How to clean a quartz worktop, and what to keep off it

Warm water, a soft cloth, a small amount of mild washing up liquid. Wipe the surface down, rinse the cloth, go over it again with clean water, then dry it with a tea towel or kitchen roll. Drying is the step most people skip and it is the one that matters most, because it is what keeps a dark quartz looking even rather than streaky.

Do it at the end of cooking, while things are still warm and before anything has set hard. Most of what we see dulling a worktop after five years is not damage at all. It is a thin limescale film from water left to dry on the surface, and in the hard water we get across London, Hertfordshire and Essex that film builds faster than people expect.

A microfibre cloth is worth keeping under the sink. A washing up sponge is fine on the soft side. The green scouring side is not, and that matters more than it sounds. How marks show up also depends on whether you chose a honed or polished finish. A honed surface hides water marks better, while a polished one shows streaks more readily but wipes to a higher shine.

Knowing how to clean the surface day to day is the easy part. The harder question is what products to keep away from it entirely.

Keep these off it completely: bleach and any bleach-based spray, oven cleaner, hob cleaner, drain unblocker, paint stripper, nail varnish remover, methylated spirit, descaler and anything sold on how strong its acid or alkali is. Add dishwasher tablets used as a scrubbing block, a trick that goes round online and takes the sheen off polished quartz permanently.

Quartz is roughly ninety per cent crushed stone and mineral, held together with a polymer resin. The stone does not care about any of those chemicals. The resin does. Once the resin at the surface has been etched or dulled you have a patch that catches the light differently, and it does not come back. That is why a splash of oven cleaner is a far bigger problem on quartz than a glass of red wine.

Abrasives are the other half of it. No scouring pads, no wire wool, no cream cleaner with grit in it, no melamine sponge on a polished finish. They leave fine scratches you will not notice on the day. You notice them in January, when low sun comes across the worktop at an angle and lights up every one of them.

Those scratches and chemical marks are permanent. But actual stains on quartz are a different story, and the material handles them far better than most people expect.

Quartz resists stains far better than any natural stone, but it is not completely immune. The difference is time. Wipe a spill up on the day and you will never know it happened. Leave a strong pigment sitting overnight on a pale slab and you can end up with a shadow that takes real work to shift.

The worst offenders are turmeric, hair dye and concentrated food colouring, especially on white or light-veined quartz. These are strong pigments that can work into the resin surface if they sit long enough. Red wine, coffee and beetroot sound alarming but wipe off easily. Most people are surprised how little red wine does to quartz. It sits on top, it does not soak in.

Compared to granite or marble, the practical difference is enormous. A natural stone has open pores, so oil, wine and coffee travel into the surface and need a poultice to draw them back out. Quartz has no pores. The resin closes the surface at manufacture, so almost everything stays on top where a cloth can reach it.

If something has dried and left a faint mark, soak it with a warm damp cloth for ten minutes and try again. For a stubborn turmeric shadow, a paste of bicarbonate of soda and water left on the area for a few hours usually lifts it. Never reach for bleach. Bleach will clear the colour but damage the resin underneath, and that trade is not worth making.

The area around the sink tends to collect the most spills and splashes. Keep the silicone joint there clean and dry, and wipe the stone either side of it after washing up. That one habit prevents most of the discolouration we see at five and ten year revisits.

Staining is manageable. The risk that actually catches people out is one they worry about far less.

Soak it, do not scrape it. Lay a warm damp cloth over the dried patch and leave it there for five or ten minutes while you do something else. Jam, dried gravy, porridge, toothpaste and candle wax all soften and lift with almost no pressure once they have been properly wetted.

If something still will not move, use a plastic scraper or the edge of an old bank card held at a shallow angle. A wooden spatula works too. Never a kitchen knife, never a metal scourer, never a paint scraper blade. The lump of dried food is temporary. The mark you make taking it off in a hurry is not.

There is one exception to the solvent rule. For a sticky adhesive residue or a stubborn bit of wax, a small amount of white spirit on a cloth is safe on quartz for a minute or two. Wash the area properly with soapy water afterwards and dry it. Do not leave it sitting, and keep it off the silicone joints at the wall and around the sink, because those it will attack.

Once the surface is clean, some people wonder whether a specialist product would keep it cleaner for longer. Here is what is worth knowing about that.

Honestly, no. A specialist quartz worktop cleaner sells well and it does very little that warm soapy water does not already do. We fit worktops for a living, and the surfaces that look best after ten years belong to the people who simply wiped them down with a damp cloth and dried them off. No spray, no polish, no bottle with a stone on the label.

The products marketed as quartz cleaners are typically a pH-neutral surfactant with a pleasant smell. They will not harm the surface, but they will not protect it either. Quartz is non-porous, so there is nothing for a protectant to bond to. You are paying for packaging and fragrance.

If you do want something beyond washing up liquid, look for a spray that says it is safe on engineered stone, free of bleach and ammonia, and pH-neutral. Use it once a week rather than every day, and always dry the surface afterwards. Avoid anything that promises to seal or coat quartz. There is nothing to seal, and a coating just builds up into a film that dulls the finish over time.

The one thing no cleaner can undo is heat damage. That is the real risk worth planning around.

Quartz is non-porous. There is no network of open pores for liquid to travel into, so there is nothing for a sealer to fill and nothing to top up each year. If anyone offers to seal your quartz worktop, or sells you a bottle to do it yourself, that is money going nowhere.

This is the real practical difference between quartz and a natural stone. Marble, quartzite and granite are quarried in one piece and do have pores, so they are sealed and the seal is looked after over time. Quartz is engineered from crushed stone and resin, and the resin closes the surface as the slab is made. Oil, coffee, wine and beetroot sit on top of it rather than soaking in.

That non-porous surface is also why quartz handles the area around the hob and sink so well. But there is one threat that no amount of resin can stop.

Heat is what actually ruins quartz worktops, and it is the thing homeowners worry about least. The resin at the surface starts to suffer well below the temperature of a pan lifted straight off a gas hob. A hot roasting tin, an air fryer venting downwards, a slow cooker left in the same spot for eight hours: any of those can leave a dull white ring or a fine crack, and no amount of cleaning will touch it. If you want the detail on temperature limits, we cover it fully in our guide to whether quartz is heatproof.

There is no proper repair for a heat mark. We can sometimes improve one. We cannot make it disappear, and on a run with a visible joint it is rarely worth cutting a new piece for a single ring. So the answer is a trivet or a thick wooden board, every time, with no exception made for a pan you are fairly sure has cooled down. Two minutes off the heat is not cooled down.

The risk nobody plans for is thermal shock at a cut out. A sink or hob cut out is the narrowest point in any worktop, and that is where a sudden temperature difference does damage. Tipping a pan of boiling pasta water into a cold ceramic sink, or standing a hot pan on the strip between hob and sink, is asking a lot of a thin piece of stone. Run the hot tap for a few seconds first and most of that risk goes away.

If you are still choosing and you cook hard on a gas hob, say so before you commit. Our experienced fabricators can build extra support in around a cut out in our own workshop, and on a free home visit we will tell you honestly if the layout you have drawn puts a hot pan somewhere it should not be going.

We select the slab, template it, fabricate it in our own workshop and fit it, so one team answers for the whole job. The home visit is free and there is no obligation.