The Job That Sees It: The Housekeeper
The Million Dollar Question: A house cleaner works two hours a week for each of six different families, at $25 an hour. No single one of them pays her enough in a year to owe Social Security tax on her wages. Federal law has a second, independent route that guarantees her the federal minimum wage anyway: her hours across all those homes, added together, passing a threshold in a single week. What is the threshold?
A) More than 8 hours B) More than 20 hours C) More than 30 hours D) There is no second route — the test is a dollar amount onlyRead on for the answer.
The butler had five published salaries that disagreed by a factor of two. The housekeeper has the opposite problem, and it is the more interesting one.
Here the sources agree. Salary.com says $30,921. PayScale says $15.30 an hour, Indeed $16.17. ZipRecruiter, asked specifically about a private housekeeper, says $33,933. The federal government — which, unlike with the butler, does measure this occupation — says $37,080. Put on the same annual footing — three of the five publish annual figures already; PayScale’s and Indeed’s hourly rates are annualised here at a standard work year — those five land inside a 20% spread.
Then ask a staffing agency what a family pays. The answer is $80,000 to $160,000, which begins above the 90th percentile of the federal occupation and runs to more than three times its average.
Both can be true at once, and that is the finding. The occupation is defined to cover both kinds of workplace: the Standard Occupational Classification describes Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners as performing light cleaning “to maintain private households or commercial establishments, such as hotels and hospitals.” One word, two labour markets, by design — and the federal survey that prices the occupation so carefully is then barred by rule from entering one of them.
So this is not an argument that the published numbers are wrong. It is an argument that none of them can tell you what a private household pays, in either direction, and that knowing which question each figure answers is most of the value anyone will get out of them.
Housekeeper salary: the numbers, and what each one is counting
| Source | Figure | What it is | As of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salary.com | $30,921 | National average, also given as the median | 1 Oct 2026 |
| PayScale | $15.30/hr | Average hourly, 1,839 salary profiles | page updated 2 Jul 2026 |
| Indeed | $16.17/hr | Average base, from job postings over 36 months | 19 Oct 2026 |
| ZipRecruiter (private housekeeper) | $33,933 | National average, postings and third-party data | 8 Aug 2026 |
| BLS OEWS (maids and housekeeping cleaners) | $37,080 | Annual mean, 860,670 workers surveyed | May 2025 |
| Glassdoor | $43,486 | Average total pay, 50 self-reported salaries | newest entry 8 Sep 2026 |
At 2,080 hours, PayScale’s hourly works out to $31,824 and Indeed’s to $33,634 — this piece’s arithmetic, though the BLS annual figures are built the same way, by multiplying an hourly wage by a 2,080-hour year. Five of the six then sit between $30,921 and $37,080, a spread of 1.20 times. Only Glassdoor’s $43,486, on fifty self-reported salaries, breaks the cluster, widening the full range to 1.41 — still inside the butler’s 1.93.
Then look at what Salary.com publishes beside its own headline. Its related-titles list prices eleven variants of the word, and the ordering is the story:
| Title | Salary.com figure |
|---|---|
| Head Housekeeper | $101,617 |
| Lead Housekeeper | $99,089 |
| Housekeeper Manager | $71,514 |
| Housekeeper Supervisor | $39,462 |
| Private Housekeeper | $32,205 |
| Assistant Housekeeper | $30,540 |
| Cleaner Housekeeper | $30,283 |
| Hotel Housekeeper | $30,132 |
| Personal Housekeeper | $29,681 |
| Live In Housekeeper | $27,955 |
| Domestic Housekeeper | $27,888 |
The three lowest-priced titles on the entire list — domestic, live-in, personal — all describe working in somebody’s home. Add “private housekeeper” at $32,205 and the four household-specific variants average $29,432. “Live In Housekeeper” is priced $2,177 below “Hotel Housekeeper.” And “Head Housekeeper,” at $101,617, is 3.29 times the plain housekeeper it supervises.
That last ratio is the mirror image of the butler page, where Salary.com put the head butler $14,318 below the butler. One reading — this piece’s, not the site’s, which markets its figures as employer-reported and HR-verified — is that a title-matching system is sorting ads by words rather than by work: in the butler’s case dragging the senior title down into hotel shift work, here pulling “head housekeeper” up into hotel executive-housekeeping management, a real and well-paid department-head job. What is not in dispute is that the list, taken at face value, says a live-in housekeeper in a private home earns less than almost anyone else who shares her job title.
