Self-employed cleaner or employee?
You cannot simply decide that a cleaner is self-employed. HMRC looks at the reality: who controls the hours and methods, whether the person must do the work personally, who provides equipment, whether there is mutuality of obligation, and whether the person carries genuine financial risk.
If you set their rota, supply their products, tell them how to clean and expect them personally, they will usually be an employee or a worker regardless of what the paperwork says. Getting this wrong can mean back pay, unpaid holiday, tax and penalties.
What employing someone actually involves
- Register as an employer with HMRC and operate PAYE.
- Pay at least the National Minimum or National Living Wage for their age band.
- Provide a written statement of employment particulars from day one.
- Provide statutory holiday entitlement and pay it correctly.
- Assess and, where required, enrol them in a workplace pension.
- Hold employers' liability insurance.
- Carry out right to work checks before they start.
Travel time, unpaid gaps and minimum wage
A common UK cleaning-sector failure is paying only for time on site. Where travel between assignments is part of the working day, it can count as working time for minimum wage purposes. Two hours of unpaid driving across five properties can quietly push an hourly rate below the legal floor.
Build routes that minimise dead travel, and price jobs so that paid travel time is covered rather than absorbed by the cleaner.
Writing a contract that fits cleaning work
Cover the essentials plainly: pay rate and when it is paid, hours or pattern, holiday, notice, keys and property, confidentiality about clients' homes, damage reporting, and a non-solicitation clause covering clients they clean for.
Non-solicitation clauses must be reasonable in scope and duration to be enforceable. An unreasonable clause is worse than none, because it gives false comfort.
Keeping a growing team organised
Once you have two or more cleaners, the operational problem becomes visibility: who is where, what the client expects at that property, and whether the job was completed. Group chats do not solve this because information disappears in scroll.
Give each property a standing job record with access details, expectations and notes, so any cleaner can cover any job without ringing you.