The IRS names cleaning people, housekeepers and maids in its list of household workers. That list gives a cleaning company one advantage over an independent cleaner that has nothing to do with price.
When the homeowner becomes an employer. The IRS test is control. A worker is the homeowner’s employee if the homeowner can control not only what work is done but how it is done, and it makes no difference whether the work is full time or part time, or whether the worker was found through an agency’s list. For 2026, Publication 926 says a homeowner who pays one household employee $3,000 or more in cash wages owes Social Security and Medicare taxes on those wages, and total cash wages of $1,000 or more in any calendar quarter bring federal unemployment tax as well. That means withholding, a Form W-2 and a Schedule H filed with the homeowner’s own return.
When they do not. The same IRS page says that if an agency provides the worker and controls what work is done and how it is done, the worker is not the homeowner’s employee. A company that hires, trains, schedules, equips and supervises its own crews fits that description.
How to say it without giving tax advice. You can write, accurately, that clients do not employ your cleaners, that your company handles payroll, insurance and scheduling, and that the IRS explains household employment on its own site. Do not tell a homeowner what they would owe, do not call independent cleaners illegal, and do not suggest every household needs a company. Plenty of families hire one person directly and do the paperwork, and that is their decision.
Check that it is true of your company first. The IRS sentence that helps you describes an agency that controls the work. If your cleaners are contractors who set their own methods, the IRS classification test, which weighs behavioral, financial and relationship factors, may tell a different story, so have your accountant read the line before it runs.
Where it belongs: one plain paragraph on the pricing or questions page, a sentence in the Business Profile description, and an answer whoever picks up the phone can give when a caller says a friend’s cleaner charges less.
