Nearly every cleaning company in Portland puts the phrase licensed, bonded and insured somewhere on its website, usually in small type near the footer. Most people read it as one word meaning legitimate. It is three separate arrangements, backed by three different pieces of paper, protecting you from three different problems. One of the three protects you far less than almost anyone assumes.
We are licensed, bonded and insured. We would rather you knew exactly what that buys you than treat the phrase as general reassurance, because a homeowner who understands it asks better questions of every company they call, including us.
Licensed
For many trades, a license means an exam and a state board. Electricians, plumbers and general contractors work under that kind of system in Oregon. Residential house cleaning does not. There is no cleaning exam, no cleaning board, and no license anyone can be stripped of for doing a bad job on your kitchen.
So when a cleaning company calls itself licensed, it is talking about business registration: a registered entity on file with the Oregon Secretary of State, plus whatever city business registration applies where it operates. Portland businesses register with the city Revenue Division.
That is worth something real. A registered business has a legal name, a registered agent, and an address where legal documents can be served. There is an entity to hold responsible, and you can confirm it exists in about a minute by searching the Secretary of State business registry yourself, free.
What it is not is any statement about skill. Nobody checked whether the company knows that vinegar etches marble and limestone, or that a sealed hardwood finish does not survive an acid habit. Licensed means registered. Treat it as a floor, not a credential.
Bonded
A bond in this industry is almost always a janitorial or employee dishonesty surety bond. A surety company promises to pay you, up to a stated limit, if an employee of the cleaning company steals from your home.
Read that sentence again, because every limit is inside it. Here is what a dishonesty bond typically does not cover.
- Accidental damage. A dropped lamp, a scratched floor, a cracked shower door. That is an insurance question, not a bond question.
- Bad cleaning. Missed rooms, streaked glass, a visit you would not have paid for. No bond has ever covered dissatisfaction.
- Theft you cannot prove. These bonds generally require a conviction, or at minimum a police report and evidence pointing at a specific person. A missing pair of earrings and a bad feeling will not get a claim paid.
- Loss above the bond amount, which is often smaller than people picture.
There is one more thing about bonds that rarely gets said out loud. The surety is not absorbing the loss out of goodwill. A bond works more like credit than insurance, and the surety can pursue the business to recover what it paid. That is why a bond is issued only after someone underwrites the business behind it.
Which is the honest value of the word bonded. It is a modest, narrow backstop against a rare and hard to prove event, and a mild signal that a third party looked at the company before standing behind it. It is not the thing standing between you and a missing watch. Screening is. Our cleaners are carefully screened with pre-employment checks before hiring, and that is the control that actually does the work.
Insured
This is the one that matters most and gets asked about least. It also covers two different things that people run together.
General liability
General liability covers property damage and injury the company causes while working in your home. A window broken by a vacuum handle. Water damage from a hose that was not reconnected properly. A finish ruined by the wrong product on the wrong stone. A guest who trips over equipment left in a hallway.
Cleaning is a low drama job right up until it is not, and the damage figures are not small when something goes wrong with water or a floor. Without general liability behind the company, your options are a claim on your own homeowners policy, with your own deductible and your own claims history, or small claims court against a business that may have nothing to pay you with.
Workers compensation
This is the part homeowners almost never think about. Someone is on a step stool, on wet tile, moving through your house at speed for two hours. If they are hurt and their employer does not carry workers compensation, the injury does not simply disappear. It looks for somewhere to land, and the property owner is a candidate. Homeowners policies differ in how they treat someone working in the house, and where there is coverage the limits are usually thin.
Employing people carries legal obligations, workers compensation coverage among them. We employ our cleaners and comply with employment legal requirements. Whether the person cleaning your home is an employee of a company or working for themselves changes who carries this risk entirely, and it is worth knowing which situation you are in before someone gets hurt.
How to check, in five minutes
Anyone can type three words on a website. Here is how to turn them into something verifiable.
- Ask for the certificate of insurance. It is a standard one page form the insurance agent produces, and requesting it is routine. It lists the carrier, policy numbers, the types of coverage, the limits, and the effective and expiration dates.
- Check the named insured on the certificate matches the exact business name you are hiring. A certificate in a different name is not coverage for the company at your door.
- Check the dates. A certificate is a snapshot of one day. An expired one tells you what was true last year.
- Look for both general liability and workers compensation as separate lines. One is not the other.
- Ask what the bond amount is. Bonded without a number is not information.
- Search the business name in the Oregon Secretary of State registry. It takes under a minute and costs nothing.
Some companies will get the certificate from their agent within a day. Some will take longer. A company that cannot produce one at all has told you something, and you should believe it.
What none of it tells you
Coverage tells you what happens when something goes badly wrong. It says nothing about whether the work is any good, whether the same people come back, or what a company does when you are simply not happy with a visit. Those answers live in published terms, not certificates, so here are ours.
- Pricing starts at a $133 minimum service charge with a two hour minimum visit. Quotes are free and carry no obligation.
- Cleaners may arrive within one hour either side of the scheduled start. If it will be longer than that, we call.
- Cancelling inside 48 hours is charged at half the service. If we cannot get in, the full service is charged, so a reliable entry method matters.
- The same crew returns to the same home wherever possible. Illness, time off and staff changes cause substitutions, and we do not notify clients in advance of a crew change. A substitute is given the full current notes on your home. If knowing every name in advance is important to you, that is a genuine reason to look elsewhere.
- If you are not satisfied, we do not give discounts. We return and touch up the areas, and we need the feedback within 24 hours.
- There is plenty we will not do: shampoo carpets, handle pet messes or body fluids, empty litter boxes, clean rooms heavily affected by mold, clean outdoor areas, wash dishes, move furniture over 20 lb, or clean above 8 feet.
The full set, including payment methods and rescheduling limits, is on our FAQ page. If you want the wider version of this exercise, we wrote a separate piece on how to compare house cleaning companies in Portland.
Where we stand
Green Earth House Cleaning has worked in Portland since 2005, serving the Portland Metro Area. We are locally owned, licensed, bonded and insured, and our reviews sit at 4.6 out of 5 across 65 Google reviews. We use Mrs. Meyer’s, Bona and Bon Ami, with no bleach, no ammonia and no synthetic fragrance, and we bring our own HEPA filtration vacuums.
Ask us for the certificate. Ask the next company too. It is a fair question and it should never be an awkward one.
For house cleaning or office cleaning in the Portland area, call 1 888 404 7930 or email info@greenearthhousecleaning.com for a free quote.
