Five to seven nights a week, plus a deeper clean monthly or quarterly, plus the specialist trades on their own intervals. That’s how often a restaurant should be professionally cleaned when it’s a full service kitchen with fryers and a grill. Lower volume kitchens, cafes and bars run well on three to five nights.
The number is only useful once you separate the two calendars behind it. Your own closing crew already covers part of that list every night you’re open, and the quote in front of you either overlaps them or leaves a gap where you assumed there wasn’t one.
One interval in the whole calendar isn’t yours to set at all. It’s printed in a table, it’s decided by what you cook rather than by how the hood looks, and it isn’t the one most owners assume.
Two Calendars Run in Every Restaurant
Your staff runs the first one. It starts when the doors open and it ends when the last closer leaves, and it repeats every single day you serve food.
- Wiping and sanitizing food contact surfaces through service
- Sweeping and spot mopping between rushes
- Restroom checks on the hour or close to it
- Breaking down the line, draining and covering fryers, wiping equipment down
- Trash out, floors swept, mats pulled and hosed
None of that is a contractor’s job, and none of it can be. It happens while food is being cooked and guests are in the room.
It also isn’t free. Closing cleanup runs about 60 to 90 minutes across the closing crew, so three closers six nights a week is 18 to 27 labor hours every week.
At a loaded wage of $18 to $22 an hour across 4.33 weeks, that lands somewhere around $1,400 to $2,600 a month. You’re already spending it on cleaning before a single invoice arrives, and any quote you’re weighing should be read against that number rather than against zero.
The second calendar starts after the last person leaves. It’s the one you buy, and it exists because a closed empty kitchen lets you do things a working one never will. Equipment is cold, floors can flood, degreaser can sit and work, and nothing has to be moved back in five minutes.
- Degreasing and machine scrubbing floors right to the walls and under equipment
- Pulling, washing and replacing grease filters
- Detailing equipment exteriors, shelving undersides, walls and backsplash
- Restroom deep work, drains, and the back dock
- Periodic jobs on a longer cycle: behind the equipment, cooler interiors, high dusting
Owners get frustrated with cleaning quotes because they read the second calendar and mentally price it against the first. They’re not the same work, they don’t happen at the same time of day, and one of them can’t be done by anybody currently on your payroll. A contract’s scope of work sets those lines out explicitly, which is the fastest way to see where your crew stops and a contractor starts.
How Often a Restaurant Should Be Professionally Cleaned, by Type
| Restaurant type | Professional visits per week | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Full service with fryers and a grill | 6 to 7 | Grease lands on the floor every service, and it hardens overnight |
| Fast food and high volume QSR | 7 | Long hours, heavy fry output, almost no closed days |
| Casual and family dining | 5 to 6 | Steady cooking, often one dark day a week |
| Fine dining | 5 to 6 | Fewer covers, but the standard leaves no margin front of house |
| Cafe, bakery and coffee shop | 3 to 5 | Little grease, but constant guest traffic and restroom load |
| Bar with limited food | 3 to 5 | Sticky floors, restrooms and glassware areas rather than cook line grease |
The single biggest driver is what leaves your cooking equipment as vapor. Fryers and flat tops throw grease into the air all service, and it settles on the floor, the equipment fronts and the walls.
By morning it’s a hard film that takes a chemical and dwell time to lift rather than a mop. A grill and a fryer put you at six or seven nights. A panini press and an espresso machine don’t.
The second driver is the one owners underrate: how many nights a week you’re actually open. A restaurant that goes dark on Monday doesn’t need a Monday night crew. A place running fourteen hours a day seven days a week never gets a night off from grease, and neither should its cleaning schedule.
How Often the Deep Clean Should Happen
Most working kitchens need a full deep clean monthly to quarterly. Six month intervals only hold up in low volume operations: a seasonal spot, a cafe with a light menu, a church or club kitchen that cooks a few times a week.
