Who counts as your house cleaner’s employer?

By Eric, KindHow founder · Last reviewed August 2026

The short answer

IRS Publication 926 names housecleaning workers among the jobs it covers, then settles who is whose employer with a single question: who controls not just what gets done, but how it gets done. sourced Book through a cleaning service and you almost certainly owe nothing. Hire someone directly and direct their work yourself, and crossing $3,000 in a year makes you a household employer — with Social Security and Medicare tax attached.

The rule, in its own words

Publication 926 lays out three arrangements, and reaches a different answer for each one — none of which turns on the dollar amount: sourced

“If an agency provides the worker and controls what work is done and how it is done, the worker isn’t your employee.”

“If only the worker can control how the work is done, the worker isn’t your employee but is self-employed.”

“The worker is your employee if you can control not only what work is done, but how it is done.”

Only the third arrangement makes you an employer under this test — and only then does the dollar threshold start to matter: cash wages of $3,000 or more in 2026 to that one worker means you owe 7.65% in Social Security and Medicare tax on top of what you paid them, matched by the same share withheld from their pay. sourced A separate, lower test runs alongside it: $1,000 in cash wages in any single calendar quarter also triggers federal unemployment tax, typically at an effective 0.6% after the standard state credit. sourced

The part that surprises people

Two households can spend the identical amount on cleaning in a year and land on opposite sides of this line, because the amount was never the test. Book a cleaner through a service and tell them nothing about how to do the job, and you can spend $10,000 a year and owe nothing under this rule — the agency is the employer, and its control over the work is what excuses you. Hire someone directly, hand them your own supplies and your own schedule for how the rooms get done, and $3,001 a year is enough to make you a household employer, with the tax attached. house judgment— the two thresholds and the three-way test are Pub 926’s; applying them side by side to the same annual spend is our framing, not the IRS’s own example.

The middle arrangement — a direct hire who runs their own cleaning business, sets their own methods, and works for other households too — owes you nothing either. They are self-employed, and carry their own tax obligation (15.3% self-employment tax on 92.35% of their net earnings) rather than you carrying an employer’s share of it. sourced

What this doesn’t mean

• It isn’t a loophole to route around the tax by booking through an agency on paper. The test is actual control over the work, not which name is on the invoice — the IRS applies it to the real facts of the arrangement.
• It doesn’t mean a self-employed cleaner owes nothing.They carry self-employment tax on their own return; what changes is that it’s theirs to carry, not yours.
• It isn’t the only threshold that can apply. The $1,000-a-quarter federal unemployment test runs independently of the $3,000 annual one, and some states layer their own household-employer rules on top — both out of scope for this guide.

Sources

• IRS Publication 926 — Household Employer’s Tax Guide — the three-way control test, the $3,000 threshold, the 7.65% rate and the $1,000-a-quarter FUTA test quoted above.
• IRS — Self-Employment Tax (Social Security and Medicare Taxes) — the 15.3% rate on 92.35% of net earnings for a self-employed cleaner.

Informational only. This guide reports IRS Publication 926 as published and labels our own reasoning as ours. It is not tax or legal advice — employee status is a facts-and-circumstances test the IRS decides, and state rules are out of scope entirely. Last reviewed: August 2026.

More on how KindHow separates a source from a house call: the published methodology. Every guide is listed on the guides index.