Ten Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Cleaning Service
Ten questions, about six minutes on the phone, and what a good answer sounds like versus one that has never been thought about before.
You are about to give a stranger a key to your house. Six minutes of questions will tell you more than three sales calls will.
Here are the ten, in the order they are worth asking.
1. Are the people in my home employees or subcontractors?
A W-2 employee works for the company. A 1099 subcontractor is an independent business the company sent you. Both are legal. They put the risk in completely different places, and the answer shapes the next three questions.
Good answer: a straight one, either way. Bad answer: “they’re all part of our family.”
2. Do you carry workers’ compensation on them?
This one matters more in Texas than most people realise, because Texas does not require most private employers to carry workers’ comp at all. It is optional here. So “we’re insured” very often means general liability only.
If a cleaner is hurt on your stairs and there is no workers’ comp behind them, the realistic route to compensation runs through your homeowner’s policy.
3. Can you email me a certificate of insurance naming me as certificate holder?
Not “are you insured.” The specific document. Any genuinely insured business produces a COI within a day, and naming you means the insurer confirms the policy is live rather than sending you a screenshot of something from 2023.
Hesitation here is the answer.
4. What exactly is included? Can I see the checklist?
This is the question that turns “clean” from an opinion into a fact. A written scope is the only thing you can hold anyone to later.
A company with a checklist sends it in thirty seconds. A company without one describes it instead, at length.
5. What is not included?
Ask this separately, because the answer is different. Inside the oven, inside the fridge, interior windows, blinds, baseboards, garages, and anything above head height are the usual exclusions. None of those are unreasonable to exclude. Discovering them on the day is unreasonable.
6. Will it be the same team every visit?
Consistency is the single biggest driver of quality in recurring work. Somebody who has cleaned your house eleven times knows which shower door has the limescale problem and where the dog bowl lives.
“One of our teams” means no.
7. Who will be in my home, and how were they vetted?
Ask for names before the first visit, and ask who ran the background check and what it covered. “We check everyone” is a claim. “Third-party county criminal search in every county of residence for seven years” is a description.
8. What is the first visit, and what is every visit after it?
These are different numbers and they should both be quoted up front. The first clean takes longer because it is absorbing however long it has been. A company that quotes only the recurring rate and then adds a first-visit surcharge on the day has chosen to surprise you.
9. What is the cancellation policy?
Get it in writing before you book, not in the terms you find afterwards. Late-cancellation fees on one-time and move-out jobs are legitimate — those bookings hold a crew’s whole day. A fee you find out about at the moment you need to cancel is not.
10. What happens if something breaks, or the clean is not right?
The good answer sounds specific: you hear about it from us the same day with a photo, the liability policy covers it, tell us within 24 to 48 hours and we come back.
The bad answer is a pause, followed by “that’s never happened.”
If you only ask three
Ask 1, 4 and 10. Employment model, written scope, and what happens when it goes wrong. Those three cover liability, expectations and remedy, which is most of what can actually go badly.
What these questions do not tell you
None of them tell you whether the company cleans well. Nothing asked over the phone can. A company can answer all ten perfectly and still do a mediocre job on your grout.
What the answers tell you is whether the business is structured to fix a mediocre job — whether there is a scope to compare against, a policy to claim on, and a named person who will pick up. That is a different thing from quality, and it is the part you can verify before you spend any money.
For what it is worth, we will send the 60-point checklist and the $2M certificate before you book anything, because both are easier to hand over than to describe.
