How to Check a Singapore Cleaning Company Before You Book
The short answer
Half of all serious complaints about Singapore cleaning companies, 820 of 1,638, get no reply from the business at all. You can check this yourself in about 30 seconds: open a company's Google reviews, sort to Lowest rating, and see whether anyone from the business answered. The split by trade is stark. Aircon servicing firms answer 73.71% of their complaints. Cleaning companies answer 33.4%.
You are about to let a stranger into your home, and the only evidence most people check is a number nearly every company in this market already has.
We pulled every Google review held by the 42 Singapore cleaning and aircon companies listed on this site, all 53,781 of them, looking for something that still separates one company from another. The rating does not. What happens after a customer complains does.
Half of all serious complaints go unanswered
The corpus holds 1,638 reviews at one or two stars. Businesses replied to 818 of them and ignored 820.
Complaining in public is usually the last thing a customer does before giving up. A business that answers is still paying attention when the news is bad. A business that answers none of them has already decided what happens when your job goes wrong.
A reply is a public answer on a review. It shows attention, and that is all it shows. Whether the problem was fixed stays invisible from outside, and this guide does not treat a reply as proof that it was.
Aircon firms answer, cleaning firms often do not
The gap falls along trade lines rather than price or size.
| Trade | Firms | Complaints | Answered | Reply rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aircon servicing | 6 | 658 | 485 | 73.71% |
| Cleaning | 18 | 955 | 319 | 33.4% |
Same platform, same star scale, same city. An aircon company is more than twice as likely to answer you in public as a cleaning company.
We can measure that gap but cannot explain it from the data. One plausible reading is that aircon work carries warranties, servicing contracts and larger invoices, so silence costs more. Treat that as a guess.
The rating is not doing the work you think
Of the 41 listed companies that publish a rating, the median is 4.8. 33 of them, 80.49%, sit at 4.7 or above.
Underneath, 93.57% of all reviews in this market are five stars. A four-star review is rarer than a one-star review. People here either say nothing, say it was perfect, or come back angry.
So the rating can tell you a company is not catastrophic. It cannot tell you which of two 4.8s to book.
One company in the set carries 310 complaints and answered 30 of them. It still displays 4.8, because 310 is a rounding error against 7,722 reviews.
The check, in 30 seconds
- Open the company on Google Maps or Google Search.
- Find the reviews and change the sort from Most relevant to Lowest rating.
- Read the first page, looking for two things only.
- Does the same problem repeat? One bad job is noise. The same complaint 4 times is a process.
- Did anyone from the business reply? Ignore the wording. Just check whether a reply exists.
A first page of one-star reviews showing a repeated problem and no replies tells you something the rating never will.
What people actually complain about
These are the themes across all 1,465 complaints that carry written text, counted rather than guessed. A review can raise more than one, so the shares do not sum to 100%.
| What went wrong | Complaints | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Work left incomplete | 175 | 11.95% |
| No-show, late or rescheduled | 164 | 11.19% |
| Unreachable afterwards | 137 | 9.35% |
| Price disputed after the quote | 122 | 8.3% |
| Rude or unprofessional on site | 118 | 8.05% |
| Something damaged | 77 | 5.26% |
| Refund refused or chased | 53 | 3.62% |
The top 4 cover most of what goes wrong, and every one of them is addressable before anyone arrives. Put the scope in writing. Fix the price in writing, including what counts as an extra. Agree an arrival window rather than a day. Get the name and number of the person to call if nobody turns up.
Each of those 4 categories exists because somebody had no paper trail.
Where these numbers came from, and what they cannot tell you
Every figure here comes from Google Business Profile data for the 42 companies listed on this site, read on 27 August 2026. Not a sample. All 53,781 reviews those companies publish.
An earlier version of this analysis sampled the 400 newest reviews per company. It produced materially different answers, because the busiest companies carry the most complaints and were the most under-sampled. One firm looked like the best complaint handler in the market on a sample of 5 reviews. On its full history it answers 10%. We threw that version away.
Three limits worth stating plainly:
- We do not name companies in the complaint figures. Some firms measured here are our own clients on a separate engagement, so we apply one rule to all 24 and name none of them. What you get instead is the method, which works on any company, including ones we do not list.
- Reply rate measures a public answer, not a resolution. A company that quietly refunds every complaint and never replies online scores badly here and may be excellent.
- The themes are keyword-matched, not read one by one by a person. The vocabulary is fixed, published with this analysis, and open to challenge.
One company on our list has no Google profile we could match with confidence, so we excluded it rather than guess.
Frequently asked questions
What is the fastest way to check a cleaning company in Singapore?
Open their Google reviews, change the sort from Most relevant to Lowest rating, and read the first page. Look for two things: whether the same problem repeats, and whether anyone from the business replied. It takes about 30 seconds and tells you more than the overall score.
Is a 4.8 rating good for a Singapore cleaning company?
It is average. Across the 41 listed companies that publish a rating, the median is 4.8 and 33 of them sit at 4.7 or above. Because 93.57% of all reviews in this market are five stars, the rating separates almost nobody from anybody.
Does replying to a complaint mean the company fixed the problem?
A reply is a public answer on the review and nothing more. It shows the business is watching and has someone whose job it is to respond. Whether the customer was actually made whole stays invisible from outside.
Why do aircon companies answer complaints more than cleaning companies?
We can measure the gap but not the cause. 6 aircon servicing firms answered 485 of 658 complaints. 18 cleaning firms answered 319 of 955. One plausible reading is that aircon work carries warranties, repeat servicing contracts and higher ticket prices, so silence costs more. Treat that as an interpretation, not a finding.
What do people complain about most when hiring cleaners in Singapore?
Work left incomplete, in 175 of the 1,465 complaints that carry written text. Then no-shows and lateness at 164, being unreachable after the job at 137, price disputed after the quote at 122, and rude or unprofessional behaviour on site at 118.
How many reviews did you actually read?
All of them: 53,781 reviews across 42 companies, which is every review those companies publish on Google. An earlier pass sampled the 400 newest per company, produced materially different answers, and was discarded.