Two or three days a week, three hours each time is only ‘light’ housecleaning done by one person in a VERY large home. When I cleaned for a living I took three hours to clean either a fully occupied 2000 sq ft home or an ‘empty but being shown for sale’ 5000 sq ft lakefront home, both weekly. (Lakefront homes get hella dusty in a week, no matter if they’re empty. I don’t know how.) All the rates above are reasonable to me, maybe some a little high but that depends on the local market.
In DC, we pay $75 a visit to a team that come every other week. Slight hijack: do you guys tip at Christmas and if so, how much?
Yup, we’ll probably do something around $150 this year. We always give at least $100, and since our current person is so good and she’s been with us for several years we’ll probably give her more.
We also tend to pay her if her normal cleaning day falls on Thanksgiving or Christmas and she can’t make it to clean that week. She actually has a contract she makes you sign that states she gets one paid vacation a year; I’d never had a cleaning person want me to sign a contract, much less one where we had to pay her a paid vacation! But, as I said, she’s a level of magnitude more professional and better than anyone we’d ever had before, so at this point, we’ll do whatever she asks and more, just to make sure we’re on the top of her list of people she wants to clean for in case she ever decides she needs to cut back.
We will lose her at some point, because she’s going to school to get a teaching degree and hopes to get a job teaching. We’re not at all looking forward to that.
I always wonder if someone who cleans 40 hours a week goes home to a pigsty.
Charleston, SC here.
$50 for a team of two or three to come in for an hour or so.
Sweep/mop
Dishes
Vacuum
Clean all bathrooms and the kitchen
Tidy up
Last week I caught them lifting the area rugs so they could sweep under them
Yeah, we usually give the cleaning lady a separate check for $100 and label it “Holiday bonus.”
I don’t know, but I wonder what the maximun number of houses a person van clean in a week. Even at two hours a house, which I think is a very low number, when you add in travel from place to place, I think the maximum number of houses per day would be three or 18 houses a week if the person works six days a week.
Our previous cleaning lady, who was amazing, told us she cleaned one to two houses a day, averaging eight houses a week. My wife asked her as we were trying to determine how much house cleaning people could make weekly. We figured it was in the $850 to $950 range.
Eek! I think I have given $20 extra at Christmas in the past and thought I’d do the same this year. Now I’m afraid I am being horribly cheap but I can’t afford $100+. That’s as much or more than I spend on close relatives (each) for Xmas. Can anyone else chime in on what you give as a Christmas bonus for your cleaner? Is $20 low enough to be an insult? I only pay $65 per visit and live in a pretty low cost of living area if that matters.
^I’ve always given the equivalent of one day’s work, $100. In your case I’d give $65.
I got lower holiday tips from my year-round customers and larger ones from my snowbirds who were kind enough to realize my bills didn’t take a hiatus simply b/c their cleaning did.
We have an empregada that comes twice a week to clean and I believe she is paid USD200 per week. We live in quite a large house and she is worth every penny.
As I said, we go a little overboard with our current cleaner because she’s really good. Still, I think that the minimum I’d feel OK giving anyone would be the equivalent of one week’s cleaning, especially given that they almost always miss a week or more around the holidays, due to vacations/the holiday itself/etc.
Yeah, we’re 5 bedroom, 8 bath so we pay a lady and her helper $75 a week for about 3 hours work but she’ll switch each time, downstairs once then upstairs the next time. Works pretty well for everyone. It would probably be more expensive but she’s worked for us for years and most of her other appointments are friends of ours we recommended her to.
We have a ~2000 square foot house. The cleaning women comes once a week and changes and washes towels and sheets, vacuums/sweeps/mops, cleans the kitchen and bathrooms, dusts, and walks the dog. She does other little tasks that she thinks need to be done, too. She is all kinds of awesome. We pay $130/visit. I think she spends about 5 hours. Suburban DC area.