Strata Common Area Cleaning in NSW: Who Is Responsible for What?

In a NSW strata scheme, the owners corporation is responsible for common property and each lot owner is responsible for their own lot. Cleaning follows that line. The lobby, lifts, corridors, stairwells, car park and gardens are the owners corporation’s to keep clean and maintained. The inside of an apartment is not.

The complication is that the line does not sit where most people assume. Under the Strata Schemes Development Act 2015 (NSW), lot boundaries are generally the inner surface of the walls, the upper surface of the floor and the under surface of the ceiling, which means the walls themselves, the structural floor and the ceiling are common property, not lot property. Everything hinges on the registered strata plan for your particular scheme, and a handful of areas sit in a grey zone that generates most of the complaints a strata committee ever receives.

This guide sets out where the line sits, which areas cause disputes, and what a strata cleaning scope of works should actually specify.

Free On-Site Quote Royce Cleaning has been cleaning commercial and strata property across Sydney and NSW since the 1990s, with a site walk-through and a written scope of works provided as part of every quote. Call 02 9897 2099.

What counts as common property?

Common property is defined in the Strata Schemes Development Act 2015 as the part of the parcel that is not comprised in a lot. In other words, it is defined by exclusion. Anything the strata plan does not allocate to a lot belongs to everyone, collectively, through the owners corporation.

For schemes registered after 30 November 2016, section 6 of that Act sets the default boundaries of a lot: for a vertical boundary where the base of a wall corresponds substantially with a base line, the inner surface of the wall; and for a horizontal boundary where a floor or ceiling joins a vertical boundary, the upper surface of the floor and the under surface of the ceiling. The strata plan can define boundaries differently, and older schemes may work differently again, so the registered plan is always the authority.

The rule of thumb, and its limits The surface you can physically touch inside your apartment is usually yours. The structure behind it is usually common property. This is a useful shorthand and a poor substitute for the strata plan. Older schemes, notations on the plan, by-laws and past renovations can all move the line, and case law on things like original floor coverings has made some of these boundaries genuinely contested.

Where does the cleaning line sit in practice?

Typically common property, cleaned by the owners corporation	Typically lot property, cleaned by the owner or occupier
Entry lobby and foyer	The interior of each apartment
Corridors, stairwells and fire stairs	Internal walls between rooms inside a lot
Lift cars, lift doors and lift lobbies	Floor coverings installed by the owner after registration
Basement and visitor car parking areas	The lot owner’s own car space, in many schemes
Garbage rooms, bin bays and chute openings	The occupant’s own waste, up to the point of disposal
Gardens, lawns and landscaped grounds	Plants and furniture inside a lot or exclusive-use courtyard
Driveways, paths and external hard surfaces	Balcony contents and furniture
External glass and building facade	Interior face of windows, in most schemes
Shared amenities such as pools, gyms and BBQ areas	Anything the by-laws assign to the lot by exclusive-use

Two entries in that table deserve a closer look, because they are where the arguments start.

Windows

Windows and doors set into boundary walls are usually common property, including their working parts, because the wall itself is common property. Cleaning them is a different question from owning them. Guidance published for the NSW strata sector notes that cleaning windows is normally the responsibility of the owner or occupier of the lot. In practice most schemes split it: the occupant cleans the inside, and the owners corporation arranges periodical external glass cleaning as a building-wide service, because it needs height access equipment and cannot sensibly be done lot by lot.

Balconies and courtyards

These are frequently common property with an exclusive-use by-law attached, which grants the lot owner the right to use the area and often transfers some maintenance obligations to them. Whether cleaning sits with the owner or the scheme depends entirely on the wording of that by-law. Check it before assuming.

Does the owners corporation actually have a legal duty to clean?

This needs to be stated carefully, because it is often overstated.

Section 106 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 (NSW) requires an owners corporation to properly maintain and keep in a state of good and serviceable repair the common property and any personal property vested in it, and to renew or replace fixtures and fittings comprised in the common property. The NSW Supreme Court has treated this as an absolute obligation rather than a duty to take reasonable care.

That is a maintenance and repair duty, not a duty phrased in terms of cleaning. But the two are connected in a way that matters commercially. Common property that is not cleaned deteriorates into common property that needs repair. Carpet that is never extracted wears out early. Tiled entries that are never scrubbed become a slip risk. Garden beds that go untended become a pest and access problem. Gutters that are never cleared become a water ingress problem, which becomes a defect claim.

There is also a consequence attached. Section 106(5) allows a lot owner to recover from the owners corporation, as damages for breach of statutory duty, any reasonably foreseeable loss suffered as a result of a contravention. Section 106(6) sets a limit of six years from when the owner first became aware of the loss. Schemes that can show a documented, consistently delivered maintenance regime are in a materially better position than schemes that cannot.