Indeed’s page carries its own tell. Its list of best-paying employers for “housekeeper” is led by Elijah House at $468,000, with five more between $150,000 and $405,600 — the top figure 13.9 times this piece’s annualisation of the hourly average on the same page, which publishes no annual figure of its own. What those postings describe, this piece cannot say, and nothing here is a claim about why any company appears on the list; but a $468,000 housekeeper and a $16.17 hourly average are not measurements of one job, and the page prints them a scroll apart. The evidence behind the table is unequal too: 96,200 salaries at Indeed, 1,839 profiles at PayScale, 50 at Glassdoor.
Half the job is in a hotel
Unlike the butler, the housekeeper is in the federal classification. Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners, SOC 37-2012 is one of the largest occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics prices: 860,670 workers in the May 2025 estimates, a $37,080 annual mean, a $35,510 median and a $48,570 90th percentile. Then look at where they work.
| Industry (NAICS) | Employment in 37-2012 | Share | Annual mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accommodation (721) | 420,800 | 48.9% | $36,640 |
| Nursing and Residential Care Facilities (623) | 123,910 | 14.4% | $34,090 |
| Services to Buildings and Dwellings (5617) | 92,440 | 10.7% | $36,930 |
| Hospitals (622) | 85,570 | 9.9% | $41,990 |
| Private Households (814) | — | — | — |
Those four industries hold 84.0% of the occupation between them, and the largest by a distance is Accommodation. Almost all of it is hotels: Traveler Accommodation alone accounts for 415,160 people, 48.2% of every maid and housekeeping cleaner in the country, at a $36,670 mean and a $34,920 median. The remainder of the Accommodation line is RV parks, campgrounds and rooming houses.
The last row is the point. Private households are not a small share of this occupation in the federal data; they are absent. The OEWS technical notes say why in one line: the survey covers nonfarm establishments, and “Private households (NAICS 814) are also excluded.”
So when a reader looks up “housekeeper salary” and lands on $37,080, the number is real and carefully measured, and it describes a population in which nearly half work in traveller accommodation rather than in anyone’s home. That is what the data show; the rest — a supervisor, a cart, a room count, no employer who also owns the bed — is this piece’s characterisation of what hotel housekeeping usually involves, not a measured finding. Some private-household cleaners doubtless work on similar terms for similar money. The survey cannot tell you how many, because it is not permitted to ask their employers.
The highest federal figure anywhere near this work is the supervisory bucket: First-Line Supervisors of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers (37-1011), 178,760 people at a $53,320 mean and a $76,430 90th percentile. A 90th percentile is not a ceiling, but it still sits below the bottom of the band the one household agency cited here quotes.
How much does a housekeeper cost? The household’s side
The cost question has the better answer, for the same reason it did with the butler: the people who take a percentage publish their figures.
Morgan & Mallet’s housekeeper page, drawing on the firm’s 2025/26 Household Staff Annual Report, puts US private housekeeper salaries at:
| Market | Band |
|---|---|
| New York | $90,000 – $160,000 |
| Los Angeles | $80,000 – $130,000 |
| San Francisco | up to $125,000 |
On top of that, the firm says head housekeepers running a team earn 20% to 30% more, and housekeepers who travel with the family command 25% to 40% above standard rates. Live-in roles carry a lower base plus accommodation, meals and utilities the firm values at $20,000 to $40,000 a year.
Hold the New York floor of $90,000 against the federal 90th percentile of $48,570. The lowest figure in the agency’s lowest band is $41,430 above the point beyond which only one measured housekeeper in ten is paid — 85.3% higher, this piece’s arithmetic. Against Salary.com’s “Private Housekeeper” estimate of $32,205, the Los Angeles midpoint of $105,000 is 3.26 times as much.
What is the household buying for the difference? On the agency’s description of its candidate pool, experience of a particular kind of house rather than of cleaning: 83% of its US candidates have worked in homes that employ other staff and 45% already operate at head-housekeeper level. That is a specification for someone who can work inside an existing staff structure — alongside an estate manager, a nanny, a chef — without being managed. It is the premium the rest of this series keeps finding: not skill at the task, but the capacity to be in the house.
Now the costs that are not the salary. Take the Los Angeles midpoint of $105,000 and rebuild it from primary rates:
| Line | Amount | Source of the rate |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | $105,000 | the agency’s band midpoint |
| Employer social security and Medicare, 7.65% | $8,033 | IRS Pub. 926 |
| Federal unemployment tax, 0.6% of first $7,000 | $42 | IRS Pub. 926 |
| Health cover, single, full annual premium | $9,804 | KFF 2026 survey |
| Annual total | $122,879 |
That is 17.0% above the salary, this piece’s addition, before state unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, a payroll service, bonuses or a car. The whole $105,000 sits inside the 2026 social security wage base of $184,500, so the 7.65% applies to all of it. A placement fee lands on top in year one, and its size is not public: the firm publishes no fee schedule, saying only that its fees are contract-based and vary with the role.
