You find someone who cleans houses. You agree on a rate, work out how they get in, and they come every other Thursday. Plenty of Portland households run exactly like that, and it works. But hiring a house cleaner as an individual puts you on the other side of a relationship most people never examine until something goes wrong: you are the one holding the risk, the paperwork and the scheduling.
We run a cleaning company, so we have an obvious side in this. We are going to try to be straight anyway, including about the cases where hiring one person directly is the better call.
What a care or cleaning marketplace actually is
A marketplace is a directory with messaging attached. It lists people looking for work, gives you a way to contact them, and usually charges one side or both for access. The site does not clean your house and does not employ the person who shows up at your door. Whatever screening it runs is a check on a profile, not a management relationship. Once you and the cleaner agree on terms, the arrangement is between the two of you.
That single fact drives everything below. You are not buying a service from the platform. You are being introduced to a contractor and left to it.
Who is responsible if someone gets hurt in your home
Cleaning work happens on wet floors, on step stools, around stairs, near your dog. If a person you hired directly is injured while working in your home, who pays is not obvious, and the answer can land on your homeowners policy or on you personally.
Before you hire anyone directly, call your insurer and ask the narrow version of the question: does this policy respond if a person I pay to work here is injured on the property, and does the answer change if that person is not my employee? Ask for the answer in writing. Most people assume they are covered and never check.
Hiring an insured company generally changes where that exposure sits, though the specifics depend on your own policy and circumstances, which is worth checking with your insurer. Licensed, bonded and insured are three separate things: a license is a registration to operate, a bond is a financial guarantee that pays out in defined situations, and insurance is what responds to damage or injury. Green Earth is licensed, bonded and insured, and we comply with employment legal requirements for the people we send.
The background checks you can run, and the ones you cannot
You can search a name, read whatever is public, and call two references. Do that. It catches some things. What a private household generally cannot do on its own is run a formal pre-employment background check, because those are regulated: they require a permissible purpose, written consent from the person, and a screening provider.
If a listing site advertises a check, read what it actually covers. Which records, which jurisdictions, and how recently did it run? A check from three years ago tells you about three years ago. References have the same problem in reverse: the phone number on the profile belongs to whoever the applicant chose.
We screen carefully and run pre-employment checks before anyone is hired. That is not a promise that nothing will ever go wrong in anyone’s house. It is a process that happens before a person is ever assigned to a home, and it happens on our side of the transaction instead of yours.
Taxes and worker classification
This is where direct hiring gets genuinely complicated, and we are not going to pretend to give you legal advice. Depending on how regularly the person works, who sets the schedule, who supplies the equipment and how much you pay across a year, you may be treated as a household employer rather than a customer. That classification can carry payroll tax, withholding and reporting obligations.
Do not take that answer from a blog post, including this one. Ask a CPA or an employment attorney before you set up a standing arrangement with an individual. It is one short conversation, and it costs far less than getting it wrong for two years.
Buying house cleaning from a company removes the question. You are a customer of a business, and the employment relationship belongs to that business.
What happens when your cleaner is sick, away, or quits
This is the most ordinary reason households switch from an individual to a company, and it has nothing to do with quality.
With one person, there is no cover. If they are ill, the visit does not happen. If they take a vacation, you skip a cycle. If they move away, go back to school or take a full time job, you start over: finding someone, checking them, teaching them your home, arranging a key. Whatever screening you did the first time, you do again.
A company has other cleaners, and that is most of what you are paying the difference for. Here is the honest version of how it works at our end. We send the same crew back to the same home wherever we can, because people who know a house do better work in the same two hours. Illness, time off and staff changes still cause substitutions. We do not call you ahead of time to say the crew is different. A substitute arrives with our full current notes on your home, but if a familiar face at the door every single visit matters more to you than the cover a company carries, hiring one person directly may suit you better. We would rather you knew that before you booked than after.
Where the knowledge about your home lives
Every house accumulates instructions. The guest bath gets used twice a year. The hardwood takes Bona and nothing else. The back door sticks. Do not touch the record player.
With an individual, all of that lives in one person’s head and walks out with them. With a company it should live in a file. So ask any company you are considering a direct question: how do you record instructions for a home, and what is a substitute cleaner given before they arrive? If the answer is vague, the notes probably do not exist. Our substitutes get the current notes for the home, which is the only reason substituting works at all.
When hiring an individual is the better call
Four situations where we would tell you to hire a person directly.
- Price on a small job. Our minimum service charge is $133, with a two hour minimum visit. If you want ninety minutes of light tidying in a one bedroom apartment, someone working for themselves will cost you less.
- Timing we cannot serve. Our house cleaning visits run Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. If you need someone at 7:00 PM or on a Saturday at home, that is not us.
- Work we will not do. We do not shampoo carpets, wash dishes, handle pet messes or body fluids, clean outdoor areas, move furniture over 20 lb, or clean above 8 feet. Body fluid cleanup requires a bloodborne pathogen certification we do not currently carry. An individual may simply agree to some of that.
- Schedule churn. Recurring clients with us can reschedule three times a year. Someone self employed can often be far more flexible than that.
None of those are apologies. They are the shape of the service, and pretending otherwise wastes your time and ours.
How to decide
Ask yourself which job you want. Hiring an individual means you own the screening, the insurance question, the tax question, the cover when they are out, and the record of how your home works. In exchange you usually pay less and you get one consistent person. Hiring a company means someone else owns all of that, and you pay for it.
If you land on the company side, compare more than the hourly figure. We wrote a longer piece on how to compare house cleaning companies in Portland, and our terms are on our FAQ page. Read them before you talk to anyone, ours included.
Want a number to compare against? Our house cleaning prices in Portland are published by home size and frequency. Quotes are free and there is no obligation. Call 1 888 404 7930 or email info@greenearthhousecleaning.com and tell us about your home.
