House Cleaning
This is one of the few home-service questions with no settled answer, and the reason is structural rather than cultural. A restaurant server is paid under a system that assumes a tip. A house cleaner may be paid under a system that assumes one, or under a system that deliberately does not - and from the customer's side of the door those two situations can look identical. So the useful question is not "what is the standard tip" but "who is actually receiving the money I pay, and how much of it reaches the person doing the work."
Answer that and the tipping question mostly answers itself.
There are three arrangements in common use, and they are easy to tell apart once you know what to look for.
An independent cleaner quotes you directly, sets their own price, and keeps all of it. They may be a sole operator or run a small crew with one or two helpers. Signs: you negotiated the rate with the person who shows up, you pay them or their own business, and if they raise prices they tell you themselves.
A local company with employees sends a cleaner or a two-person team, and the person cleaning is on payroll. Signs: a dispatcher or office schedules you, the same company sends different people, and the rate is the company's rate rather than the cleaner's.
A franchise or app-based platform sits between you and the cleaner and takes a cut of every job. Signs: national branding, booking through an app, and a price that appears without anyone quoting it.
An independent cleaner has already decided what the work is worth to them. They set the number, and if it were too low they could raise it. Nothing about that arrangement assumes a tip, which is why many independents will tell you outright that tipping is not expected.
That does not make a tip meaningless. It makes it what a tip is supposed to be: recognition of something above the job. A cleaner who dealt with a genuinely bad kitchen without renegotiating, who stayed late because the house was worse than described, or who has been reliable for a year through your schedule changes, is being thanked rather than topped up.
This is where tipping stops being optional in the moral sense, even though it stays optional in the practical one. When a company or platform takes a share of what you pay, the cleaner receives a fraction of your total, and that fraction is set by an agreement you were never party to and usually cannot see.
You can find out with one question, asked of the office rather than the cleaner: "how much of the price reaches the person doing the cleaning, and do tips go to them in full?" A company confident in its pay model will answer without hesitating. Hesitation is itself informative.
If you cannot get an answer, cash handed directly to the cleaner is the version of a tip that cannot be intercepted or divided by anyone.
A one-time job is a single unusually large effort with no future relationship attached. A move-out clean, a post-renovation clean, or a first deep clean of a house that has not had one in years is genuinely harder than routine maintenance, and it is the case where a tip most clearly matches the situation. There is no next visit to make it up on.
A standing schedule handled by the same cleaner every visit is a relationship, and relationships have cheaper and better levers than a per-visit tip. Consistency, an easy house to work in, and a rate that does not need to be argued about every year matter more over twelve months than a small amount of cash twelve times.
There is no authoritative number here, and anyone quoting one with confidence is quoting a custom rather than a standard. What does exist is a reasonable way to think about it.
For a one-time job, people generally think in terms of a share of the total - the way they would for any single service - and the harder and more unpleasant the job, the more the number moves. For recurring service, a per-visit tip is uncommon and often awkward for both sides; an occasional lump at a natural moment tends to land better. For a crew of two or three, decide the total and hand it to the crew rather than to one person, or ask that it be split, because otherwise you have quietly made someone's day at someone else's expense.
The general etiquette literature treats service tipping as discretionary and situational rather than fixed; the Emily Post Institute's tipping guidance is the usual reference point if you want a considered outside view. It is guidance, not a rule, and it is honest about that.
If there is a single point of agreement in this whole subject, it is that a household with a regular cleaner often gives something once a year at the end of the year. It is the closest thing to a norm, and it has the advantage of being unambiguous - it is a gift for the year, not an assessment of one visit.
The common form is roughly the cost of one visit, sometimes with a card. If money feels wrong to you, a thoughtful gift is a genuine substitute here in a way it is not for a one-time job.
Money you hand someone for their work is income to them, and cash does not change that. The IRS guidance on tips sets out how tip income is treated and reported. That is the cleaner's responsibility, not yours - but it is worth knowing, because it is the reason a professional cleaner may prefer a rate increase to an equivalent stream of cash tips, and why an offer of "cash so it stays off the books" is a thing to keep out of the conversation entirely.
If your goal is to keep a good cleaner rather than to observe an etiquette rule, these outperform cash consistently.
Then do not, and stop treating it as a problem. Tipping is not the mechanism that makes this arrangement fair - the rate is. If you suspect the rate is the thing that is wrong, the fix is to ask what the cleaner is actually paid, and to move to someone who pays properly if the answer is bad. A tip used to patch a bad pay model mostly relieves the customer.
What is not reasonable is being unclear about it. A cleaner who does not know whether to expect something is doing the arithmetic every visit. Say once, kindly, what you do - "I do not tip per visit, I do something at the end of the year" is a complete and perfectly good answer - and then be consistent.
Most tipping anxiety turns out to be uncertainty about whether the underlying price was fair, which is a different question with an actual answer. Work out what the job should cost, what is included, and who is doing it, and the tipping decision gets much smaller. Our walk-through of the tipping question for Seattle-area homeowners covers the same ground against local rates, and what to look for when hiring a cleaning service covers the questions worth asking before any of this comes up.
It depends on who receives the money. An independent cleaner sets their own rate and keeps it, so a tip is a bonus rather than an expected part of their pay. A cleaner employed by a company or working through a platform receives only a share of what you pay, so a tip does real work there. Ask the office how much of the price reaches the cleaner and whether tips go to them in full.
There is no authoritative figure, and anyone quoting one is quoting a custom. For a one-time job people generally think in terms of a share of the total, moving up with how hard and unpleasant the work was. For recurring service a per-visit tip is uncommon; an occasional lump at a natural moment is more usual.
Most households on a standing schedule do not tip every visit. The levers that matter more over a year are accepting rate increases without a fight, keeping the house easy to work in, and referring them. A single end-of-year gift is the common way to mark a recurring relationship.
This is the clearest case for tipping. A move-out, post-renovation, or first deep clean is genuinely harder than routine maintenance, and there is no future visit on which to make it up. If you are going to tip at all, this is when.
The usual form for a household with a regular cleaner is roughly the cost of one visit, given once at the end of the year, sometimes with a card. It is the closest thing to a shared convention in this whole subject, and it reads as a gift for the year rather than a verdict on one clean.
Decide a total for the job and either hand it to the crew together or ask explicitly that it be split. Giving it to whoever happens to be nearest the door means one person is thanked and the others are not, which is worse than not tipping.
No, provided you are clear and consistent about it. The rate is what makes the arrangement fair; a tip is discretionary on top. What causes friction is ambiguity - a cleaner who does not know what to expect is guessing every visit. Saying once that you do something at the end of the year instead is a complete answer.