One caution about advice aimed at families. A 2026 staffing guide opens with a housekeeper “national average” of $33,933 — ZipRecruiter’s private-housekeeper figure, to the dollar — then fairly notes it is dragged down by part-time and hotel-adjacent listings, and quotes full-time private metro roles at $25 to $35 an hour. It also lists ZipRecruiter, Salary.com and Morgan & Mallet among its sources. There is less daylight between the “independent” figures and the agency ones than it looks. On this one example, at least, published guidance on household pay recirculates the same handful of inputs; how general that is, this piece cannot say.
The answer is A: more than eight hours
The answer is A — more than eight hours, in the aggregate, in a single workweek; exactly eight does not do it. It is one of the few places where federal law reaches the house cleaner the wage data cannot see — provided she is an employee rather than an independent contractor, which the economic-realities test decides, not the label the household uses.
Domestic service is not unregulated. 29 CFR § 552.3 defines domestic service employment as “services of a household nature performed by an employee in or about a private home (permanent or temporary),” and names the jobs: “companions, babysitters, cooks, waiters, butlers, valets, maids, housekeepers, nannies, nurses, janitors, laundresses, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, home health aides, personal care aides, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use.” Housekeepers, maids and laundresses are all in the regulation by name. Being named is not the same as being covered — the same list includes companions and casual babysitters, whom FLSA § 13(a)(15) exempts from both minimum wage and overtime when the household employs them directly — but for housekeeping work the wage and hour floor does reach into the home. It is the workplace that the wage survey will not enter.
The coverage test is in the statute, at 29 U.S.C. § 206(f), and it has two independent routes. Under (f)(1), a domestic worker is owed the federal minimum wage if her pay counts as wages for Social Security purposes — in practice the $3,000-a-year-from-one-employer threshold that IRS Publication 926 sets for 2026. Under (f)(2), she is owed it anyway if she “is employed in domestic service in one or more households” and “is so employed for more than 8 hours in the aggregate” in a workweek.
The second route is the one that matters for the job as most people do it. A cleaner working two hours a week for each of six families at $25 an hour fails the first test six times over — no single household pays her $3,000 in the year — and clears the second before she finishes her third house. Hours across all the homes, added together.
Overtime is the asymmetry. § 552.100(a)(2) requires time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a week for the same employer, “unless the employee is one who resides in the employer’s household” — for live-ins, section 13(b)(21) of the Fair Labor Standards Act gives “an overtime, but not a minimum wage, exemption.” A live-out housekeeper working 55 hours is owed overtime on fifteen of them. A live-in housekeeper employed directly by the family and working the same 55 is not.
That exemption is narrower than it looks. § 552.109(c) provides that third-party employers of live-in domestic service employees “may not avail themselves of the overtime exemption,” even where the worker is jointly employed — though the household, “even if considered a joint employer, is still entitled to assert” it. A live-in employed by an agency keeps her federal overtime; one on the family’s own payroll does not.
State law closes some of that. New York’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights pays live-in overtime after 44 hours rather than never, guarantees one 24-hour rest period every seven days, and after a year with the same employer requires at least three paid days off a year. Three.
Living in: three answers to what a room is worth
Nothing illustrates the measurement problem better than asking what the room is worth. Three institutions answer, and they are not within an order of magnitude of each other.
The agency says $20,000 to $40,000. That is Morgan & Mallet’s valuation of accommodation, meals and utilities for a live-in, and the figure a candidate weighs against a lower base.
The Labor Department says $54.38 a week. § 552.100(d) provides that for “lodging furnished to live-in domestic service employees,” the Administrator “will accept a credit taken by the employer of up to seven and one-half times the statutory minimum hourly wage for each week lodging is furnished.” At the $7.25 federal minimum that is $54.375 a week, or $2,827.50 a year — 9.4% of the midpoint of the agency’s valuation. The meal credits at § 552.100(c) run to 37.5%, 50% and 62.5% of the minimum wage for breakfast, lunch and dinner, capped at 150% a day: $2.72, $3.63, $4.53 and $10.88.
The Internal Revenue Service says nothing at all. Under Publication 926, noncash items such as food and lodging are not subject to social security or Medicare taxes; meals furnished at the employer’s home for the employer’s convenience are excluded from wages, and lodging is excluded where it is furnished at the employer’s home for the employer’s convenience and as a condition of employment. For federal employment-tax purposes the room is worth zero.
