Housekeeper, house cleaner, or maid service?

A housekeeper is household staff — someone who works in your home on a schedule you set, doing more than cleaning. A house cleaner is a person you pay visit by visit to clean. A maid service is a company that sends a team. JAS is the third one: a cleaning company with published prices.

Three words, three working arrangements

The words get typed into the same search box, but they describe different jobs. A housekeeper works for your household. The classic arrangement is recurring presence — several mornings a week, every weekday, sometimes living in — and the duties reach past cleaning into running the home: laundry cycled and put away, beds made, dishes done, groceries and packages received, sometimes cooking. In hotels and large homes the role keeps its formal Spanish title, ama de llaves — keeper of the keys. When you hire a housekeeper directly you aren’t buying a service; you are employing a person, with the schedule-setting, supervision and paperwork employment carries. (What that means for taxes and insurance is a question for an accountant, not a cleaning company’s blog.)

A house cleaner sells visits. She — in Miami it usually is she — has her own clients, her own supplies and her own calendar, and comes weekly, every two weeks, or when you call. The scope is cleaning — floors, bathrooms, kitchen, dust — not household management. It’s a private arrangement between two people, which is exactly why there is no published rate anywhere for us to quote you.

A maid service is simply the older name for a cleaning company: a business that sends a team, carries insurance, invoices you, and has someone else to send when your regular cleaner is out sick. Almost no company — JAS included — actually says “maid” anymore, but search engines see the word daily, which is why this article exists. JAS is this third thing: the standard residential visit is a 2-person team for a 2–3 hour visit, 28 items verified by photo, starting at $189 —, not as retold by a blog.

Three cost models with different shapes

The price difference isn’t that one is “cheap” and another “expensive” — it’s that they charge in different units. A housekeeper is payroll: hours per week, every week, whether the week was messy or not. A house cleaner charges per visit, at a figure the two of you negotiate — we won’t invent a number for that here, because none is published anywhere. A company also charges per visit, but at a published price you can read before anyone walks through your door.

That word — published — is the practical difference. JAS’s residential cleaning page prints its own size table: starting at $189, with 2 bed · 2 bath at $243 and 3 bed · 2 bath at $265, and up to 15% off on the recurring HomeCare plan. Whether you ever book us or not, that is the shape a company’s price should arrive in: written down, sized to the home, and the same number for the next caller.

The short rule: buy hours when you need presence; buy visits when you need an outcome.

Which one does your home actually need?

Start from what you need done, not from the word. If the help is daily and half of it isn’t cleaning — laundry cycled, beds made every morning, groceries put away, someone home when the repair tech arrives — you are describing staff, and no per-visit service will honestly satisfy that. If what you need is the house clean on a rhythm — weekly, every two weeks — you are buying visits, and the question becomes an individual versus a company. We’ve already written that comparison in full: independent house cleaner or a cleaning company. And if you go the company route, take the nine questions worth asking any cleaning service with you before you hand over a key.

If you’ve never hired a company before, the mechanics are simpler than people expect — we walk through them in how a home cleaning service works, step by step. With JAS the buying order is written into our published terms: “We price before you commit: you request a quote, see it, and then request a time.” No payment at booking, and a CleanCheck report with photo proof on eligible completed visits.

Why the three words tangle in Miami

Miami complicates the vocabulary in a way national articles never notice. Job listings written in Spanish keep the English word housekeeper; the visit-based professional is la limpiadora or simply la señora que limpia; ama de llaves survives mostly in hotels and estates. Three neighbors can describe the same person with three different words — and each word smuggles in expectations. A cleaner who is quietly handed the laundry, the packages and the cooking has been reclassified into a housekeeper without the pay conversation that change deserves. Naming the arrangement out loud — hours or visits, cleaning or household management — is the cheapest way to keep everyone honest.

On our side the boundary is clean: JAS does not place housekeepers or household staff. What we do is scheduled cleaning visits against a published checklist — and anything not on that list gets discussed and priced beforehand, never improvised in your kitchen.

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