How Often Does Commercial Carpet Need Extraction?

Vacuuming removes what is sitting on the carpet. Extraction removes what has worked its way into the pile and the backing: the oils, the fine grit that cuts the fibre, and the soil that makes a light carpet look gray before it is worn out.

A building with excellent daily vacuuming and no extraction schedule will still get a carpet that looks tired years early, because the abrasive part of the soil never leaves.

Published guidance is reasonably consistent. Commercial cleaning guides such as RBM Building Services and GoGreen Building Services put general commercial carpet at every six to twelve months, moderate-traffic offices at three to six, and high-traffic entries, medical buildings and schools as often as quarterly, with entryways and common areas sometimes monthly.

The same guidance reports extraction extending carpet life by 50 to 100 per cent against vacuuming alone. Treat those as ranges rather than a specification. They describe other people’s buildings.

Five things move the interval more than square footage does.

• Entrance matting. How many steps of it a visitor crosses before the carpet decides how much soil ever arrives.
• The traffic path, not the floor area. A corridor wears on a different clock to the room beside it.
• Carpet color and construction. A light loop shows soil at a fraction of the load a dark cut pile hides.
• Food service in the building, which changes what the soil is as well as how much.
• Whether anyone is spotting spills the day they happen or the week they happen.

Soil arrives wet here for a large part of the year. Afternoon storms and irrigation overspray mean the first few meters of carpet inside an entrance take a load that has nothing to do with how busy the building is, and a frequency table will not tell you that.

In practice, buying more matting is often cheaper than buying more extractions, and we will say so on a walkthrough rather than quote you the extra visits.