These answer different questions — a market valuation, a ceiling on an offset against the minimum wage, a tax exclusion. But a live-in negotiating her base against her board is pricing something the Labor Department will let an employer count as $54.38 a week towards its minimum-wage obligation, the IRS will treat as no wages at all, and the offer letter will describe as worth $30,000.
The hours rule bends the same way. § 552.102 lets a live-in and her employer agree to exclude sleeping time, meal time and “other periods of complete freedom from all duties” — provided those periods are long enough “to enable the employee to make effective use of the time,” and that any interruption “by a call to duty” is counted back in. It is a sensible rule and a hard one to enforce in a house with no time clock, which is why the regulation adds that on “a significant deviation from the initial agreement, the parties should reach a new agreement.”
The one federal number that sees the household, and what it is not
There is a federal dataset built from household employers, and for the housekeeper it points the wrong way. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages is an administrative count drawn from state unemployment-insurance records, and it carries an industry code for the employer: NAICS 814110, Private Households. Its 2025 annual averages for the United States:
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Establishments (household employers) | 190,606 | 184,901 |
| Average employment | 208,560 | 205,372 |
| Total annual wages | $8.88bn | $9.08bn |
| Average weekly wage | $819 | $850 |
| Average annual pay | $42,588 | $44,222 |
$44,222 is higher than every national-average housekeeper figure in this piece — 43.0% above Salary.com’s $30,921, 19.3% above the federal occupational mean of $37,080, and above even Glassdoor’s $43,486, this piece’s arithmetic. The one dataset assembled from actual household payrolls pays more than every commercial aggregator in this piece, and more than the federal occupational survey.
That is suggestive rather than conclusive. Households that register for unemployment insurance are not a random sample of households that employ someone: they skew towards full-time, metropolitan, higher-paying, payroll-service-using employers — exactly the ones whose staff would be paid above the aggregate anyway. The inversion is consistent with the aggregators missing private-household work, and equally consistent with the registered households simply being the well-paying ones. Both are probably true.
What it certainly cannot do is stand in for a housekeeper’s pay. QCEW counts every kind of household employee together — nannies, cooks, drivers, carers, estate managers — with no occupational mix published for the code. It records 1.11 employees per establishment, so the average household employer on the rolls has one member of staff, not a head housekeeper and three under-housekeepers. And it sees only the households that register: BLS says QCEW covers “more than 95 percent of U.S. jobs” but excludes “certain farm and domestic workers from having to report employment data,” without specifying which.
For scale on what is missing from all of it, the Economic Policy Institute’s Domestic Workers Chartbook 2022, built from Current Population Survey microdata, counts 304,557 house cleaners in data pooled over 2019–2021, at a median hourly wage of $13.04 in 2021 dollars; on an older 2016–2018 pool, a 25.4% poverty rate and employer health insurance for 7.3% of them. Those are five- to ten-year-old figures from a different programme and cannot be lined up arithmetically against anything else here. But they describe the part of the trade that the agencies, the aggregators and the unemployment-insurance rolls all mostly miss.
Which gives this job two ends and a crowded, ambiguous middle. At one end, the 304,557 house cleaners the CPS could find in 2019–2021 at a $13.04 median hourly wage. At the other, a New York band topping out at $160,000. In between, 860,670 federally surveyed maids and housekeeping cleaners averaging $37,080 — the figure everybody quotes, and the one that cannot tell you which end of the market a household is hiring in.
What people get wrong
That the agreement between the sources means they are right. Five figures inside a 20% spread looks like convergence. It is better read as a shared blind spot: the occupation is defined to span private homes and hotels, and the biggest datasets are weighted towards the side with more postings, employers and payroll records. Agreement about an ambiguous question is not an answer.
That the BLS number covers private homes. It is a careful national estimate of 860,670 people, and the OEWS technical notes state that private households, NAICS 814, are excluded from the survey. Nearly half the workers inside it are in Traveler Accommodation.
That the agency band is what households pay. It is what one firm publishes as its salary bands, in three expensive metros, for full-time staff of the kind it places — 83% of its candidates having previously worked in homes that employ other staff — the top of household employment, not its average, reported by a firm with a commercial interest in the number.
That “live-in” is a benefit. The agency that places live-in housekeepers values the accommodation at $20,000 to $40,000 a year. The Labor Department will accept an employer crediting itself $54.38 a week for it. The IRS treats it as no wages at all. And a live-in on the family’s own payroll gives up the federal overtime right her live-out colleague keeps — though one employed by an agency does not, under 29 CFR § 552.109(c).