The deep clean is the job that gets behind and underneath, which is where the nightly crew can’t reach on a normal night. Equipment gets moved out and hoods get detailed beyond the filters.
Cooler shelving comes out so the walls and fan guards can be washed. Floor drains get lifted and brushed, and wall and ceiling surfaces above the line get degreased.
Three things move you inside that range:
- What you cook. Fry heavy and char heavy menus load the room faster than anything else. A wok line or a charbroiler compresses a quarterly interval to monthly.
- How many hours you run. Sixteen hours of cooking a day is more than twice the load of eight, because the surfaces never fully cool and never get a long dry window.
- How strong your nightly work is. This is the lever most owners never think about. A thorough nightly crew pushes the deep clean interval out, because far less is accumulating between visits. A rushed one pulls it in, and you end up paying for the deep clean to fix what the nightly service should have prevented. The difference between recurring service and a one time deep clean is exactly this relationship.
There’s a practical way to find your own interval if you’re guessing. Book one deep clean, then have the crew photograph the same six places on the way out: behind the range, under the fryer, the wall above the line, inside a cooler fan guard, a lifted floor drain and the top of the hood.
Look at those six places again a month later. If they’re back to where they started, monthly is your interval. If they still look close to clean, stretch to six or eight weeks and check again.
Skip the deep clean entirely and the interval sets itself. Grease keeps building where nobody looks, and eventually a health inspector, a fire marshal or a failed compressor picks the date for you.
The Intervals You Do Not Get to Choose
Two lines on the calendar are not a preference. They’re set outside your building, and one of them comes from a published table.
Hood and exhaust cleaning is governed by NFPA 96, the standard for ventilation control and fire protection of commercial cooking operations. Its Table 11.4 sets the frequency by what kind of cooking you do, not by how the hood looks:
| Type of cooking operation | Minimum frequency |
|---|---|
| Solid fuel cooking (wood, charcoal) | Monthly |
| High volume (24 hour operations, charbroiling, wok cooking) | Quarterly |
| Moderate volume (most sit down restaurants, hotel kitchens) | Semiannually |
| Low volume (seasonal, church, club and day camp kitchens) | Annually |
The 2025 edition also pushed any operation cooking more than 16 hours a day into the monthly category regardless of fuel. This is certified work performed by an exhaust cleaning specialist, not by a janitorial crew, and it ends with a written report, a label posted in the kitchen and a certificate you keep on the premises. The reason the interval is fixed is that grease inside an exhaust system is a fire load rather than a cosmetic problem.
The fire suppression system over your cook line runs on its own six month clock. A certified technician checks the agent tank, weighs the cartridge, inspects the nozzle caps, verifies the fuel shutoff and replaces the fusible links, which get changed semiannually whether they look worn or not.
Grease traps are set by your municipality. The operating standard is to pump when grease and solids reach 25 percent of the trap’s capacity, but plenty of cities require pumping every 90 days regardless of how full it is. Call your sewer authority rather than guessing, because this is the one interval where the rule genuinely changes across town lines.
Four Things That Should Change Your Cleaning Schedule
A cadence set at signing and never revisited goes wrong slowly. Four changes should send you back to it:
- The menu changed. Adding a fryer, a charbroiler or a wok station changes the grease load in the room immediately. The cleaning schedule should change in the same month, not at the next contract renewal.
- The hours changed. Adding brunch, a late night menu or a seventh service day adds cooking hours the current schedule was never priced against.
- The closing crew changed. New closers, a new kitchen manager, or a stretch of short staffing all mean less gets done before the contractor arrives. Watch the first two weeks and adjust.
- Something showed up. A drain fly problem, a slick floor near the fryer, a mouse dropping in dry storage, or a violation on your last inspection report. Those are all frequency signals, and the fix is usually one more night a week in the right room rather than a bigger annual project.
Setting the Right Schedule for Your Restaurant
Start from your closing crew, not your square footage. Three questions settle it.
