The honest answer is a range
Owners ask me this with a booking calendar open, hoping for one number that makes the spreadsheet work. A two-bedroom apartment that slept two quiet retired people and a five-bedroom villa that slept ten after a week of barbecues are not the same job.
As a rough frame, from years of turning over holiday villas here: a small apartment with one bathroom, one cleaner, is two to three hours. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms is more like four. A five-bedroom villa with a pool terrace is a full working day for one person, which is why nobody sensible sends one person. Those figures assume normal condition and no laundry on the clock.
What actually drives the clock
Owners size a job by bedrooms. I size it by bathrooms. A bedroom is a strip, a vacuum and a make, twenty minutes with the linen to hand. A bathroom done properly, with descaler given dwell time rather than a hurried scrub, is thirty to forty-five, and there is no faster version that is not also a worse one.
Occupancy matters more than square metres. Ten people generate more washing-up, more towels, more sand and more touched surfaces than four. Small children add sun cream on every door handle and food under the dining table.
Then the variable nobody can schedule around: whether the last guests were tidy. A full fridge, a caked barbecue and wet towels on the bedroom floor adds an hour and a half to an ordinary turnover, and it lands on the busiest Saturday of the year.
Laundry changes the arithmetic completely. Washed on site, the job is bounded by machine time rather than cleaning time: an hour a load, four or five loads in a big villa, and heavy cotton towels wanting two hours on the line even in Algarve sun.
What gets dropped when the window is squeezed
Three hours to turn a four-bedroom house with two cleaners can be done. The honest thing is to say which parts stop happening, because it is always the same parts, invisible on the day and visible by Wednesday.
Dwell time goes first. Limescale and oven products get sprayed and wiped straight off, which looks fine while wet and cloudy an hour later. Then anything that requires moving something: the toaster, the sofa cushions, the bin under the sink. Then the oven, the fridge seals and the extractor filter, and skip those through July and August and by September the kitchen needs a full deep clean to recover.
The walkthrough goes last, and it hurts most. That is when the missing bulb, the crooked blind and the towel left in the machine slip through. If you are consistently an hour short, the job wants two pairs of hands rather than a faster pair, which is how we run most villa changeovers in Albufeira.
Plan from a number you measured
Checkout at ten or eleven and check-in at three or four exists for a reason. It is the buffer that absorbs a late taxi, a lost key, a blocked shower drain. Guests forgive a great deal in a holiday house, but their tolerance for someone else's hair in the shower is close to zero.
If your calendar genuinely cannot carry that gap, the answer is not speed. It is more hands and better preparation: two cleaners, linen delivered clean the day before, a stocked cupboard so nobody drives to the supermarket for bin liners. A busy apartment in Quarteira turning over every Saturday needs a different plan from a villa taking fortnightly bookings.
Time one full changeover honestly in March, with a watch, in a normal state of house. Count your bathrooms rather than your bedrooms and set your minimum gap from that. The number to plan around is not the fastest a changeover has ever gone; it is the time it takes when the last guests were not especially tidy.
Send me your bedroom count, your bathroom count and the window you are working with. I will tell you what is achievable inside it and what it would take, and the quote itself costs nothing.