That a few hours a week falls outside the law. It does not. Under 29 U.S.C. § 206(f)(2), more than eight hours of domestic work in a week, across one or more households combined, triggers the federal minimum wage regardless of whether any single employer crosses the $3,000 Social Security threshold.
That the cost is the salary. Employer payroll tax and single health cover put a $105,000 Los Angeles post at about $122,900 a year before state unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, a payroll service or any agency fee.
Bottom line
The housekeeper is the job in this series where the public data is at its best and least useful at once. The federal government surveys the occupation properly, publishes percentiles, breaks it out by industry — and the one industry a wealthy family represents is the single line the survey is not permitted to contain.
What the job pays, as best the record shows: $30,921 to $43,486 across the commercial aggregators in 2026; $37,080 as the May 2025 federal mean for 860,670 maids and housekeeping cleaners, 48.9% of them in accommodation and none of them in a private home; $44,222 as the 2025 average pay at household employers registered for unemployment insurance, across every kind of household job; $13.04 an hour as the 2019–2021 median for the 304,557 house cleaners the Current Population Survey could find; and $80,000 to $160,000 as one agency’s published 2025/26 private-household salary bands for three expensive cities.
Those are not five estimates of one number. They are five populations, and the disagreement between them is information rather than noise: it marks out how wide the range of real arrangements is, from four hours a week paid in cash to a salaried post in a house with a staff rota. What no figure here will give you is the thing people actually search for — what a household pays a housekeeper. The occupation was defined to span two labour markets, the survey that measures it best is barred from half of them, and the only source built on household placements alone has a commercial interest in the numbers it publishes. So ask the narrower question: full-time or by the hour, one house or six, live-in or not, and in which city. Each number above answers one of those. None answers all four.
Methods and sources.
Federal occupational data. Figures for Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners (SOC 37-2012) and First-Line Supervisors of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers (SOC 37-1011) are May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates, the most recent available, retrieved from the BLS time-series file oe.data.0.Current (national, cross-industry, all ownerships) on 30 October 2026 and checked against the OEWS profile tool. For 37-2012: employment 860,670, hourly mean $17.83, annual mean $37,080, hourly median $17.07, annual median $35,510, annual 10th percentile $27,640 and annual 90th percentile $48,570. For 37-1011: employment 178,760, annual mean $53,320, annual median $49,100, annual 90th percentile $76,430. Two features of OEWS annual figures are worth stating because this piece flags its own annualisations elsewhere: the programme’s technical notes explain that an annual wage is itself calculated by multiplying the hourly wage by a 2,080-hour year, so the BLS annual numbers are a conversion on the same convention; and a “May 2025” estimate pools six semiannual collection panels running from November 2022 to May 2025, wage-updated to the reference period, rather than observing a single month. Industry detail for 37-2012 is from the same source: Accommodation (NAICS 721000) 420,800 at a $36,640 mean; within it, Traveler Accommodation (721100) 415,160 at a $36,670 mean and a $34,920 annual median; Nursing and Residential Care Facilities (623000) 123,910 at $34,090; Services to Buildings and Dwellings (561700) 92,440 at $36,930; Hospitals (622000, all ownerships) 85,570 at $41,990, of which privately owned hospitals (622005) are 72,840 at $42,500. The shares — 48.9% for Accommodation, 48.2% for Traveler Accommodation alone, 14.4%, 10.7%, 9.9% and 84.0% for the four largest combined — are this piece’s arithmetic on those employment counts against the 860,670 national total. OEWS industry categories nest at different levels of aggregation, so the four industries summed for the 84.0% figure are Accommodation, Nursing and Residential Care Facilities, Services to Buildings and Dwellings and Hospitals, counted once each, with Traveler Accommodation not added alongside the Accommodation total that contains it. Private households do not appear in the occupation’s industry breakdown because they are outside the survey: the OEWS technical notes state that the survey covers wage and salary workers in nonfarm establishments and that “Private households (NAICS 814) are also excluded,” along with the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers and unpaid family workers. That exclusion, and not an inference about how any employer classifies anyone, is the basis for every statement here that the federal wage survey does not price household work. Nothing here claims that any particular person counted in 37-2012 does or does not work in a private home. The occupation’s definition — light cleaning duties “to maintain private households or commercial establishments, such as hotels and hospitals” — is the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification wording as published by O*NET; that both workplaces are named in the definition while one is excluded from the survey is the structural point the piece rests on.
