The move-out cleaning checklist that gets your deposit back
Room by room, what a landlord inspects, what they can legally deduct, and where the money actually goes missing.
The short answer
A move-out clean is a deep clean plus everything a deep clean normally skips: inside the oven and fridge, inside every cabinet and drawer, interior window glass and tracks, and scuff marks off the walls. The property has to come back close to how you got it, minus fair wear and tear. In both Missouri and Kansas your landlord has 30 days after the tenancy ends to return the deposit or send you an itemised list of what they held back and why.
What your landlord is legally allowed to keep
This is worth getting straight before you start scrubbing, because it decides where your effort is worth spending.
A landlord can deduct for damage and for cleaning beyond normal use. They cannot deduct for fair wear and tear — carpet flattened along the hallway you walked down for two years is wear. A wine stain ground into that same carpet is damage. Faded paint is wear. Crayon on the paint is damage.
In Missouri, RSMo 535.300 gives the landlord 30 days from the end of the tenancy to return the deposit or provide a written itemised list of deductions. Miss that, and a tenant can sue for up to twice the deposit. In Kansas, KSA 58-2550 also sets 30 days, and a landlord who wrongfully withholds can be liable for one and a half times the amount.
Practical consequence: photograph everything on your last day, timestamped, before you hand the keys over. It costs ten minutes and it is the only evidence you will have.
This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice. If a deposit dispute goes past a phone call, talk to a tenant advice line or a lawyer.
Kitchen — where most deductions come from
If you only have time for one room, make it this one. Kitchens are where inspections slow down and where the expensive line items live.
- Inside the oven: racks out, glass door degreased on both sides, and the cavity properly stripped. A baked-on oven is the single most common deduction we hear about.
- Inside and behind the fridge. Empty it, wash the shelves and drawers, and pull it out to clean the floor underneath. Leave the door ajar if the power is going off.
- Inside every cabinet and drawer, including the crumbs in the corners and the liner nobody has lifted since move-in.
- Extractor hood filter — degreased or replaced. Landlords check it because tenants never do.
- Sink, taps and drain, descaled. Kansas City water leaves visible limescale on chrome.
- Splashback and the wall behind the hob, back to the paint.
Bathrooms
- Limescale off the shower screen, tiles and taps. Vinegar and time beats scrubbing hard.
- Grout and silicone: mould treated, not painted over. A blackened silicone line reads as neglect even in an otherwise spotless room.
- Toilet including the base, the hinges and the pipe behind it.
- Extractor fan cover, which will be grey with dust.
- Mirror and cabinet, inside and out.
Everywhere else
- Interior window glass, sills and the tracks the sliders run in. Tracks are the classic miss.
- Skirting boards, door frames and switch plates, wiped rather than dusted.
- Light fittings and ceiling fan blades.
- Wall scuffs spot-cleaned. Do not repaint a patch unless you can match the colour — a mismatched square is worse than the mark.
- Carpets vacuumed, and shampooed if your lease says so. Check the lease; plenty of KC leases require professional carpet cleaning with a receipt.
- Garage, basement and any storage cupboard swept out and emptied. Anything you leave becomes a disposal charge.
- Bins emptied and washed, not left full on the drive.
Do it yourself if…
You have two full days, the property is under about 1,200 square feet, you kept on top of it while you lived there, and your lease has no professional-cleaning clause. A determined weekend genuinely does it.
Hire someone if the oven has not been cleaned in a year, if you are handing keys over on the same day you move out, if the lease requires a receipt from a professional, or if the deposit at stake is more than the cost of the clean — which it usually is.
What it costs
Our move-in/move-out clean starts at $260 and takes five to eight hours on an empty property. That covers everything in the deep clean plus the oven, the fridge, inside all cabinets, interior window glass and wall spot-cleaning.
For comparison, a standard clean of an occupied home starts at $120 and a deep clean at $220. The move-out tier costs more because an empty property means every surface is reachable, and reachable means expected.
Book it for the day after the van leaves, not the same day. Cleaning around boxes is slower, and a crew working around your furniture cannot do the job the inspection is about to check.
Common questions
Five to eight hours for a typical two or three bedroom home, with a crew rather than one person. An empty property takes longer than people expect because everything is reachable — inside cabinets, behind appliances, window tracks — and all of it gets inspected.
After. Cleaning around furniture and boxes takes longer and leaves marks where things stood. Book the clean for the day after the property is empty, and before your final walkthrough with the landlord.
Not as standard, ours included. Carpet extraction is a separate job with separate equipment. Check your lease first — a lot of Kansas City leases require professional carpet cleaning with a receipt, and if yours does, get it done and keep the paperwork.
No, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. Cleaning addresses cleaning deductions. It does nothing about a damaged worktop or a hole in a door. What it does is remove the most common and most subjective category of deduction from the conversation.
Thirty days after the tenancy ends, in both Missouri and Kansas. They must either return it in full or send an itemised written list of what they kept and why. Missing that deadline exposes the landlord to damages in both states.