Does it matter if your cleaning company uses employees or contractors?

Yes — it matters more than almost anything else on your vetting list. With W-2 employees, the cleaning company carries workers’ compensation, training, and supervision, and its insurance is built to absorb an injured cleaner or a broken vase. With 1099 independent contractors, much of that burden rides on each individual cleaner — and a claim that finds no coverage upstream can come looking closer to home.

Nobody asks this question on the first phone call, because it sounds like an accounting detail. It is not. The staffing model is the skeleton under every reassuring sentence on a cleaning company’s website: it decides who trained the person wiping your counters, who pays if she falls off a step stool, and whether the “we’re insured” on the homepage covers the crew or only the company’s office chairs. What follows is general information about how the two models usually work — not legal or tax advice — but it is more than enough to ask the right questions.

Two lines on a pay stub, two different companies

The employee model is the one most people picture. The cleaners are on the company’s payroll: it recruits them, trains them, schedules them, supervises the work, withholds their taxes, and shoulders the employer obligations that come bundled with all of that — workers’ compensation among them. When a company like this says “our team,” the possessive is literal.

The contractor model looks identical from the doorway. The person arrives with the company’s name on the text message, sometimes on the shirt. On paper, though, each cleaner is a self-employed business: responsible for her own taxes, her own insurance, often her own methods and supplies. The company in the middle is closer to a booking layer — it matched you with a cleaner and takes a cut, and its contract with her usually says exactly that. There is a structural reason such companies rarely dictate how the work is done: controlling the how is much of what employing someone means, so a marketplace that trains, supervises, and corrects like an employer risks not being a marketplace anymore. The training question and the liability question are joined at the factory.

Three moments where the difference reaches your living room

• The ladder moment. If a cleaner is hurt working in your home, the employee model has an answer ready before anything happens: the injury is the employer’s claim — that is what workers’ compensation exists for. Under the contractor model, the company’s certificate may show no workers’-compensation coverage for the crew at all, because the crew are not its workers, and an injured person’s costs go looking for a policy that will take them. We’ve written the full walkthrough of who is liable if a cleaner is injured in your home; the short version is that when nobody upstream carries coverage, the exposed policy is your homeowner’s.
• The broken-heirloom moment. Under the employee model, the company’s general liability policy answers, because its people’s work is its work. Under the contractor model, a damage claim may be routed to the individual cleaner’s own insurance — a policy you have never seen and cannot verify. The sentence you need either exists in writing or it doesn’t; there is an example of what it looks like published further down.
• The who-is-this-person moment. Screening follows the model too. An employer runs its own checks on its own hires; a marketplace may lean on whatever a platform ran on whoever signed up. Do cleaning companies run background checks? has its own article — the point here is that who checked whom is decided by the staffing model before anyone checks anything.

Five questions that surface the model

You do not need to audit anyone’s payroll. Five questions, sent by email so the answers exist in writing, do the whole job:

• “Are the people who will clean my home your employees or independent contractors?” — A fair question with a one-word answer. Hesitation — or a paragraph where a word would do — is an answer too.
• “Who carries workers’ compensation for the crew that comes to me?” — Not “are you insured?” — that phrase is too easy to say yes to. Name the coverage and the people it covers.
• “If something breaks, whose insurance responds — the company’s or the cleaner’s?” — And how a claim is filed: one email to the company, or a case you open against an individual you met once.
• “Who ran the background check, and on whom?” — The company on its own hires, or a platform on whoever signed up — the staffing model settles this before anyone checks anything.
• “Will you put all of that in writing?” — Ask for the certificate of insurance by email. What a company will attach to an email, it usually actually has.

The honest counterweight

None of this makes the contractor model a scam. It is legal, common, and sometimes exactly what you want — plenty of superb cleaners work for themselves, and hiring one directly, eyes open, is a legitimate decision we’ve compared honestly in independent house cleaner or cleaning company?. The trouble is only ever the hybrid discovered late: a company that presents like an employer, is structured like a marketplace, and lets you find out which one it was after the step stool slips. You are not owed the employee model. You are owed a straight answer about which model you’re buying.

What JAS puts in writing

We’ll hold this site to the same test rather than grade our own homework in prose. The residential cleaning page publishes that visits are fulfilled by “JAS-supplied, background-checked cleaners”, and publishes the shape of the visit: starting at $189, a “2–3 hour visit · 2-person team”, “28 items verified by photo”. Our terms state: “Every cleaner is background-checked, and we carry at least $2,000,000 in general liability coverage” — and if something is damaged during a clean, “damage is documented in your CleanCheck and resolved through our insurance. That is what it is for.” Send us the five questions above anyway: answers you can forward are the point.

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