Commercial aggregators, quoted with the dates each page gives itself, retrieved 30 October 2026. Salary.com: $30,921 given as both average and median, with percentiles of $26,835, $28,782, $30,921, $33,631 and $36,098, as of 1 October 2026; the page describes its data as drawn from employer job postings and third-party sources and states no sample size. Salary.com markets its data as employer-reported and HR-verified; that characterisation is paraphrased here rather than quoted, because the exact banner wording was not re-captured on the retrieval date. Its “as of” date is the page’s own; its related-title figures carry no separate dates. The eleven related-title figures — Head Housekeeper $101,617, Lead Housekeeper $99,089, Housekeeper Manager $71,514, Housekeeper Supervisor $39,462, Private Housekeeper $32,205, Assistant Housekeeper $30,540, Cleaner Housekeeper $30,283, Hotel Housekeeper $30,132, Personal Housekeeper $29,681, Live In Housekeeper $27,955 and Domestic Housekeeper $27,888 — are reported as that page displays them beside its own estimate; the standalone pages for those titles were not separately retrieved, so they are not treated here as verified independent national estimates. The $29,432 average of the four household-specific titles, the $2,177 gap between Live In Housekeeper and Hotel Housekeeper, and the 3.29 ratio between Head Housekeeper and Housekeeper are this piece’s arithmetic on the figures as displayed. Ranked ascending, the eleven are Domestic $27,888, Live In $27,955, Personal $29,681, Hotel $30,132, Cleaner $30,283, Assistant $30,540, Private $32,205, Supervisor $39,462, Manager $71,514, Lead $99,089 and Head $101,617; the text’s claim is that the three lowest are all household titles, which that ordering supports, and “private housekeeper” at seventh-lowest is counted into the four-title average but not into that claim. The characterisation of the ordering as a title-matching artefact, and the suggestion that “head housekeeper” is being matched to hotel executive-housekeeping roles, are this piece’s reading and are labelled as such in the text; the comparison with the butler page’s inverted ordering refers to figures reported in this site’s butler post. PayScale: $15.30 average hourly with a 10th-to-90th range of $11.04 to $22.55, stated to rest on 1,839 salary profiles, with 2 July 2026 given as the page’s update date rather than a sample date; PayScale profiles accumulate over years, so the table labels it “page updated.” Indeed: $16.17 average base hourly with a $10.85–$24.11 range, 96.2 thousand salaries, described as taken from Indeed job postings over the past 36 months, last updated 19 October 2026; the page publishes no annual average. Its best-paying-employers list — Elijah House $468,000, Qualicare Home Care $405,600, Ultra Prime Logistics LLC $280,833, DaVita $204,370, Excellence Services LLC $175,000 and Everforth CyberCoders $150,000 — is quoted as published, with no sample sizes given on the page; the inference that a posting-derived average for this title is mixing unlike work is this piece’s, and no claim is made about why any particular company appears on that list or about what work those postings describe. ZipRecruiter: $33,933 a year and $16.31 an hour for Private Housekeeper, a stated range of about $19,000 to $54,000, a 25th percentile of about $28,000, a median of $31,000 and a 90th percentile of $42,500, as of 8 August 2026, with estimates it says are “derived from both employer job postings and third party data sources”; the page gives a 75th percentile of $34,200 in its chart and about $36,000 in its text, which is reported rather than reconciled. ZipRecruiter’s general Housekeeper page could not be retrieved and no figure from it is used. Glassdoor: $43,486 average total pay, a $43K median, a $37,121–$51,420 range, 50 salaries listed under all years of experience, a most recent visible submission dated 8 September 2026, and no methodology statement; the sample is self-selected, and the page does not explicitly state that the average rests on those 50 salaries. The annualisations of PayScale’s $15.30 to $31,824 and Indeed’s $16.17 to $33,634 apply the 2,080-hour convention and are this piece’s arithmetic, not figures either site publishes; neither job is necessarily paid for 2,080 hours. The 1.20 ratio is $37,080 ÷ $30,921 across the five non-Glassdoor figures and the 1.41 is $43,486 ÷ $30,921 across all six, both this piece’s arithmetic; the 1.93 comparison figure is from the butler post. The butler post is also the source for the $14,318 by which Salary.com’s head butler figure trailed its butler figure; neither was re-verified here. The 13.9 multiple is $468,000 ÷ $33,634, this piece’s arithmetic on an annualised average.
