There's a moment in a good round where the diary is full and the enquiries keep coming. You start turning work away, which feels wrong every time, and someone says the obvious thing: take somebody on.
Then the questions land, and none of them are about cleaning. Can you just pay them self-employed? What insurance do you need? What's left once you've paid them?
All of it is sortable, most of it in an afternoon. Nobody puts it in one place, so here it is.
Can you just take someone on as self-employed?
Most advice treats "take them on self-employed" as the easy option you pick, because it sounds like less admin. Employed or self-employed describes what's really going on between you, and HMRC decides whether it's true by looking at what happens, not what you called it.
The Health and Safety Executive puts it plainly:
"Whether you choose to call your contract a contract of employment or a contract for services is largely irrelevant. What matters is the real nature of your relationship with the people who work for you and the nature and degree of control that you have over the work they do."
That's written about insurance, and the same control logic runs through the tax question. Tell someone which house, what time and how you want it cleaned, and you're describing control, which looks like an employee whatever either of you signed. Someone genuinely self-employed works for others too, brings their own kit, and can send somebody else in their place.
Getting it wrong is expensive in a nasty way, because HMRC can look back at what you should have been paying all along. HMRC's free Check Employment Status for Tax tool asks what the job really looks like and stands by the answer, as long as what you told it is accurate. Where it's borderline, seek legal advice.
Do you need employers' liability insurance?
If they're an employee, yes, and it isn't optional. Public liability, the cover you hold for working in people's homes, is a different thing and won't do the job.
You must be insured for at least £5 million, and you can be fined up to £2,500 for any day you're without suitable cover. That's per day, which is how a slow start turns into a serious bill.
One exception: if everyone working for you is close family and you're not a limited company, you may be exempt. Go limited and that exemption falls away.
What's left for you after you've paid them?
Say a client pays you £20 an hour and you pay your cleaner £13. The sum:
- Holiday. Everyone gets 5.6 weeks' paid holiday. On hourly work that's usually reckoned as 12.07% of the hours worked, so £13 becomes about £14.57.
- Pension. If they're 22 or over and earning over £10,000 a year, you must enrol them and put in at least 3%. Call it another 39p an hour.
- Employer's National Insurance. 15% on anything over £5,000 a year, which sounds brutal. For most first hires it comes to £0, because the Employment Allowance knocks up to £10,500 off the bill. Check you qualify, because it changes the answer completely.
So roughly £15 an hour of cost against £20 coming in. About £5 is yours, before insurance, admin time and the odd bit of kit.
That's a smaller slice than most people picture, and it's the trade: less per clean, more cleans, and a business that grows past one pair of hands.
What you must sort before their first day
All 5 are legal duties, and they're the ones people find out about late.
- Check they're allowed to work in the UK. Before they start, every time, and never by judging accent or appearance. Skip it and you lose your defence if it turns out they can't: the penalty runs to £45,000 per worker for a first breach.
- Give them a written statement of their main terms, on or before day one. It covers workers, not just employees.
- Register as an employer with HMRC before the first payday, or you can't legally pay them. You can register up to 2 months ahead.
- Sort the pension. Your duties start the day you take them on, and you have 5 months to tell the regulator you've complied.
- Get the employers' liability cover in place, per above.
None of it is hard. All of it is worse after they've started.
How do you keep the standard up when it's not your hands?
Your reputation is in somebody else's hands from day one, and clients rarely tell you when a clean slips. They quietly find someone else.
Write down what each job involves, because a vague idea of the job turns into a vague clean. Spot-check early, while it's still a conversation rather than a complaint. And hand your best clients over last, because the person you train up can leave and take them with them.
The bit worth remembering
One last thing that catches people out: solo, the round lives in your memory and you know Tuesday without looking. 2 people can't share a memory, so the week has to move somewhere you can both see it before day one.
The first hire is where a round becomes a business, and it turns on the boring stuff settled up front: the right status, the right cover, a margin you've worked out, and the legal bits done before their first clean. Get those right and the rest is just work you already know how to do.