How you pay your cleaners shapes how they work, not just what they take home — the three common models each create different incentives worth understanding before you pick one.
The most straightforward model: cleaners are paid for actual time worked, usually simplest to administer and clearest for compliance (minimum wage and overtime rules apply directly and unambiguously). The tradeoff is it can reward slower work if there's no other incentive attached — a cleaner paid purely hourly has no built-in reason to move efficiently.
Cleaners are paid a set amount per completed job regardless of how long it takes. This incentivizes speed and can work well once you have standardized, well-scoped jobs — but it can also incentivize rushing on jobs that genuinely need more time, and requires care that the flat rate still clears minimum wage on an hours-worked basis in your state, even on a slower day.
Less common for routine cleaning but used in some commission-on-sales-generated or lead-based models, where a cleaner (or crew lead) earns a percentage tied to the job's price or to upsells/add-ons they generate. This aligns incentive with revenue generation specifically, more than with raw task completion.
Whichever model you use, actual hours worked generally still needs to clear your state's minimum wage when averaged over the pay period — a flat per-job rate that works out below minimum wage on a job that ran unusually long is still a wage violation, not just a bad deal for that cleaner on that day. This is worth checking directly against your state's wage rules, not assuming the structure is automatically compliant because it's common in the industry.
A lot of owners land on hourly as the base, sometimes layered with a per-job bonus or completion incentive once a cleaner is trained and trusted — combining the compliance simplicity of hourly with some of the efficiency incentive of flat-rate, rather than picking one model in isolation.
There's no single right answer, but there is a wrong way to pick: choosing based only on administrative ease without thinking through what behavior the structure actually rewards, or without checking it against your state's wage floor rules.
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