Agency figures are from Morgan & Mallet’s housekeeper page, which attributes them to the firm’s 2025/26 Household Staff Annual Report: New York $90,000–$160,000, Los Angeles $80,000–$130,000, San Francisco up to $125,000; head housekeepers managing teams 20%–30% above those figures; travelling housekeepers 25%–40% above standard rates; live-in roles at a lower base plus accommodation, meals and utilities the firm values at $20,000–$40,000 a year, with no live-in base band published. Candidate statistics from the same page, all firm-reported: 83% of its US candidates have worked in homes employing other staff, 45% already work at head-housekeeper level, about 20% have solid cooking experience, about 3% specialise as laundresses, and a floor of three to five years in private homes or luxury hotels. The page gives no sample size, date range or methodology for the salary bands and no placement fee; the firm’s FAQ states only that its fees are “transparent and contract-based, varying according to the type of role and employment contract,” so no fee percentage is quoted or illustrated in this piece. The firm is paid by the households it places staff with and so has a commercial interest in the salaries it reports; its bands are asking prices and placement recollections rather than measured wages. The $41,430 and 85.3% comparison between its $90,000 New York floor and the $48,570 OEWS 90th percentile is this piece’s arithmetic and is not like-for-like: one is an advertised salary in a self-selected set of placements, the other a survey percentile for an occupation in industries that exclude the employer. The $105,000 Los Angeles midpoint and the 3.26 multiple against Salary.com’s $32,205 are likewise this piece’s arithmetic. The reading of the agency’s candidate specification as a premium for working inside a staff structure is this piece’s interpretation of the duties and statistics it publishes, not a finding of the firm’s.
The employer-cost table is this piece’s reconstruction from primary rates applied to the agency’s Los Angeles midpoint, not an observed household budget. The 6.2% and 1.45% employer rates and the combined 7.65%, the $184,500 social security wage base for 2026, the 0.6% net federal unemployment rate after the state credit on the first $7,000 of wages, the $3,000 cash-wage threshold for social security and Medicare in 2026 and the $1,000 quarterly threshold that triggers federal unemployment tax are from IRS Publication 926 for use in 2026. The $9,804 health figure is the 2026 average total annual premium for single coverage from the KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, published 22 October 2026 — the full premium rather than the employer’s share, so the table overstates what an employer contributing less than the whole premium would pay. The $122,879 total and the 17.0% margin over salary are this piece’s addition on the lines shown and exclude state unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, payroll services, bonuses, vehicles, uniforms and, for live-in roles, accommodation. The observation about household-staffing guides refers to this 2026 guide, which publishes a $33,933 housekeeper “national average” — the same figure ZipRecruiter gives for a private housekeeper — states on the same page that the figure is pulled down by part-time and hotel-adjacent listings, quotes $25–$35 an hour for full-time private roles in major metros and six figures for senior household roles, and lists ZipRecruiter, Lighthouse Careers, Morgan & Mallet, Oplu, Talent Gurus, House Managers Network, Metaintro, Salary.com and CNBC among its sources. The inference that the headline figure travelled from ZipRecruiter to that page is this piece’s; no criticism of the guide’s handling of it is intended beyond the point about shared inputs.
Statute and regulation are quoted from the eCFR as in force on 28 October 2026, read from the versioner API for Title 29, Part 552, and from the US Code. The definition of domestic service employment and the list naming maids, housekeepers and laundresses are from § 552.3, which states that the listing “is illustrative and not exhaustive.” The two coverage routes are from 29 U.S.C. § 206(f): subsection (f)(1), which turns on whether the compensation would constitute wages under section 209(a)(6) of the Social Security Act, and subsection (f)(2), which covers an employee “employed in domestic service in one or more households” for “more than 8 hours in the aggregate” in a workweek. The $3,000 figure attached to the (f)(1) route in the text is the 2026 Social Security cash-wage threshold from IRS Publication 926 and is offered as the practical form that test takes for a household employer, not as statutory language in § 206(f) itself. The six-households illustration is this piece’s, and describes how the two tests interact rather than any particular person’s circumstances; state minimum wage and coverage rules may be more protective and are not addressed. The overtime requirement and the live-in carve-out are from § 552.100(a)(2), resting on section 13(b)(21) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. § 213(b)(21); the third-party limitation, under which third-party employers of live-in domestic service employees “may not avail themselves of the overtime exemption” while the household “even if considered a joint employer, is still entitled to assert the exemption,” is from § 552.109(c); the meal credits of 37.5%, 50% and 62.5% of the statutory minimum hourly wage with a 150% daily cap are from § 552.100(c); the lodging credit of “up to seven and one-half times the statutory minimum hourly wage for each week lodging is furnished” is from § 552.100(d); and the