Can your closers finish the nightly list? Stand in the kitchen at 11:30 on a busy night and watch. If the last twenty minutes are rushed, if the mop water is going down while somebody is still cooking staff food, you’re already short. Buy the nights that recover that gap first.
What comes out of your cooking equipment? If a fryer and a grill run every service, plan on six or seven nights of professional cleaning and a monthly deep clean. If your heaviest appliance is an oven and a steamer, five nights and a quarterly deep clean is honest. Cafes and light menu bars can hold at three or four.
Which dates are already fixed? Put the hood interval from the NFPA table, the six month suppression inspection and your municipality’s grease trap requirement on the calendar first. They’re the only dates you don’t get a vote on, and they’re the ones owners find out about late.
Then set the rest around them. That’s why we build a schedule from how a restaurant actually runs rather than from a square foot count, and why a schedule that fit in January often needs a look in June. Deciding whether to bring a contractor in at all is a separate question, and our guide for owners weighing that decision walks through it.
Your closers already run the first calendar, tonight and every night. The second one is the one you’re choosing, and the honest way to size it is to count the nights your crew can’t cover rather than the square feet on your lease.
Want a schedule built around your actual hours and menu? Call Excellence Janitorial Services at (800) 851-0806 for a free, no obligation walkthrough anywhere in Northeast Pennsylvania.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a restaurant be professionally cleaned?
Most full service restaurants use a professional cleaning company five to seven nights a week, plus a deeper clean monthly or quarterly. Cafes, bakeries and bars with limited food usually run well on three to five nights. The main driver is what your cooking equipment throws into the room, since fryers and grills load a kitchen with grease every single service.
How often should a commercial kitchen be deep cleaned?
Monthly to quarterly for most working kitchens, and every six months only for genuinely low volume operations. Fry heavy and char heavy menus, long operating hours and a rushed nightly crew all pull the interval shorter. A thorough nightly service is what lets you stretch it.
Can my own staff handle it instead of hiring a company?
They can handle the service clock work, and they already do: sanitizing surfaces, sweeping, restroom checks, breaking down the line, taking trash out. What they can’t do is the work that needs a cold, empty kitchen and chemical dwell time, like machine scrubbing floors under equipment or detailing behind the line. Most restaurants need both, which is why closing cleanup and a cleaning contract aren’t alternatives to each other.
How often do restaurant hoods need to be cleaned?
NFPA 96 Table 11.4 sets it by cooking type: monthly for solid fuel cooking, quarterly for high volume operations like 24 hour kitchens and charbroiling, semiannually for moderate volume sit down restaurants, and annually for low volume kitchens. The 2025 edition also puts any operation cooking more than 16 hours a day on a monthly schedule. This is certified specialist work, separate from your janitorial contract.
How often should a grease trap be pumped?
When grease and solids reach 25 percent of the trap’s capacity, which in practice means every one to three months for most restaurants. Many municipalities require pumping every 90 days regardless of the fill level, so check with your local sewer authority rather than relying on a general rule.
How often should restaurant floors be stripped and refinished?
Vinyl and VCT floors in a restaurant typically need stripping and refinishing once or twice a year, with scrubbing and recoating in between. Quarry tile in a kitchen isn’t waxed at all, but it does need periodic deep scrubbing of the grout, which usually rides on the monthly or quarterly deep clean.
Does the health department require a specific cleaning schedule?
No. Inspectors don’t mandate a frequency for most cleaning. What they inspect is condition: food contact surfaces clean to sight and touch, cooking equipment free of encrusted grease, and non food contact surfaces free of accumulation. The Food Code sets hard clocks for a few specific things, but for everything else the schedule is yours to set and the result is what gets judged.
What happens if you skip the deep clean?
Grease keeps building in the places the nightly crew can’t reach: behind and under equipment, on walls above the line, in floor drains, and inside cooler fan guards. The first symptoms are usually drain flies, odors and slick floors. The expensive ones are a failed inspection, a compressor that dies early, or a fire that starts in accumulated grease.