A commercial kitchen exhaust clean runs from about A$230 for a small cafe canopy and filters to A$900 for a full restaurant system with ductwork and fans, on Sydney rates advertised in September 2026.
Skai Solutions priced the job against what the guideline actually asks for, and the two do not line up. The invoice is quoted per visit, but the annual bill is set by how often you need one, and that is decided by what is cooking under the canopy rather than by the size of the room.
A grease trap is the other trade waste cost that arrives on the same bill, and it is priced separately: see what grease trap cleaning costs a restaurant for the per litre rates, the pump out schedule the utility sets, and the charge that applies when a trap is not maintained.
Per visit, not much. The Sydney market advertised in September 2026 starts at about A$230, with most jobs falling between A$230 and A$990 and an attendance of two to five hours. Broken down by system, a small cafe canopy and filter clean sits at A$200 to A$350 and a full restaurant exhaust including ductwork and fans at A$400 to A$900.
| Job | Sydney range, September 2026 | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| Cafe canopy and filters | A$200 - A$350 | Hood face, grease filters, accessible plenum |
| Full restaurant system | A$400 - A$900 | Canopy, plenum, ductwork, fan |
| Whole market spread | A$230 - A$990 | Eight listed Sydney providers |
Advertised rates read from the CleaningSearch Sydney kitchen exhaust cleaning page on 17 September 2026. A directory's market rates, so treat them as the going price in one city rather than a quote.
Those numbers are easy to find and they are not the answer to the question. The annual cost is the visit price multiplied by a frequency, and the frequency is worth between one and twelve times the visit price. So the whole question is how often.
The Australian Institute of Refrigeration, Air Conditioning and Heating publishes a best practice guideline for commercial kitchen exhaust management. Its recommended inspection frequencies are set by what is cooking, not by floor area, seats or turnover.
| Type or volume of cooking | Recommended system inspection | Visits a year |
|---|---|---|
| Solid fuel, combustion chambers | Weekly | 52 |
| Solid fuel cooking operations | Monthly | 12 |
| High volume cooking | Quarterly | 4 |
| Moderate volume cooking | Semi-annually | 2 |
| Low volume cooking | Annually | 1 |
Table 4.1 of the AIRAH Best Practice Guideline, Commercial Kitchen Exhaust Management, 2022. The visits a year column is Skai Solutions' own arithmetic from the stated intervals, not an AIRAH figure.
Read the two ends of that table together, because the gap is the point. A sandwich and coffee operation with no fryer and no grill is on an annual inspection. A venue that puts in a chargrill or a wood oven moves to monthly. Same room, same rent, same extraction, twelve times the attendances, because of one appliance.
Priced at the Sydney floor of A$230, that is A$230 a year against A$2,760. Priced at the middle of the full system range, it is closer to A$650 against A$7,800. Nothing in the quote you are given will tell you this, because the quote is for one visit.
This is the part that separates the guideline from the contracts operators actually sign. AIRAH does not set cleaning by the calendar at all. It sets inspection by the calendar and cleaning by the grease found at the inspection, using a Grease Thickness Test taken behind the filters, one and three metres from each hood, midway along the duct, at the fan and downstream of it.
| Measurement | Reading | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Mean across the system | 50 micrometres or less | Acceptable, keep monitoring |
| Mean across the system | 200 micrometres or more | Complete system clean required |
| Single point | 2,000 micrometres or more | Urgent localised clean, even if the average passes |
| Single point, after a clean | 50 micrometres or less | Verification standard |
Table 4.2 of the AIRAH Best Practice Guideline, Commercial Kitchen Exhaust Management, 2022. AIRAH's own wording is that cleaning frequency should be enough to ensure a mean of 200 micrometres, 0.2 of a millimetre, is never exceeded.
Two consequences follow, and neither appears on a cleaning invoice. The first is that a fixed quarterly contract is a guess at a measurement. It can be too often, which is money, or not often enough, which is the fire risk the whole exercise exists to manage. The second is that the post-clean verification standard is stricter than the operating one: a mean of 50 micrometres passes day to day, but after a clean no single point may exceed 50. A system that is fine on average can still fail a verification.
Ask for the grease thickness readings, by location, on every attendance. That single request converts a maintenance bill into a record you can set frequency from, and it is the only way to find out whether you are buying too many visits or too few.
Fifteen minutes, your menu, your hardest order.