sleeping-time, meal-time and free-time agreement, the “effective use of the time” standard, the rule that an interruption “by a call to duty” counts as hours worked and the significant-deviation provision are from § 552.102. The $54.375 weekly lodging credit, its rounding to $54.38, the $2,827.50 annual figure, the meal credits of $2.72, $3.63, $4.53 and $10.88, and the 9.4% comparison against the $30,000 midpoint of the agency’s $20,000–$40,000 valuation are this piece’s arithmetic at the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Both §§ 552.100(c) and (d) permit an employer instead to credit the actual cost or fair value of the facility, whichever is less, on three years of supporting records, so the figures quoted are the amounts the Administrator will accept without such records rather than hard caps; § 552.100(b) also requires that the employee’s acceptance of such facilities be “voluntary and uncoerced” and bars crediting the cost of required uniforms. State minimum wages exceed the federal rate in most states and would raise both credits proportionally; nothing here is a statement about any particular state. The treatment of noncash food and lodging is from IRS Publication 926: such items are not subject to social security or Medicare taxes; meals are excluded from wages where furnished at the employer’s home for the employer’s convenience; and lodging is excluded where furnished at the employer’s home for the employer’s convenience and as a condition of employment — a conjunctive test, not an alternative one. the description of the room as “worth zero” refers to federal employment-tax treatment only and not to income tax in every circumstance. New York’s requirements — overtime after 44 hours for live-in workers and 40 for others, one 24-hour rest period every seven days, and at least three paid rest days a year after one year with the same employer, with casual workers and relatives of the employer or the person cared for excluded — are from the New York State Department of Labor’s guide to the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.
Private-household employment and wage figures are Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages annual averages for NAICS 814110, Private Households, private ownership, US total, retrieved from the BLS QCEW open data API on 30 October 2026: for 2025, 184,901 establishments, average employment of 205,372, total annual wages of $9,081,972,988, an average weekly wage of $850 and average annual pay of $44,222; for 2024, 190,606 establishments, 208,560 employment, $8,882,179,362, $819 and $42,588. The 1.11 employees per establishment, the 43.0% comparison against $30,921 and the 19.3% comparison against $37,080 are this piece’s arithmetic. QCEW is an administrative count built from state unemployment-insurance records rather than a survey; BLS states that it covers “more than 95 percent of U.S. jobs” and that it excludes proprietors, the unincorporated self-employed, unpaid family members and “certain farm and domestic workers from having to report employment data,” without specifying which domestic workers those are. An establishment in QCEW is a reporting unit, so a household employer registered for unemployment insurance counts as one; the description of these as “household employers” is a reading of the industry code, not a BLS characterisation. QCEW publishes no occupational mix for NAICS 814110, so the $44,222 covers all household staff together and is not an estimate of housekeeper pay; the text says so. The inference drawn from the inversion is this piece’s reasoning from the gap, not a BLS finding, and the text states the competing explanation it does not rule out: households that register for unemployment insurance are self-selected towards full-time, metropolitan, higher-paying employers, which would raise the average independently of anything the aggregators do. The two series differ in concept, population and reference period.
House cleaner figures are from the Economic Policy Institute’s Domestic Workers Chartbook 2022, which analyses Current Population Survey microdata: 304,557 house cleaners in 2021 and a median hourly wage of $13.04 in 2021 dollars, both from files pooled over 2019–2021; median annual earnings of $14,915, a poverty rate of 25.4% and employer-provided health insurance coverage of 7.3%, all from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement pooled over 2016–2018 and therefore four to ten years older than the other figures in this piece. The chartbook’s totals of 2,158,969 domestic workers and 1,253,899 agency-based home care aides, likewise from files pooled over 2019–2021, are reported for context; the chartbook states its count is likely an undercount, partly because some domestic work is paid off the books and immigrants may be underrepresented in surveys. EPI, QCEW and OEWS figures come from different programmes, years and concepts and are not differenced or combined here; the text states only the direction.
Compensation practices, tax treatment and overtime obligations vary by employer, state and arrangement; nothing here is legal, tax or financial advice, and no figure in this piece describes the pay, employment terms or conduct of any identifiable housekeeper, household or staffing client.
Related reading: The Job That Sees It: The Butler · The Job That Sees It: The Nanny and the House Manager · The Job That Sees It: The Estate Manager · The Job That Sees It: The Private Chef · The Job That Sees It: The Sommelier · The Job That Sees It: The Private Jet Pilot · Staff: Outsourcing Daily Life · Chefs, Nannies, and Household Help: The Labor Behind Affluent Life · Estate Managers: Running a Household Like a Business
