End of tenancy cleaning law in Scotland.

No. There is no law in Scotland that says a tenant must hire a professional cleaner at the end of a tenancy. The legal duty is narrower and more useful than that: return the property in the same state of cleanliness it was in when you moved in, allowing for fair wear and tear. That standard is set by your check-in inventory, not by anyone's opinion.

Two pieces of law do the work in Scotland. The Rent (Scotland) Act 1984, tightened by the Private Rented Housing (Scotland) Act 2011, makes any charge beyond the rent and the deposit an unlawful premium, which is what a compulsory cleaning fee is. The Tenancy Deposit Schemes (Scotland) Regulations 2011 govern what can come out of your deposit at the end and how a disagreement gets settled. Everything below sits inside those two.

The ban is on fees, not on deductions. If you hand a property back dirtier than the check-in inventory recorded it, your landlord can propose a deduction from the deposit to put it right. That is a claim against your money rather than a bill, and it has to be reasonable, evidenced and proportionate to the work actually needed.

What they cannot do is charge you to leave the property cleaner than you found it, apply a round-number cleaning fee as a matter of course, or bill you for fair wear and tear. If the check-in report describes a kitchen as clean throughout and you return it that way, there is nothing to deduct, whether you did the work yourself or paid someone else to.

Fair wear and tear is the deterioration you would expect from ordinary use over the length of the tenancy: worn carpet in a hallway after three years, faded paint, small scuffs on a wall. It is not a licence to leave grease on a hob or limescale round a shower screen. Adjudicators draw that line every day, and they draw it against the inventory.

Nearly every private let in Scotland started on or after 1 December 2017 is a private residential tenancy under the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016. A PRT is open ended. There is no fixed term and no end date, so nothing expires and nothing rolls over. You end it by giving 28 days notice in writing. A landlord ends it by serving a Notice to Leave citing one of the statutory grounds, and the Tribunal decides. There is no assured shorthold tenancy in Scotland, no Section 21, and no "How to Rent" guide: the Scottish equivalent is the Scottish Government Model Private Residential Tenancy Agreement and its Easy Read Notes, which your landlord has to give you.

Two more Scottish rules are worth knowing at checkout. Every private landlord must be registered with the council, and in Glasgow that is Glasgow City Council; the registration number has to appear in any advert. Every letting agent must be registered too and is bound by the statutory Letting Agent Code of Practice, in force since 31 January 2018 and enforceable at the First-tier Tribunal. The person doing your checkout inspection answers to a statutory code.

This page describes Scotland. We clean across Glasgow, so Scots law is the law our customers are under. England, Wales and Northern Ireland each run different statutes, different deposit caps and different dispute bodies, so do not read across from an English guide. If you are renting elsewhere in the UK, check your own nation's guidance.