The Datum Report

Occupation 9131 · Elementary occupations

Industrial cleaning process occupations

Half of full-time industrial cleaning process occupations in the UK earn more than £27,306 a year, and half earn less.

Industrial cleaning process occupations clean manufactured goods, plant and machinery, industrial premises and building exteriors.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic entry requirements. Training is typically received on-the-job. Vocational qualifications covering various aspects of industrial cleaning are available at levels 1 and 2. Qualifications are also offered by the British Institute of Cleaning Science.

What the work involves

• uses industrial hoovering, polishing, pressure washer, steam cleaning and sandblasting equipment to clean industrial premises and building exteriors
• dismantles engines, boilers, furnaces and other industrial plant and machinery, cleans component parts and reassembles equipment
• washes, rinses, dries and cleans manufactured goods, and stacks cleaned articles ready for removal

Also called

Cleaner and greaser · Factory cleaner · Hygiene operative · Industrial cleaner · Pot washer

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for industrial cleaning process occupations, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 9 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Elementary process plant occupations n.e.c. · Packers, bottlers, canners and fillers