A cleaner who leaves and takes your clients with them is a real risk in this industry -- but whether a non-compete actually stops that depends heavily on your state and how it's written.
A cleaner who's built a direct relationship with your clients can, in theory, leave and quietly take them along -- either going independent or joining a competitor and bringing the relationships with them. This is a genuine risk in a trust-based, relationship-driven service business.
A non-compete tries to stop a former cleaner from working in the same industry in a given area for a period of time. A non-solicit is narrower -- it only restricts them from actively pursuing your specific clients, not from working in cleaning generally. The narrower tool is both easier to justify and more likely to actually hold up if challenged.
Several states heavily restrict or flatly ban non-competes for lower-wage or hourly workers specifically, which covers a lot of cleaning staff. A clause that's standard practice in one state can be completely unenforceable, or even illegal to present, in another -- this is genuinely state-specific and worth checking rather than copying a template from elsewhere.
Where non-competes or non-solicits are allowed at all, courts generally look for the restriction to be reasonable in scope, geography, and duration -- a narrow, short-duration non-solicit limited to clients the person actually serviced is far more likely to be enforceable than a broad, long-duration ban on working in the industry at all.
Strong client relationships with the business itself (not just the individual cleaner), fair pay that reduces the incentive to leave in the first place, and simply being a good place to work do more real protective work day-to-day than a clause that may not survive a legal challenge anyway.
This happens often enough in this industry to have its own playbook -- see what to do when a client tries to hire your cleaner directly for the reactive side of this same risk.
A narrow non-solicit is more likely to be useful and enforceable than a broad non-compete, but check your specific state before relying on either -- and don't treat the clause as a substitute for the retention and relationship work that actually prevents the problem.
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