Hiring a cleaner: privately, or through a company

Most people looking for a cleaner in Maastricht compare an hourly rate and stop there. That is a fair instinct and it hides the real decision, because the two options are not the same product at a different price — they are two different arrangements, with the risk sitting in different places. Hiring someone privately is entirely legal here; the Netherlands has a rule designed to make it so. What that rule does not do is remove the obligations that come with it, and those are the part almost nobody is told about.

What you are actually choosing between

There is a real choice here and it is not obvious. On one side: you find someone, agree an hourly rate, and they come on Tuesdays. Simple, personal, usually cheaper on paper, and for a great many households it works perfectly well for years. On the other: a company sends someone, and the rate carries a set of things you never handle yourself.

What follows is not an argument that one is right. It is what each one contains, so the comparison is a real one. We will say plainly where the private route is the better answer.

The rule that makes private hiring legal

The Netherlands has a specific arrangement for this: the Regeling dienstverlening aan huis, introduced in 2007 to bring domestic work above board rather than to push it underground. In outline, it applies when a private individual hires another private individual for household work in or around the home for fewer than four days a week.

Under it, you do not have to withhold payroll tax or social insurance contributions for that person. This is the part everybody knows, and it is genuinely a simplification. It is also the only part most households are ever told.

What being an employer quietly means

The exemption is from withholding, not from being an employer. Under the same rule, the household is expected to:

• pay at least the statutory minimum wage;
• pay 8% holiday allowance on top;
• give paid holiday — four times the weekly hours, each year;
• continue paying wages during illness, for up to six weeks;
• provide a safe and healthy place to work.

Read that list again with an ordinary arrangement in mind — someone who comes three hours a week, cash or bank transfer, no paperwork. Most such arrangements do not include holiday allowance or sick pay, because neither side knew they were part of it. That is not dishonesty on anyone’s part. It is simply not widely known.

It matters because the obligation does not disappear by being unmentioned.

“But we never signed anything”

This is the sentence almost everyone reaches for, and it is the one that helps least. In the Netherlands an employment contract exists the moment three things are true at once: someone does work, they are paid for it, and they work under your direction. Nothing has to be signed. Nothing has to be printed. “Come on Tuesdays, this is the hourly rate” is already a valid arbeidsovereenkomst.

So there is no such thing as having a cleaner and having no contract. There is only having one you never wrote down.

What the missing paperwork changes is not the obligations — those are set by law and arrive whether or not anyone mentions them. It changes who can prove what, and it removes protections that only exist on paper:

• Nothing agreed about duration means it is open-ended. You do not have a casual arrangement. You have an indefinite one.
• Some terms are valid only in writing. A probation period, a penalty clause, a notice clause — if it was never written, you simply do not have it.
• In a disagreement, the question is what can be shown. Statutory minimums are the floor and they need no proof at all; anything you believe you agreed above or below them does.

What it costs when it goes wrong

Almost all of these arrangements end quietly and well. The ones that do not tend to end at the worst moment — someone falls ill, someone is let go, someone finally looks up what they were owed — and the bill is not for last month. It reaches backwards.

Two of those surprise people. The first is the five-year reach: an unpaid holiday allowance is not a small annual oversight, it is 8% of everything you have paid that person for as long as five years, claimable in one go. The second is transition compensation — as of 1 January 2020 it is owed from the first working day rather than after two years, at a third of a month’s pay for each year worked. Four years of Tuesdays is well over a month’s pay, due when the arrangement ends.

None of this is a reason to be frightened of hiring someone privately. It is a reason to spend twenty minutes writing down what you agreed — which costs nothing, protects the person doing the work exactly as much as it protects you, and removes almost every dispute before it can start.

Who is covered when something goes wrong

Two exposures sit on the household in a private arrangement, and both are easy to overlook until the day they are not.

If the person working in your home is injured. The duty to provide a safe workplace is yours. A fall from a chair used as a step, a slip on a wet floor, a back injury lifting furniture — these happen in ordinary houses. Under this route the worker is not insured through you for sickness, disability or unemployment. They can arrange voluntary cover with UWV, but many do not, and the question of who bears the cost then lands between you.

If something of yours is damaged. A private individual generally carries no liability cover for work in someone else’s home. If a vacuum takes a chip out of a skirting board, or the wrong product marks a stone worktop, there is no policy behind it — only a conversation between two people who probably like each other, which is precisely why it is an uncomfortable one.

Through a company both of these are somebody else’s problem by design. We are insured for liability and registered with the Chamber of Commerce (KvK 86396862); if we damage something, that is ours to put right, and nobody has to have an awkward conversation about it.

Illness, holidays and the week it does not happen

This is the difference households notice first in practice, long before any of the legal points come up.

One person is one person. When they are ill, on holiday, moving house or simply have a difficult month, the cleaning does not happen — and you owe pay for the sick weeks regardless. Over a year that is typically several missed visits, usually clustered at the least convenient moment.

A company covers the visit. That is most of what the difference in rate is buying, and it is the reason offices, holiday lets and anyone with a fixed handover use companies almost without exception: an Airbnb changeover cannot be postponed a week because one person has flu.

There is also the quiet question of equipment and products — and they are two different questions, which is worth being precise about because plenty of companies are not.

Equipment is ours. Machines, cloths, the vacuum, replacing it all when it wears out — that sits inside the rate, and it is commercial equipment rather than domestic. In a private arrangement the household usually supplies all of that and replaces it.

Products depend on the job, and we would rather say so than round it up. On a regular cleaning plan you supply the products, which is precisely why the plan rate is lower than a one-off; we bring ours on request for an agreed extra charge. On a one-time job — a deep clean, a move-out, after a party — we always bring them, included in the price. For businesses it is optional and agreed in the quote. If you have allergies or delicate surfaces, tell us and we use what you prefer.

Comparing the two prices honestly

Compare the hourly figures alone and the private route wins every time. That comparison is not wrong so much as incomplete. To make it real, add to the private rate:

Done properly, the gap narrows a great deal — and for a business customer it closes entirely, because a business needs the VAT invoice and cannot use this rule at all. The Regeling is for private households only.

Our own plan rates are published rather than quoted case by case, on the price list. If you want to understand what drives those figures generally in this city, that is a separate article.

Which one actually fits you

Hiring privately is the better answer when you have found someone you trust and want a long personal relationship; your hours are small and regular; you are relaxed about occasional missed weeks; and you are willing to set the arrangement up properly — written agreement, holiday allowance, paid leave, sick pay. Done that way it is a good arrangement and a fair one. Many households in Maastricht run it happily for years.

A company fits better when the visit genuinely has to happen — a rental changeover, an office, a handover date; when you would rather not be an employer; when you want the work checked rather than assumed; or when you simply do not want to manage it. Ours is checked in on site with an NFC tag and every finished area is photographed and reviewed before the job is called done, which exists so that "was it actually cleaned properly?" has an answer that is not a matter of opinion. Details on home cleaning and how we work.

Frequently asked questions