ve seen a claim for a full carpet replacement in a Leytonstone maisonette collapse because the check-in entry for the whole first floor read “carpet: beige, condition fair” with a single photograph taken from the top of the stairs.
Why the check-in report decides everything
Read yours in the first week, and photograph anything it has missed. If the check-in says “light soiling to traffic areas” and the check-out says the same, you owe nothing regardless of how the carpet looks in absolute terms. If the check-in says “professionally cleaned, no visible marks” then you have a ceiling to get back to, and that’s a very different job with a very different invoice attached.
The clock changed on this in May 2026, when assured shorthold tenancies became assured periodic ones under the Renters’ Rights Act. Check-outs no longer cluster neatly at the end of a fixed twelve months; they happen whenever notice runs out. Deposit protection rules themselves haven’t shifted, but the practical effect is that people are now moving out with three or four weeks’ warning rather than three months, and there’s less time to sort the floors.
How does a clerk photograph a carpet, room by room?
There’s a sequence, and it barely varies between firms.
Wide establishing shot from the door with the flash off, so the natural light rakes across the pile and shows up flattening. Then the four corners, usually including a bit of skirting for orientation. Then the traffic lane down the middle of the room, shot along its length rather than across it, because along the lane is where wear reads worst. Under the bed and behind the wardrobe get a photograph each once the furniture has gone, and those are the ones that catch moth damage nobody knew about. Stairs get shot from the bottom looking up, then each nosing individually if there’s fraying.
Close-ups come last, and they come with a reference object. A tape measure, a pound coin, sometimes a clerk’s own pen laid alongside the mark. Nine jobs in ten where a deduction gets successfully challenged, it’s because the close-up photographs had no scale in frame and no wide shot tying them to a location, so the adjudicator couldn’t tell whether they were looking at a two-centimetre mark or a dinner plate.
Where the measurements go
Marks get located against fixed points. “Circular stain approx. 60mm diameter, 1.4m from bay window wall, 0.8m from radiator.” That form of words exists so the same mark can be found again a year later, and it’s also why a stain the tenant removed themselves can still be argued about – the clerk’s note describes a position, and if there’s a faint ring at that position in the check-out photographs, the position is what’s on trial.
Which carpet defects get written down, and in what words?
This is where the money lives. The vocabulary is narrow and it repeats, so learn it.
Soiling is graded light, moderate or heavy, and it’s the most common entry by a distance. “Heavy soiling to traffic areas” is the phrase that triggers a cleaning deduction. It varies by clerk to a degree that ought to embarrass the industry. The same hallway carpet on Churchfield Road in Acton was described as “moderate” by one firm and “requires professional clean” by another, eleven months apart, with nothing having happened in between except two winters’ worth of feet.
Staining gets a colour word and dimensions to the nearest ten millimetres, plus a shape if the shape is odd enough to be worth describing. Clerks are trained not to guess at the substance, so you get “dark brown staining, irregular, approx. 200 x 150mm” rather than “coffee”, which matters because it leaves the cause open.
Watermarking describes the pale-edged tidemarks left when something wet dried in place, and it’s a separate entry from staining because it’s often removable by us and often isn’t caused by the tenant at all – a radiator valve weeping over eighteen months produces textbook watermarking.
Pile flattening and shading. Shading, sometimes called pooling or pile reversal, is the light and dark patchwork you get in plush carpets where the pile has permanently changed direction. It looks exactly like a damp patch. It cannot be cleaned out or brushed back, and it’s a manufacturing characteristic of cut-pile carpet rather than a defect. Clerks who log it as staining are common, and a good adjudicator will throw the entry out if you say the word shading in your response.
Indentation from furniture feet, usually noted with the room’s layout so it’s clear what caused it. Fair wear in almost every case.
Burns, snags, tears, seam separation, moth damage, fraying at door thresholds where the gripper rod has started to show. These are damage entries and they attach to the tenant unless the check-in already records them.
Odour. Clerks write “strong pet odour noted” and cannot photograph it, which makes it one of the weakest claims to bring and one of the most frequently brought. In a Brockley flat off Wickham Road I once dealt with a claim built entirely on a smell that turned out to be a mouldy under-sink cupboard two rooms away.
Where fair wear and tear stops
A hallway carpet in a four-year London tenancy is meant to look four years old. Adjudicators apply lifespan tables – medium-quality carpet is generally treated as having a useful life of somewhere around five to ten years – and they apportion. A landlord who wants a new carpet after seven years is asking a tenant to fund an upgrade, and schemes call that betterment and refuse it. What tenants get charged for successfully is the clean itself, at invoice cost, with the landlord expected to produce the invoice.
What gets blamed on tenants that isn’t their doing?
Here’s the one I’ll argue with anybody about.
Filtration lines along the skirting
Those dark grey lines that appear along skirting boards and under doors are filtration soiling. Air is pushed through the carpet pile at the edges by pressure differences between the room and the void beneath, and the pile filters fine airborne particulates out of it – cooking soot, candle carbon, brake dust off the South Circular, the lot. The carpet is doing the job an air filter does, and the deposit is filtration in reverse.
They appear in nine jobs in ten in Victorian conversions with suspended timber floors and gappy floorboards, which describes an enormous slice of the Greater London rental stock. They are a building defect. They have nothing to do with hoovering, and no amount of tenant diligence prevents them.
Clerks record them as “heavy soiling to perimeters” and landlords deduct for them constantly. Every one of those deductions should be contested. I’ll take the work when it’s offered, and I can usually shift eighty per cent of a filtration line with a solvent-based pre-treatment and a lot of patience – but the tenant shouldn’t be paying for it, and I say so on the phone before I quote.
What should you do in the fortnight before check-out?
Photograph everything yourself, in daylight, with the rooms empty. Do it before you move the furniture out if you can, then again after. Timestamped phone photographs are accepted evidence and they cost nothing. Shoot each room from the doorway and from the opposite corner, then close in on anything the check-in already recorded, so your set mirrors the clerk’s.
Deal with spot marks early rather than on the last night, because a fresh spill lifts and a six-month-old one has oxidised into the fibre and often won’t. And leave the carpets dry – a clerk arriving to damp carpet will note it, and damp on a check-out report reads as concealment whether or not anything was concealed.
Where the receipts matter
Keep the invoice. Since the Tenant Fees Act 2019 a landlord can’t require you to buy a professional clean as a term of the tenancy, only to return the property as clean as it was at check-in, so your invoice is evidence of standard rather than compliance with a clause.
Which leads to the part that loses me bookings. If your check-in report says “fair, light soiling throughout” and your carpet is still fair with light soiling, don’t book us. A hired machine from the shop on Dyne Road and an afternoon will meet the standard, and you’ll be £130 up. Ring us when the check-in says “as new” – nine jobs in ten, that’s the tenancy where a professional invoice pays for itself twice over.
The clerk photographs the threshold strip first. Look at yours now.