Occupation / job
Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners pays $35,510 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $14,510 a year short, or $6.97 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.
With 860,670 employed, this is one of the biggest occupations in the country. Work at this scale is always available and rarely scarce, and the wage on this page is what that combination produces.
Cleaning and pest control suit people who want autonomy over how a job gets done, work largely unsupervised, and a result that is finished and visible at the end of a shift.
How long it takes to become one of the 860,670 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
$9,240 separates the bottom quarter at $30,350 from the top quarter at $39,590, a ratio of 1.3x. In a band that tight, moving up inside Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners pays less than moving out of it would.
The bottom quarter is under $30,350, $19,670 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.
Avoid it if the hours would not work — much of this is scheduled before a building opens or after it closes.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 860,670 figure counts people already working as Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.3x between $30,350 and $39,590, this is a narrow distribution. $35,510 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.
The middle half of this field earns between $30,350 and $39,590. That is $9,240 of range, with $35,510 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $39,590. Reaching it from the $35,510 midpoint is $4,080 a year; reaching it from the $30,350 that the bottom quarter of Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners earn is $9,240.
There is $5,160 between $30,350 and $35,510, and $4,080 between $35,510 and $39,590. The lower half of the range is marginally the longer one — worth knowing if you would be entering Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners at the bottom of it.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners is $17.07 an hour. The quarters sit at $14.59 and $19.03, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $35,510 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners, the hourly figure is $35,510 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else