Twelve Questions to Ask Before You Hire a House Cleaner

You are giving a stranger a key to your house and leaving. That is the actual transaction, and it deserves more scrutiny than most people give it. Here are the questions worth asking, and what a good answer sounds like.

1. Is the price flat or hourly?

Hourly pays for time. Flat pays for a finished house. With hourly, a slow visit costs you more and a fast one punishes the cleaner. Ask which it is, and if it is hourly, ask what happens when the estimate runs over.

2. Can I have the number before someone visits?

A company that has done this a while can price a standard home from a handful of questions. Requiring an in home estimate before naming any figure is usually about getting a salesperson through your door.

3. Who is actually coming, and how will I know?

Be wary of a company that promises one fixed pair of cleaners forever. Turnover happens in every service business, and anyone guaranteeing otherwise is guessing. The useful answer is that you are told in advance who is coming. We text first names before the visit and again when we lock up.

4. Are your cleaners employees or subcontractors?

This is the question almost nobody asks and it matters more than most. In Massachusetts, worker classification runs on the ABC test under chapter 149, section 148B, and it is strict. Ask directly. Either answer can be legitimate, but a company that gets cagey about it is telling you something.

5. What insurance do you carry?

Ask for the specifics rather than the phrase. A lot of cleaning companies advertise themselves as licensed, bonded, and insured, which sounds like three protections and often is not. There is no state license for residential house cleaning in Massachusetts, so the word licensed is doing no work in that sentence. Ask what general liability coverage they carry and whether they have workers compensation, and ask to see the certificate. A real company will send it.

6. Do you bring your own supplies and vacuum?

If they use yours, you are buying the consumables and your vacuum is doing the mileage. Ask what happens with cross contamination between houses too. We bring everything, and nothing of yours gets used up.

7. What do you clean with, and can I change it?

Be careful with the marketing language here. Terms like green and eco have no enforced meaning in cleaning. What you actually want to know is what is in the bottle and whether you can swap it. We use plant based products as standard, and if you would rather we used something you already have under the sink, leave it out and we will use that instead.

Related and worth being clear about: cleaning and disinfecting are different things with different legal definitions. Any product making claims about killing germs has to be registered with the EPA. If a company tells you their products are chemical free, that is not a real category, and it is a sign they are selling rather than explaining.

8. What is on the list, exactly?

Ask for it in writing, room by room. Then ask what is not on it. Inside the oven, inside the refrigerator, interior windows, and baseboards are the four most common assumed inclusions that turn out to be extras.

9. What happens if something is not right?

A promise is only real if it says what actually happens. Ask what the remedy is and when it applies. Ours is simple: tell us and we put it right on your next visit. A company that says they will make it right without saying how has not thought about it.

10. What is the cancellation policy, both ways?

Ask what you owe if you cancel, and ask what happens if they cancel on you. The second half is the one that tells you about their staffing.

11. How do you handle keys and codes?

Ask where a key is stored, who has the code, and what happens when someone leaves the company. This is a security question, not a cleaning question, and the answer should be immediate.

12. Will anyone photograph the inside of my house?

A lot of companies now send photographs taken inside your home as proof of work, and plenty of customers find that unnerving without ever saying so. We do not photograph inside your house. You get a text when we lock up instead.

What to do with the answers

You are not looking for perfection on all twelve. You are looking for whether they can answer without getting defensive. Vagueness on insurance, worker classification, and what is actually on the list is the pattern worth walking away from.

If you want to see how we answer these in writing, most of it is on the why us page and the rest is on the questions page.