Hiring a cleaner in Spain: the legal part nobody tells you
Here is what the Facebook groups do not mention. Under Spanish law, if you hire a domestic cleaner directly — even part-time, even paid in cash — you become her employer. The empleadas de hogar (household employees) regime requires you, the household, to:
- Register as an employer with Spanish Social Security (Seguridad Social) and register your cleaner under your name;
- Pay monthly social security contributions on top of her wages — roughly 250€+ per month for a full-time cleaner, proportionally less for part-time;
- Issue a written contract and payslips, pay at least the hourly minimum wage, and respect paid holidays;
- Pay severance (finiquito) when the arrangement ends.
Paying cash and skipping all this is common — and it is undeclared employment. If your cleaner has an accident in your home, or reports the situation, the liability lands on you: back-payment of contributions plus fines. Labour inspections in this sector have increased notably since the regime was reformed. For a foreign resident, it is an unnecessary legal exposure for the sake of saving a few euros an hour.
The company route: same cleaner, zero paperwork
When you book your cleaning lady through Limpieza.ai, the equation changes completely. Our cleaners are our salaried employees — with contracts, social security paid, and liability insurance covered by us. We are not an agency that passes you a freelancer and disappears: the same cleaner comes to your home every week, and the employment relationship, the insurance and the admin are entirely ours. You receive one invoice. That is the whole of your paperwork.
It also means the things that break the informal arrangement — holidays, sickness, someone moving away — stop being your problem. We manage cover, we brief the substitute, and if your cleaner ever leaves us, we train her replacement on your home's routine before the handover.
