Condo common area cleaning checklist
A resident forms an opinion of the building four times before they reach their own door: the entry glass, the lobby floor, the elevator cab, and the corridor outside their unit. This checklist follows that path in order, with the specific pass and fail criteria at each stop.
Condo common areas fail differently from commercial space. An office tenant sees the same twenty square metres every day and notices decline slowly. A resident walks the entire public route of the building twice a day, often carrying something, often in poor light, and notices everything at close range. Hand marks on glass, a smear on a stainless elevator panel, a lint line along the corridor baseboard: none of these would register in a warehouse and all of them generate emails here.
The checklist is grouped by that route rather than by cleaning discipline. It ends with the trash rooms and chute areas, which are the areas most often cleaned last, least often inspected, and responsible for a disproportionate share of complaints.
Front Entry and Vestibule
- Exterior door glass clean on both faces with no smears at hand height
- Door hardware, push plates and kick plates polished, no dulling film
- Vestibule mat lifted and the floor beneath cleaned, not just vacuumed on top
- Grit removed from door tracks and the threshold channel
- Buzzer panel, camera lens and keypad wiped, digits readable
- Ceiling corners and light fixtures free of cobwebs and insect debris
- No salt residue or tracked-in staining on the entry floor in winter months
Lobby and Seating Areas
- Hard floor damp-mopped to the wall line with no haze under overhead lighting
- Baseboards free of mop splash and vacuum scuffing
- Feature wall, art frames and mirrors clean with no streaking off axis
- Seating wiped including arms, backs, undersides and legs
- Side tables, ledges and window sills dusted, glass tops fingerprint-free
- Planters clean, no dead leaves or debris in the soil surface
- Waste receptacle emptied, liner fitted neatly, exterior wiped
- Air quality neutral, no lingering chemical or musty odour
Mail, Parcel and Package Room
- Mailbox faces wiped, no dust ledge along the top of the bank
- Floor vacuumed or mopped including under the mail bank and the sorting counter
- Discarded flyers and packaging cleared, recycling bin emptied
- Parcel shelving wiped and free of loose tape and label backing
- Parcel locker screens and touch panels cleaned and functional
- Counter surface clear, no accumulated abandoned items
Elevators and Elevator Lobbies
- Cab floor cleaned to the door line, corners free of grit
- Door tracks vacuumed out, no debris blocking the channel
- Stainless panels and doors polished with the grain, no cloudy patches
- Buttons, braille plates and handrails cleaned as touchpoints, not just dusted
- Cab ceiling, vent grille and light diffuser free of dust
- Cab mirror streak-free when viewed from the entry angle
- Elevator lobby on every floor vacuumed, call panel and surround clean
Residential Corridors and Stairwells
- Carpet vacuumed edge to edge including tight against unit doors
- Carpet edges and corners free of the lint line a vacuum head cannot reach
- Unit doors, frames, numbers and peepholes free of dust and marks
- Corridor walls spot-cleaned at cart, stroller and handrail height
- Corridor lighting lenses and sprinkler escutcheons free of dust
- Stairwell treads and landings swept, corners clear of debris
- Stairwell handrails wiped along the top and the underside
- No resident items, mats or shoes left in the corridor without being reported
Amenity Rooms
- Gym equipment touchpoints, handles and screens wiped, sanitising wipes stocked
- Gym floor cleaned including under and behind equipment where accessible
- Gym mirrors checked at a 45 degree angle for hand marks and haze
- Party or lounge room reset to the standard layout, surfaces cleared and wiped
- Amenity kitchen counters, sink and appliance fronts clean, fridge free of abandoned food
- Amenity washrooms stocked and cleaned to full restroom standard
- Guest suite turned over as contracted, no previous occupant traces
- Roof deck or terrace furniture wiped and set upright, deck swept and drains clear
Trash Rooms and Chute Areas
- Chute intake door, handle and surrounding wall cleaned on every floor
- Trash room floor washed, no residue or leachate under the bins
- Bins wiped, lids closed, returned to marked positions
- Recycling and organics signage clean, current and visible
- Floor drain flushed with clean water, no odour at the door line
- Overflow reported to management rather than redistributed
General checks (site-wide)
- Every floor of the building visited, not only the floors near the elevator core
- Burned-out lighting, damage and graffiti reported with the floor and location noted
- Previous deficiencies verified as fixed before the new inspection is scored
- Service log initialled with date and time on completion
- Janitor closet left tidy, chemicals labelled, mop heads hung to dry
- No wet floor left without signage
How often to inspect
| Daily | Entry glass, lobby floor, elevator cabs, mail room, trash room floor, waste removal |
| Weekly | Full corridor vacuum on every floor, stairwells, amenity rooms, chute intake doors |
| Monthly | High dusting, corridor spot-cleaning pass, elevator track detail, roof deck and terrace |
| Quarterly | Corridor and lobby carpet extraction, light diffuser cleaning, hard floor restoration where scheduled |
What inspectors actually check
Stainless, with the grain and under the light
Pass: elevator panels and doors show an even finish with no cloudy patches when you stand off to one side. Fail: circular buffing marks, or a greasy film that only shows up at an angle. Stainless wants to be wiped along the grain, not in circles, and a general-purpose spray left sitting on it is usually what causes the film in the first place.
