Exterior cleaning is a labour and chemistry trade. There is no custom joinery being fabricated, no stone being imported, no three-week lead time on materials.
That matters for one reason: when a builder asks for a deposit they are usually funding something they have to buy before they start. On a house wash there is almost nothing to fund. So the question of who holds the money, and when, is worth understanding before you hand any over.
What a deposit is actually for
There are legitimate reasons to ask for one.
A job needing hired equipment — an elevated work platform booked for a specific day, scaffold, a traffic control permit — carries real committed cost. So does a specialist sealer bought for your specific stone, which cannot be returned and cannot be used on the next job.
Securing a date in peak season is a weaker reason but not an unreasonable one, since a cancellation leaves a crew idle.
What is not a reason is working capital. If an operator needs your money to buy the chemicals for your job, they are funding this week’s work with this week’s deposits, and you are an unsecured creditor in a business with a cash flow problem.
The proportion is the signal, not the existence
A modest deposit on a job with hired plant is ordinary. A demand for half or more of a straightforward residential wash, before anyone has arrived, is not.
The pattern to be wary of is the full amount in advance, cash preferred, on a job quoted at the door. That combination is the structure of essentially every exterior cleaning scam that runs through Sydney each spring. More: door-knock pressure washing.
What the law says about paying before work starts
If the agreement came from an unsolicited approach — someone knocked, or cold-called you, and you did not invite the quote — the Australian Consumer Law treats it as an unsolicited consumer agreement. You get ten business days to cancel, and during that cooling-off period the business must not supply the services or accept any payment at all.
That is not a guideline. A business that takes money during the cooling-off period, or starts the work inside it, extends your cancellation right out to six months. Details are on the ACCC’s page on unsolicited sales.
It does not apply when you went looking for the quote yourself, which is most of our work. But if a stranger at your door wants a deposit today, the law has already told you what that looks like.
Payment on completion, and what completion means
The sensible structure for residential exterior cleaning is payment after the work is done and you have seen evidence that it was done.
Which raises the question of what finished means, because on soft washing it is less obvious than it sounds. A soft-washed roof is not at its final appearance the day the crew leaves. The biological growth has been killed, not scrubbed off, and it breaks down and weathers away over following weeks. The job is complete; the look is not final.
That needs to be explained before payment, not after, which is why the photo report matters — it is the evidence of work performed in places you cannot see. More: what is in our photo report and what a realistic result looks like.
Progress payments on larger work
On a multi-day commercial or strata job, staged payments are normal and reasonable: a portion at an agreed milestone, the balance on completion. The principle holds — each payment follows work that has already been delivered and documented.
Strata work has its own rhythm, since the committee usually needs an invoice against a resolved scope and the managing agent pays on terms. More: strata exterior cleaning.
Cash, GST and what the receipt tells you
A discount for cash is sometimes just a discount. It is also sometimes a job with no invoice, no ABN, no GST and no record — which means no warranty, no insurance claim and nothing to take to Fair Trading.
Ask for a tax invoice with an ABN on it. Verify the ABN if the job is substantial; it takes thirty seconds on the ABN Lookup register. An operator working properly has no issue with any of this.
What you are entitled to regardless of what you signed
Under the Australian Consumer Law, services come with guarantees that cannot be contracted out of: they must be provided with due care and skill, be fit for the purpose you made known, and be supplied within a reasonable time.
A clause in a quote saying the operator is not responsible for damage caused by their own work does not override that. If a surface is damaged through a method that should never have been used on it, paying in full upfront does not remove your remedy — it just makes getting it harder.
More: what happens if we break something and what public liability actually covers.
The short version
Ask what a deposit is funding. If the answer is a specific committed cost, it is reasonable. If the answer is vague, it is your money financing someone else’s business.
And keep the balance until the work is done and you have the photographs.