Book a Free DemoFour things, in roughly this order. Access is first: a fan on a roof with no ladder point, or ductwork with no access panels, turns a two hour job into a five hour one and the guideline itself lists access panel locations as a design requirement precisely because of this. Length of duct run is second, since the price follows metres of internal surface, not the size of the canopy you can see. Grease load is third, which is the measurement above. Trading hours are fourth: work that has to happen after close, or before a breakfast service, is priced as after hours work.
The one that is inside your control is access. A venue that fits access panels during a fit out pays for them once. A venue that does not pays for the extra labour on every single attendance, for the life of the lease. That is the same logic as the rest of the commercial kitchen equipment decisions made at fit out and paid for monthly afterwards.
The canopy is one trade on one interval. Floors, surfaces and the quarterly kitchen degrease are a different trade, priced a different way, and the award wage floor underneath a contractor's hourly rate is published even though nobody quoting you shows it. That is on what restaurant cleaning costs an hour in Australia.
The fuel in almost every canopy fire is the grease this interval removes, which is why the cleaning schedule matters more than the hardware. On the hardware itself, see whether a fire suppression system is required in a commercial kitchen.
Three honest limits. AS 1851 itself is a paid Australian standard, so the frequencies quoted here are AIRAH's published best practice guideline rather than the standard's own text; if your insurer names a clause, read the clause. The market rates are Sydney in September 2026 and one city is not a national price. And no New Zealand equivalent of the AIRAH frequency table was found in this research, so a New Zealand operator should treat the intervals above as Australian practice rather than a local rule.
The honest concession, by category: if you run a cafe with an urn, a toaster and a panini press, you are on the annual line of that table, and a quarterly cleaning contract is selling you three visits a year you do not need. Buy the inspection, read the grease numbers, and let them set the schedule.
Exhaust cleaning is an overhead. It arrives on a schedule set by your equipment and it does not fall when the room is empty, which puts it in the same bucket as power, water and rent on the restaurant overhead costs page. The electricity and water pages make the same point with regulated numbers behind them.
Fixed costs are only ever covered by covers. A venue on the monthly inspection line is carrying roughly A$2,760 a year of cleaning at the market floor before a single plate leaves the pass, and the cheapest additional revenue in a restaurant is the booking that already tried to reach you. Skai Solutions answers the phone during service, takes the booking and the order, and sends it through, which is the part of the overhead conversation an operator can actually move this week.
Canopy cleaning is one half of a kitchen fire schedule and the extinguishers are the other. Fire extinguisher service cost in Australia covers the six monthly cycle, the annual statement and what the whole year runs to for a small venue.
Cleaning is the recurring half. The design is the half that decides whether the canopy passes assessment at all: see commercial kitchen ventilation requirements in Australia for the 8 kW threshold that triggers a hood, the published 380 litres a second per square metre airflow figure, and what AS 1668.2 changed in 2024.
Sydney rates advertised in September 2026 run from about A$230 for a small cafe canopy and filter clean to A$900 for a full restaurant system including ductwork and fans, with most jobs landing between A$230 and A$990 and a typical attendance of two to five hours. Those are per visit. The annual bill is the per visit price multiplied by a frequency, and the frequency is the part most operators get wrong.
There is no single answer and the guideline is explicit about that. AIRAH's 2022 best practice guideline recommends inspecting the system weekly for solid fuel combustion chambers, monthly for other solid fuel cooking, quarterly for high volume cooking, every six months for moderate volume and annually for low volume. Cleaning then follows the measured grease, not the calendar.
AIRAH sets the trigger at a mean of 200 micrometres, which is 0.2 of a millimetre, averaged across measuring points through the whole system. Below a mean of 50 micrometres the system is acceptable. Any single point at 2,000 micrometres or more needs urgent localised cleaning even if the system average passes. After a clean, verification is stricter again: no single point above 50 micrometres.
More than the size of the kitchen does. Solid fuel cooking sits on a monthly inspection recommendation and a low volume kitchen sits on an annual one, so the same room can carry twelve attendances a year or one depending on what is installed under the canopy. Adding a chargrill or a wood oven is a decision about the maintenance contract as well as the menu.
AS 1851 is the Australian standard for maintaining fire protection systems and it is the document insurers, councils and fire inspectors ask about, but the standard itself is a paid publication rather than legislation. Your obligations come through your lease, your insurer and your local fire safety requirements, which is why the honest answer is to read those three documents rather than trust a sticker.
Skai Solutions found no New Zealand equivalent of the AIRAH frequency table in this research, so no frequency figure is offered here for New Zealand venues. The grease measurement logic still holds physically, but treat the Australian intervals as Australian until a New Zealand source says otherwise.