Why the paper trail is the point Any competent strata cleaning contractor should be producing records: what was cleaned, when, by whom, and what was reported. Those records are how a scheme demonstrates it has been meeting its obligations, and they are how a strata committee answers a complaint with evidence instead of an opinion.

Who decides the standard, and who pays for it?

The owners corporation decides, usually acting through the strata committee and its strata managing agent. Routine cleaning is generally funded from the administrative fund, which covers recurrent day-to-day expenses, rather than the capital works fund, which is for capital expenditure over the longer term. Periodical work such as carpet extraction, external glass cleaning or high pressure washing may be treated either way depending on the scheme’s budget and the nature of the work.

This is worth understanding as an owner, because it explains a common source of frustration. When a scheme cuts cleaning frequency to hold levies down, the saving lands in the administrative fund now and the cost usually reappears later as a capital works item.

What should a strata cleaning scope of works actually specify?

The single most common cause of strata cleaning disputes is not poor cleaning. It is an ambiguous scope, where nobody agreed in advance what was included, how often, and to what standard. A scope worth signing sets out the following.

1. Every area, listed by name. Not “common areas”. Lobby, lift cars, lift lobbies on each level, fire stairs, corridors by floor, basement, bin room, letterbox area, pool surround, gym, BBQ area, driveway.
2. Frequency per area. Daily, three times weekly, weekly, fortnightly. Frequencies should differ by traffic. A ground floor lobby and a level nine corridor do not need the same attendance.
3. Periodical works and their cycle. Carpet extraction, hard floor machine scrubbing, external glass, bin room pressure washing, cobweb removal, light fitting cleaning. Each with a stated interval.
4. What is explicitly excluded. Anything not listed should be named as excluded, so it becomes a quoted variation rather than an argument.
5. Consumables. Who supplies and replenishes bin liners, hand soap and paper products in common amenities, and how a shortfall gets reported.
6. Reporting. How the contractor reports damage, graffiti, dumped rubbish, lighting outages and security issues, and to whom.
7. Access and hours. Key or fob arrangements, after-hours attendance, and how the contractor secures the building on leaving.
8. Review points. A scheduled review so frequencies can be adjusted as occupancy changes, rather than remaining fixed for a decade.

Royce Cleaning conducts a site walk-through as part of the quoting process and provides every client with a written scope of works alongside the quote, which can be amended before it is agreed. For a strata committee, that document is the thing to scrutinise, because it is what you will be holding the contractor to.

The part most schemes overlook: common property is a workplace

When a cleaner attends a strata building, that building becomes a workplace for the duration. Under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW), a person with management or control of a workplace must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that the workplace and the means of entering and leaving it are without risks to health and safety. An owners corporation engaging contractors sits inside that framework.

The Act also requires duty holders to consult, cooperate and coordinate activities with other duty holders where they share a duty in relation to the same matter. In a strata building, that means the scheme and the cleaning contractor both have obligations and are expected to talk to each other about them.

There is a specific issue worth naming. The approved NSW code of practice on managing the work environment and facilities uses a cleaner working alone at night in a city office building as its example of a worker who may be isolated even though other people are nearby. Strata cleaning frequently happens early morning or after hours, alone, in basements and fire stairs with poor mobile reception. A contractor who has thought about this will have communication procedures, induction and reporting arrangements in place. One who has not is a risk the scheme is sharing.

• Ask how the contractor manages lone and after-hours work.
• Ask whether staff are inducted to your specific site, including security protocols and evacuation points.
• Ask whether staff are police checked, and what happens to keys and fobs when a staff member leaves.
• Ask what the incident reporting process looks like when something is damaged.

Royce Cleaning uses police checked staff, inducts staff to each site so they are familiar with that building’s security protocols and evacuation points, keeps doors locked behind them when working outside business hours, and completes an incident report with the client notified where something is damaged.

What happens when residents complain about cleaning?

The escalation path in NSW is reasonably well defined, and knowing it prevents a minor issue becoming an expensive one.

• Raise it with the strata committee or strata managing agent. Most cleaning complaints are scope problems, not performance problems, and are resolved by clarifying or varying the scope.
• Get it on the record. A complaint that exists only as a conversation in the lift is not something the committee can act on or the contractor can fix.
• Compare the complaint against the scope. If the area is not in the scope, the answer is a variation, not a dispute.
• Mediation through NSW Fair Trading. Where the issue is genuinely about the owners corporation meeting its obligations and cannot be resolved internally.
• NCAT. The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal can make binding orders where mediation does not resolve matters.

Frequently asked questions

Get a strata cleaning scope you can actually hold someone to

Royce Cleaning provides commercial and strata cleaning plus grounds maintenance, waste removal and pest control across Sydney and New South Wales, with 120 staff and a written scope of works supplied with every quote.

Call 02 9897 2099 or request a free quote online.