Door tracks in the elevator cab
Pass: the track channel is clear enough that you can run a finger along it and pick up nothing. Fail: compacted grit and hair packed into the channel. Clearing it takes a crevice tool and about thirty seconds, and almost nobody does it, since it hides below eye level where a quick walk-through never looks.
The mat, lifted
Pass: the floor under the entry mat is as clean as the floor beside it, and the mat lies flat with no curled edge. Fail: a clean mat sitting on a ring of grit that built up underneath it. Lift the mat during the walk-through rather than trusting what's visible around its edges, especially in winter, when a curled corner in a wet vestibule turns into a trip hazard fast.
Amenity rooms and the turnover problem
Amenity spaces break the daily rhythm. A party room booked on Saturday night has to be reset before Sunday morning, and a gym is busiest exactly when the crew is not there. The workable answer is to score amenity rooms against a defined reset state rather than against a cleaning frequency: photograph the standard layout once, attach it to the site record, and inspect against the photograph. That removes the argument about whether the room was left correctly.
If your building is a strata with a large parkade, storage and bike rooms, and exterior common property, use the strata cleaning checklist instead. It carries the back-of-house areas this page treats lightly. For restrooms in amenity areas, the commercial restroom cleaning checklist has the fixture-level detail. And if the same corridor complaints keep returning after every inspection, the problem is probably the loop, not the list. Building a quality control system covers how to close it.
Common questions
What should a condo cleaner do daily versus weekly?
Daily: entry glass, lobby floor, elevator cabs, mail and parcel room, trash room floor, and all waste removal. Weekly: a full corridor vacuum on every floor, stairwells, amenity rooms, and the chute intake doors floor by floor. Monthly: high dusting, a corridor spot-cleaning pass, elevator track detail, and roof deck or terrace. Quarterly: carpet extraction in corridors and lobby, and light diffusers.
Why do residents complain about corridors that were just vacuumed?
Because the vacuum ran down the centre and the eye reads the edges. Carpet corners, the strip against unit doors, and the line along the baseboard hold lint that a standard vacuum head cannot reach without a deliberate edge pass. A resident standing at their own door is looking directly at the worst two feet of the corridor. Fix the edges and complaints drop even if nothing else changes.
How many floors should an inspection cover?
All of them, on a rotation you can defend. Inspecting the second floor and the penthouse every time trains the crew to clean those two floors. A workable pattern is a full pass on every floor weekly and a scored inspection that rotates through a different set of floors each visit, so no floor goes more than a month without being formally scored.
Who is responsible when a resident leaves items in the corridor?
The building, not the cleaner. A cleaner who moves personal property creates a liability problem, and one who cleans around it forever lets the corridor degrade. The right handling is to record it as a deficiency with a photograph and the unit location, and let management issue the notice. That is why the checklist has a line for it rather than leaving it to judgement.
Is the PDF free to use in our building?
Yes. No email, no form. Download it, put your building name on it, and hand it to whoever walks the site.