Contractor Prequalification: What to Ask a Commercial Cleaner Before Work Starts
What to ask a commercial cleaner before work starts.
What to ask a commercial cleaning contractor before work starts: insurance, police checks, SWMS and the paperwork that predicts a safe, steady job.
Published 22 August 2026 by Clean My Biz. 5 min read.
Every contractor you let in carries risk on your behalf.
If you manage a facility, an office, or a strata building, every contractor you let through the door carries risk on your behalf. Cleaning is no exception. The crews work after hours, often unsupervised, around your equipment, your data and your people. Prequalification is how you find out, before the first shift, whether a commercial cleaning company runs the kind of operation you can defend if something goes wrong.
There is no single form mandated by law, but the duty behind it is real. Under work health and safety law, a business that engages contractors still holds a duty of care for the work done on its site. That is why serious buyers ask for the paperwork up front, and why a contractor's reaction to being asked tells you almost as much as the documents themselves.
Here is what a reasonable prequalification for a commercial cleaning contractor looks like.
Ask for the Certificate of Currency, and Read It.
Ask for the certificate of currency for public liability insurance, and read it. Check the insured name matches the entity quoting, check the expiry date, and check the cover amount is adequate for your site. Clean My Biz carries $20 million public liability cover and provides the certificate on request, and any established commercial cleaner should be able to do the same within a day. A contractor who stalls on this one document is telling you something.
Ask Who Is Actually on Your Site.
Ask whether the people on your site are police-checked, and whether they are the contractor's own crew or a chain of subcontractors. Both answers matter. Police checks matter for the obvious reason that cleaners hold keys and alarm codes. The subcontracting chain matters because every layer between the company you hired and the person in your building dilutes accountability, training and pay compliance. Our crews are our own, police-checked and insured.
Ask for a SWMS Where the Work Is High-Risk.
Ask for a safe work method statement for anything high-risk. Routine office cleaning does not need one, but work at height, work with certain chemicals, and work in plant areas does. A contractor who knows when a SWMS is required, and can produce a real one rather than a template with the wrong company name on it, is a contractor who has done this before.
Ask How Chemicals Are Managed.
You are entitled to expect safety data sheets available for every product used on your site, secure storage, and no decanting into unlabelled bottles. This is a two-minute question that instantly separates a systemised operation from an improvised one.
Ask Who Supervises, and How Problems Reach You.
A written scope of works, a named supervisor, and a stated response path when something is missed. Without those three, quality is a hope and disputes have no reference point. The scope is also what your agreement should attach to, which is covered in our guide to commercial cleaning contracts.
Ask About Workers Compensation and Pay Compliance.
A quote that only works below award rates is not a bargain, it is a liability you inherit. The Fair Work Ombudsman's enforcement in the cleaning industry is well documented, and buyers who engage underpaying contractors can find themselves named in the story. We cover what a suspiciously cheap quote can mean, and the checks any buyer can run, in the compliance risk in a cheap cleaning quote.
Prequalification Is a Preview of the Relationship.
None of this needs to be adversarial. A good contractor has this paperwork ready because it describes how they already operate. When we respond to tenders and prequalification requests, the documents above are the pack we send, and the questions above are the ones we would ask in your position. The companies that resent prequalification are, reliably, the companies that fail it.
Prequalification, questions answered.
What documents should a commercial cleaning contractor provide before starting?
Do cleaning contractors need a SWMS?
Who is responsible if a cleaning contractor is injured on our site?
What insurance should a commercial cleaner have in Australia?
Get the Pack Before the Pitch.
If you are prequalifying cleaning contractors for an office, facility or strata building in the Preston to Port Melbourne corridor, send us your form, or ask for ours. We will return the full pack in writing. Book a free site visit and we will bring the paperwork with us.
Ready for a Cleaner Standard?
Book a free site visit. We'll walk your facility, scope the work, and have a tailored proposal in your inbox within a week.