Salon Cleaning Checklist: Daily, Weekly and Monthly, and What a Council Inspection Covers

Written by Iva, founder of Iva Cleaning Services London.

A salon gets dirty in a particular way. Hair settles everywhere, including places you do not look. Colour splashes on the backwash and the floor around it. Product builds up as a film on every surface near a hairdryer. Steam from a treatment room carries moisture into the walls. And all of this happens in front of clients who are sitting still, under bright lights, for an hour, with nothing to do but notice.

This checklist is organised by frequency: what a salon needs at the end of every day, every week and every month, plus the items a local authority inspection concentrates on. It is the schedule we build salon cleaning in London contracts around, so the daily list is what your team does and the weekly and monthly lists are what a contractor does out of hours.

Daily (end of each day, 30 to 45 minutes)

Styling stations

• Sweep and vacuum hair from the floor around every chair, including under the chair base and along the skirting.
• Wipe the chair seat, back and arms with a disinfectant safe for vinyl or leather. Hydraulic bases and footrests too; hair sticks to the oil on the pump.
• Wipe the station surface, the mirror and the mirror frame. Product haze on a mirror shows under the lights.
• Empty and wipe the trolley trays. Wipe hairdryer bodies and cord.
• Clean and disinfect combs, brushes, clips and sectioning tools. Scissors and razors as per your sterilisation routine, not the cleaner’s.

Backwash area

• Clean the basins inside and out, including the underside of the rim and the neck rest. Remove hair from the plughole trap.
• Descale taps and spray heads if there is visible scale; in London’s hard water that is weekly at the least.
• Wipe the chair and the floor around it, where water and colour land.
• Wash and dry towels at 60°C. Capes wiped or washed.

Colour bar and dispensary

• Wipe the mixing surface, scales and bowls. Rinse bowls and brushes and leave to dry.
• Check the floor for tint drips before they set. Our guide on removing hair dye stains covers the ones that did.

Reception, waiting area and retail

• Vacuum, wipe the desk, the card machine, the door handles and the retail shelf fronts.
• Wipe the seating. Straighten magazines, empty the bin.

Toilets, kitchen and bins

• Toilet, basin, taps, mirror, floor, bin. Restock paper and soap.
• Staff kitchen surfaces and sink. All bins emptied and liners replaced; colour waste and sharps in the right containers.

Weekly (out of hours, 2 to 3 hours)

• Full floor clean: move the chairs, vacuum and mop edge to edge, including behind the backwash units where hair collects in a damp mat.
• Descale all basins, taps and spray hoses properly. Soak the spray heads in descaler.
• Degrease and wipe all station surfaces, trolley trays and drawers inside.
• Wash the walls around the backwash and the colour bar at hand height.
• Clean the inside of windows and the door glass, and the window display.
• Dust light fittings, shelves and the tops of mirrors; dust and hairspray combine into a sticky felt.
• Deep clean the toilets, including the base, the hinges and the wall behind.
• Vacuum upholstered seating in the waiting area.
• Launder all towels; check the washing machine seal and drawer for mould.

Monthly (half a day)

• Machine-scrub or deep mop hard floors; shampoo any carpeted waiting area. Hair and product build a film on vinyl flooring that a mop pushes around.
• Clean the extraction and ventilation grilles, and the air conditioning filters.
• Wipe every wall from floor to ceiling in the colour and backwash zones.
• Professionally clean the styling and waiting chairs; fabric chairs by hot water extraction, vinyl with a conditioning cleaner. This is the job most salons skip and clients notice first.
• Clean the inside of all cupboards and the dispensary shelving.
• Check and clean behind and under all fixed units, the fridge, and the staff kitchen appliances.
• External signage, fascia and the shopfront.

Treatment rooms (beauty, nails, brows, massage)

Treatment rooms follow the daily list plus their own rules: couch wiped and re-covered between every client, equipment sterilised per your protocol, wax pots and warmers cleaned weekly, nail dust extracted and the desk cleaned at the end of each day, and the floor mopped daily rather than vacuumed because of dust and product. Steam and hot-towel rooms need the walls and ceiling wiped weekly for condensation and the extractor checked monthly.

Products, COSHH and where the bottles live

A salon already handles chemicals all day, so the cleaning products are one more set to control. Keep a COSHH data sheet for every cleaning product on the premises in the same folder as the colour and treatment sheets; an officer will ask for them together. Store cleaning chemicals in a locked or high cupboard away from the retail shelf and the client areas, never under the backwash where a client’s bag sits. Never mix a bleach-based product with a descaler or anything acidic, which in a salon is an easy mistake because both are in use at the basins. Use the right product for the surface: vinyl conditioner on chairs, a pH-neutral cleaner on sealed floors, a non-abrasive cream on porcelain. And label decanted spray bottles with the contents and the dilution, because an unlabelled bottle of clear liquid at a hair station is exactly what an inspector photographs.

What a council inspection covers

Hairdressing itself is not licensed in England, but most salons in the capital offer treatments that are. Under the London Local Authorities Act 1991, London boroughs license “special treatments”, which include massage, manicure, waxing, piercing, tattooing, electrolysis and most beauty treatments, and the licence comes with conditions on hygiene, waste, ventilation and sterilisation that an officer can inspect. Environmental health officers can also visit any salon under health and safety law.

What they look at, in practice:

• Whether surfaces are smooth, impervious and cleanable: cracked laminate, worn vinyl and bare wood are noted.
• Hand-washing facilities with hot water, soap and a way to dry, separate from the backwash.
• Sterilisation of tools and the records for it; single-use items actually single-use.
• Clean towels and couch covers for each client, and where used ones are stored.
• Waste: colour waste, sharps and clinical waste in the right containers with a collection contract.
• Ventilation and extraction, particularly in nail bars and colour areas.
• Toilets clean and stocked.
• A written cleaning schedule that matches what they can see.

That last point is why the schedule above is worth printing. An inspector who sees a daily, weekly and monthly plan on the wall, and a salon that looks like the plan is followed, has most of their questions answered. A clean salon with no plan gets more questions than a plan with a tick sheet.

Dividing the work

The daily list belongs to the team; it is thirty to forty-five minutes at close and it keeps the salon presentable. The weekly and monthly lists are where a contractor earns their fee: floors done properly with the chairs moved, descaling done with the right products, chairs cleaned by extraction rather than wiped, and all of it out of hours so no client sees a mop. For a typical two-to-six-chair salon that is one evening visit a week plus a longer monthly one. The same approach applies to an office cleaning in London contract, where daily is the team’s job and the deep work is ours.

Want the weekly and monthly lists taken off your team? Get a free quote and we come back within one working hour with a fixed price.