An occupied home hides its own flaws. Furniture covers the marks, rugs cover the floors, and a full cabinet is a cabinet nobody opens. Empty it out and every one of those becomes visible at once, which is exactly the condition your landlord will inspect it in.
Kitchens carry the most deposit risk, and the inspection is mostly about interiors. Inside every cabinet and drawer, including the backs and the shelf edges. Inside the oven, including the door glass and the racks. Inside and behind the refrigerator. The dishwasher filter and seal. Range hood filters and the grease film on cabinet fronts above the stove. Almost nobody does the interiors, and almost every inspection checks them.
Bathrooms are graded on scale rather than dirt. Hard-water deposits on shower glass and chrome, mineral staining in the toilet bowl, grout discolouration, and the exhaust fan cover, which collects a surprising amount of dust and is at eye level for anyone actually looking. All of it needs a descaling product and dwell time, not a general spray and wipe.
Then the details that read as neglect: baseboards, door frames, light switch plates, light fixtures and their covers, closet shelving and rods, window sills, and window tracks. Tracks in particular are a classic deduction. They collect grit for years, they are trivially easy to check, and an inspector who finds them dirty will start looking harder at everything else.
Floors go last, always, and this is the part people get wrong by doing it first. Cleaning cabinet interiors and baseboards knocks debris onto the floor, so a floor cleaned early has to be cleaned twice. Work top to bottom through the whole property, then vacuum and mop your way out the door.
Two things worth doing regardless of who cleans. Photograph every room after the clean and before you hand back the keys, timestamps included, because a deposit dispute weeks later comes down to evidence. And ask your landlord or property manager for their actual checklist. Many have one and will send it over, and cleaning against the real document beats cleaning against a guess.
If you would rather not do any of it in the middle of a move, that is what move-out cleaning exists for. We quote it flat by size and condition, and we come back at no charge if an inspection flags something we were supposed to have cleaned.