The short answer
- "Insured" can cover damage to your home, injury to the cleaner, or the company’s own kit — ask which.
- The one that matters to you is liability for damage caused while working in your home.
- Being registered (a KvK number you can look up) is a separate question from being insured. Ask both.
- In an informal arrangement, the risk usually lands on the householder — that is the real cost of the cheaper hourly rate.
- Ask for the KvK number, confirmation of liability cover, and what the company does in the first hour after a breakage.
What’s in this guide
Every cleaning company in the country says it. It appears on websites next to a tick, it gets said in the doorway, and almost nobody asks what it means — which is a shame, because it can mean three quite different things, and only one of them is about your broken lamp. This is a plain-language explanation of the shape of it. It is not insurance advice, and we are deliberately not quoting policy terms or amounts at you: the useful thing is knowing which questions produce a real answer.
A phrase that means nothing on its own
"Fully insured" is not a legal category. It is a marketing sentence, and a perfectly honest company and a completely uncovered one can both write it without lying to themselves. The phrase only becomes useful when you ask the follow-up: insured for what?
There is no such thing as being insured in general. There is only being insured for a particular thing happening to a particular person.
The three different things it can mean
When a cleaning company says it is insured, it is usually pointing at one of these. They protect different people.
- Liability for damage caused while working. The cleaner knocks the lamp off the sideboard; this is the cover that deals with the lamp. This is the one that protects you, and it is the one to ask about by name.
- Cover for the people doing the work. Someone slips on your stairs. This protects the cleaner, and indirectly protects you from being the person a claim is made against.
- Cover for the company’s own equipment and business. Useful to them, irrelevant to you, and frequently what is actually meant.
None of these is dishonest to advertise. But if the lamp goes over and the answer turns out to be the third one, the phrase did not do what you thought it did.
Registered is not the same as insured
These two get bundled together and they are separate facts. In the Netherlands, a real business has a KvK number, and you can look it up yourself in a few seconds — it tells you the company exists, under that name, and has not just been invented for a leaflet. What it does not tell you is whether there is a policy behind it.
So ask for both, plainly: the registration number, and confirmation that there is liability cover for work carried out in a customer’s home. Neither question should cause any hesitation. Ours is KvK 86396862, and we are insured for exactly that.
What actually happens when something breaks
Things break. Anyone who tells you otherwise has either never cleaned professionally or is not telling you about the week they did. What separates companies is not whether it happens but what happens in the hour afterwards.
The version you want is simple and unglamorous: the cleaner tells you the same day, before you find it yourself. There is a photograph. Somebody who is not the cleaner contacts you about it. And there is a route to putting it right that does not depend on how good you are at arguing.
The version you do not want is the one where a small thing is quietly moved to the back of a shelf, and you find it three weeks later and now have no idea when it happened or who to ask. That is not really an insurance failure. It is a culture failure, and it is visible long before anything breaks — in whether the company tells you about small problems at all.
It is one of the reasons every finished area in our visits is photographed before the job is called done: a photograph taken at the time is also a record of what was intact at the time. You can read the mechanics on how we work.
The informal arrangement problem
A lot of cleaning in the Netherlands is arranged privately and paid in cash, and the hourly rate is lower for a reason that is rarely spelled out: the arrangement has moved the risk onto the householder.
If there is no company, there is usually no company policy. If somebody is hurt in your home, the question of who is responsible lands with you and your own insurer. If something is damaged, there is no process at all — only two people in a kitchen trying to agree on the value of a bowl.
None of that makes a private arrangement wrong. Plenty of households run one happily for years. But the difference in the hourly rate is not a discount; it is a price for accepting a risk, and it is worth knowing that before rather than after. We wrote about the whole trade-off in hiring a cleaner privately or through a company.
What a good company tells you before you ask
There is a useful signal that costs you nothing to watch for: what a company volunteers.
Good ones tell you, unprompted, that they are registered and insured, because it is one of the few things that distinguishes them from the person who put a card through your door. They tell you what happens if a cleaner is ill, because they have had to answer it before. And they tell you about small problems while they are still small — a cracked tile they noticed, a tap that has started dripping, a blind that is coming away from its bracket.
That last habit is the one to weigh most heavily. A company that reports the things that are not its fault will certainly report the things that are. A company that has never mentioned a single imperfection in your home in a year is either extraordinarily lucky or is not telling you things.
Four things to ask for, in one message
- The KvK number. One line, and you can check it yourself.
- Confirmation of liability cover for work in a customer’s home — not "we are insured", but insured for that.
- What happens in the first hour after something is damaged. Ask them to describe it. The answer tells you whether it has ever happened.
- Who to contact if it does — the cleaner, or someone else? "Tell the cleaner" is not a process.
Any company that finds these questions awkward has told you something. Any company that answers them in two sentences has told you something better.
Frequently asked questions
Should I claim on my own home insurance if a cleaner breaks something?
Speak to the company first — where there is liability cover, this is what it is for. Involving your own insurer for something somebody else caused can affect your position, and it is worth asking before rather than after. Your insurer can tell you how it works for your policy.
Is a company that is not insured necessarily bad?
Not necessarily, and plenty of good people work that way. It does mean the risk sits somewhere else — usually with you — so it should be a decision you have made rather than one you have discovered.
What if the damage is my own fault, like a shelf that was already loose?
Then say so. It is far more common than people think, and a company that has been told honestly will usually deal with it well. Hiding it helps nobody, including you, because the next person to touch the shelf is likely to be a cleaner again.
Do I need to prove something was intact before?
You should not have to, but it makes everything easier, which is why a company that photographs its own work is useful to you and not just to itself.
What about my valuables — should I put them away?
For genuinely irreplaceable things, yes, and nobody sensible will be offended. It is the same instinct as moving a laptop before the decorators come: not suspicion, just a sensible way to keep an accident from becoming a loss.
