Nobody in my trade answers this one straight, because both honest answers cost us something. Say cash is fine and it sounds like we’re helping people dodge tax. Say use an agency and it sounds like a sales pitch, which, given what I do for a living, it partly is. So here’s the version I give people who ring me and then don’t book. The tax question is the least interesting part of this whole business, and it is the only part most people ask about. The interesting part is what happens when a woman you pay £60 a week goes up a stepladder in your kitchen, comes down badly, and can’t work for four months.
Is Paying a London Cleaner Cash in Hand Against the Law?
No. Handing someone three twenty-pound notes at the end of a Tuesday morning is a lawful act. Cash is legal tender and there is no rule that says domestic work must be paid by transfer.
The obligation to declare that income sits with the person receiving it. If your cleaner is self-employed and running her own round across Sydenham and Forest Hill, she reports her takings and pays her own tax, and whether she does that is between her and HMRC. You are not her accountant. You have no duty to audit her.
What people mean when they ask this question is usually something vaguer: am I doing something a bit grubby? The grubbiness, if there is any, has almost nothing to do with the twenties. It has to do with whether the arrangement quietly makes you an employer.
What HMRC Cares About, and What It Doesn’t
For 2026 to 2027 the Lower Earnings Limit is £129 a week. Three hours at £20 comes to £60, so a standard weekly slot sits well underneath it, and a self-employed cleaner with six other clients doesn’t touch PAYE at all. Fine.
I’d still pay by standing order, and not for HMRC’s benefit. Cash leaves you with nothing. No proof of when she started, what you paid, how long the arrangement ran. If there’s ever a dispute about a missing ring or a burst washing machine hose or a claim on your policy, the bank statement is the only thing in the room that isn’t somebody’s memory.
Are You Their Employer Without Meaning to Be?
The HSE’s own guidance on the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 puts it more plainly than most solicitors will. You probably won’t need employers’ liability insurance for people such as cleaners or gardeners if they work for more than one person, but if you employ someone who works only for you, you may be required to take out insurance to protect them. That single sentence decides most London households in about four seconds.
The Act also makes clear that what you call the arrangement is largely irrelevant, and that what matters is the real nature of the relationship and the degree of control you have over the work. Do you set the hours and the method? Do you supply the mop, the machine, the products? Can she send someone else when she’s ill without asking you first?
The stakes are worse than most people assume, because domestic employment is carved out of the usual relief. Employer National Insurance runs at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year, and liabilities arising from employing someone for purposes connected with another person’s personal, family or household affairs are excluded liabilities against which the Employment Allowance cannot be claimed. A live-out housekeeper in Ealing on £16,000 generates roughly £1,650 of employer NI with no allowance to soak it up.
The One Test That Settles It
Substitution. If your cleaner can send her sister-in-law when she’s got flu, and you have no veto, she is running a business and you are a customer. If your instinct is to say no, absolutely not, I only want her, then you are closer to being an employer than the twenty-pound notes suggest.
Who Pays if She Falls Off a Stepladder in Your Kitchen?
This is the part nobody asks until it’s happened.
A woman off Leighton Road in NW5 rang me two winters ago, not for a quote. Her cleaner of six years had gone up on a kitchen chair to reach the top of the cupboards above the fridge, the chair had gone sideways on a tiled floor, and she’d broken her wrist in two places. Eleven weeks off. No sick pay, no income protection, three other households in Kentish Town suddenly without a cleaner. Nobody sued anybody. What happened was a conversation on a doorstep about money, conducted between two people who liked each other and now couldn’t look at each other properly. That’s the shape these things usually take.
Legally, you owe lawful visitors to your home the common duty of care under the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957. Loose stair nosing, a rug over a doorway, the socket you know sparks, the floor you’d mopped and didn’t mention. If any of that causes the injury, you were the one who let it be there. And if you supplied the equipment, you supplied the defect. That wobbly aluminium thing from the shed is legally yours, not hers, and a defective one puts you on the wrong side of the argument before anyone has even worked out how she fell.
Somebody is carrying that risk. It’s either an insurer or it’s you across the kitchen table.
Most contents policies include a personal liability or occupier’s liability section, and many extend to domestic employees. Many is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. Some policies cover only occasional or live-in staff, some exclude anyone paid regularly, and some cover a defective appliance you provided while excluding a plain trip on your own floor. Ring your insurer, ask the exact question – am I covered if a paid cleaner is injured in this house – and ask them to confirm it by email. Fifteen minutes on hold beats the alternative. I have watched two households discover the wording only after the injury, and in both cases the phrase that sank them was one they could have read on page nine any Sunday afternoon for six years.
Your Ladder, Your Problem
Buy a proper EN 131 stepladder and keep it where she can find it, because the alternative is a chair. And I’ll say this even though it costs me work: don’t ask a £20-an-hour domestic cleaner to do the outside of a first-floor window, or to go above shoulder height on a windowsill. I won’t send my own people up there. It isn’t the job they’re insured for and it isn’t the job they’re paid for.
What Does an Agency Mean When It Says “Fully Insured”?
Three different things, and most will happily let you assume all three.
Public liability protects the agency against a claim from you. Your marble worktop, your Vitsœ shelving, the parquet in the hallway. Employers’ liability is the compulsory one, minimum £5 million by law, and it protects the cleaner. It only exists if the cleaners are employed by the agency, which in London they very often are not. Then there’s cover for damage to customers’ goods in their care, which is the one that either isn’t on the policy at all or carries a £250 excess, comfortably more than the lamp.
Here’s the bit that annoys me. A large share of London cleaning “agencies” are introduction services. They take a finder’s fee or a monthly management charge, then the cleaner is self-employed, working for herself, insured by herself if at all. You have paid a premium to arrive at precisely the cash-in-hand position, with a nicer website attached.
Somebody is carrying that risk, and the word “insured” on a homepage tells you nothing about who.
Ask for the Schedule, Not the Word
Ask for the insurance schedule as a PDF. You want the named insurer, the expiry date, the limit of indemnity, and whether damage to customers’ goods appears anywhere on it. A real agency sends it within the hour because it’s already saved on the desktop. If it takes three days and arrives as a photograph of a certificate, you have your answer.
When Is an Agency Worth the Extra Money?
For a weekly three-hour slot in a one-bed in Walthamstow or Bexleyheath, a good independent cleaner at £18 to £20 an hour beats an agency, and I run one. I’d tell my own sister the same thing. Domestic agency rates across Greater London sit somewhere between £26 and £32 an hour, the cleaner sees perhaps £13 to £15 of that, and the person who turns up was found the same way you’d have found her – by asking around. The London Living Wage is £14.80. If a company is charging you £28 and paying the statutory £12.71, ask them what the other £15 buys. A fair answer exists – scheduling, replacement staff, a complaints process, the cost of finding people who last more than five weeks. An agency that can give you that answer without going quiet is one worth paying.
Agencies earn their money on the things one person can’t do. Cover when she’s ill or in Bucharest for three weeks. Keyholding across a portfolio in Canary Wharf. End of tenancy, where you need a company that will come back and redo the oven for free because the inventory clerk disagreed. Landlords and managing agents who need an invoice trail for a deposit dispute. Somebody in a flat you’re not living in.
What I’d Do in a One-Bed in Zone 4
Ask two neighbours who they use. Pay £20 an hour by standing order. Ring your contents insurer and get the answer in writing. Buy the stepladder yourself.
Somebody is carrying that risk either way. Better it’s a policy than a conversation on your doorstep in March. The ladder in my van cost £46 from a trade counter on Bramley Road and it’s seven years old.