How to switch office cleaning companies without a gap in service

Most gaps are an ordering mistake

When an office decides to switch cleaners after a bad week, the instinct is to give notice first and find a replacement second. That order is what leaves an office with overflowing bins on a Monday. Give notice last, after the new company has walked the space, priced a written scope and cleared its paperwork.

A switch runs on three clocks: the old contract's notice window, the new company's WSIB clearance dates, and, since January 2026, the washroom cleaning record every worker can read. The steps below cover each one.

Step 1: Find your notice window first

Read the termination and renewal clause before you do anything else, and diary the deadline. Business contracts in Ontario often renew automatically unless you give written notice 30, 60 or 90 days before the renewal date, and such clauses are generally enforceable between businesses when they are clear and agreed to (MEQ Law, 2025). The same firm warns that missing the window can lock you in for another year at higher rates, and advises tracking the deadline from the contract end date (MEQ Law, 2025).

If there is no written contract or no end date, Ontario courts generally allow either side to end an indefinite agreement on reasonable notice, judged on the facts of each case (Gilbertson Davis LLP, 2021). Get advice rather than guessing a number.

One exception to "give notice last": if the renewal window will close before you have a quote, send the non-renewal notice on time. It ends the contract at its end date, which still leaves room to line up the replacement.

Step 2: Write down what clean means today

Corinne Zudonyi, editor-in-chief of Facility Cleaning Decisions, describes a scope of work as the document listing each task and how often it is done, and notes that building service contractors use it to attach labour and tool costs to each task (Facility Cleaning Decisions, 2026). Without one, two companies quote two different jobs and the cheaper number wins by default.

Walk the office for ten minutes and list what happens nightly, weekly and monthly: bins, washrooms, kitchen, floors, and the touchpoints people use all day. Our nightly office cleaning checklist is a starting template. Note what the current cleaner misses, because that is the part of the scope worth writing most carefully.

Step 3: Walkthrough and written quote before notice

Ask the new company to walk the space with you, after hours if you can, so they see access, alarms and the real state of the kitchen and washrooms. Then ask for a written quote against your scope, task by task and frequency by frequency.

Use the walkthrough to ask how the work is supervised. Staff turnover is a known problem in commercial cleaning: in a 2017 benchmarking study by ISSA and the Building Service Contractors Association International, prepared by Jeff Gardner of Maximum Performance Group and Dr. Shawn Green of Aurora University, 41% of responding contractors reported annual staff turnover of 50% or more (ISSA/BSCAI, 2017). The sample was small and mostly American, 64 firms (three in Canada) with a 4% response rate, but recruiting and keeping good staff ranked as their top challenge.

Step 4: Check the WSIB clearance and the insurance

This step protects your business, and it costs nothing. Under Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, when you hire a contractor in a Schedule 1 industry other than construction, the WSIB can treat you as the employer of the contractor's workers and make you pay their unpaid premiums (Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, s. 141). Services to buildings, which covers cleaning companies, is a Schedule 1 industry (O. Reg. 175/98).

WSIB policy caps that exposure at the labour portion of the contract, and a clearance certificate relieves you of it for the period the clearance is valid (WSIB Operational Policy Manual). Clearances are free, valid for up to 90 days, and most expire on the 20th of February, May, August and November (WSIB). Check at signing, then again each quarter.

Toronto firm Daoust Vukovich LLP uses a landlord hiring a janitorial company as its example of this liability, and points out that the right to recover the money from the contractor may be of limited value if the company is insolvent (Daoust Vukovich LLP, 2017).

For insurance, ask for proof of commercial general liability and ask to be named as an additional insured. A certificate on its own is issued for information and confers no rights on the holder, as insurance consultant Wade Millward explains, though his article describes U.S. certificate forms (Risk Management Magazine, 2021). In Ontario, Law Times reported, in a piece quoting Pallett Valo partner Sudevi Mukherjee-Gothi, that additional-insured disputes often come up in slip-and-fall claims where an occupier hired a maintenance company (Law Times, 2018).

Step 5: Give notice, then run the handover

Now give notice in writing, and set the new start date so the new crew's first night is the night after the old crew's last. That avoids a gap and avoids paying two companies for the same nights.

• List every key, fob and alarm code the old company holds, and collect them on its last night.
• Change the alarm codes the old company used.
• Rekey any lock whose key is unaccounted for.
• Give the new company its keys, codes and your written scope, and confirm who they call if something is wrong.

Keys go missing in ordinary ways: "lost, loaned, stolen, copied or simply not returned," as Cameron Sharpe, a certified protection professional with 30 years in commercial locks and access control, puts it. He recommends keeping a simple log of which keys were issued, to whom and when they came back (Locksmith Ledger, 2022).

Week one: check the touchpoints and the washroom record

Judge the new company on specific surfaces in the first week. In hospital audits led by Dr. Philip Carling of Boston University School of Medicine, checking marked surfaces and giving cleaning staff feedback raised thoroughness from 48% to 77% (Carling et al., 2008).

Ontario gives you a second check. Since January 1, 2026, employers must post a record in or near each washroom they provide, or electronically, showing the date and time of its two most recent cleanings (O. Reg. 480/24). Confirm the new crew fills it in from night one; a skipped night now shows on the wall. The duty covers washrooms the employer provides; in a multi-tenant building where the landlord provides them, ask the property manager who keeps the record.

Because crews change often, repeat the week-one check whenever your regular cleaner changes. At Néa, the walkthrough comes first and the written quote follows within one business day of the visit, and anything missed and reported within 24 hours of a clean gets a return visit at no extra charge.