New cleaner wants to be paid more as house is bigger?

[Saltedbutter]

I agreed an hourly rate with a new cleaner prior to her coming and also an approximate amount of hours but left that quite open as I obviously don’t know her pace yet.
She is currently at my house and just messaged to say actually she’d like more money per hour as the house is bigger than she expected.
Surely she’ll still clean the same amount per hour as in a smaller house but just might be paid for a few more hours?
I’ve provided all products and the rate she now wants is more than my previous cleaner (who included her products).
AIBU?

Larger house means you have more money therefore she would like to make more money from you.....

Dont know about shortage of cleaners as round here they are loads always advertising on the local web site.

She is manipulating you. Tell her sorry no, the hours are fixed.

I had similar she arrived after sending floor plan, and photos and asked for more because of stairs. Wtf? Buh bye.

You’re making a bunch of links there that just don’t exist. There are a few people on here (not the OP) who are suggesting that cleaners are lazy, greedy for money and dumb, which is what I felt was unnecessary so called it out. Cleaning by and large is a min wage unskilled job. If there are some domestic cleaners able to squeeze £37 per hour out of their clients then good on them! Wish I earned that much!

Dot give a cleaner bleach either..

Ask the cleaner who she/he is insured with and can you see the certificate of insurance?

Not to mention that more often than not, it’s the cleaner who sets the rate - that’s always been my experience anyway.

Clearly a bigger house is going to be more work. How much is variable - I mean for example, the difference between a small bathroom and a medium bathroom is going going to be negligible, but if the bigger house has more bathrooms then it's a big difference.

But rather than work longer to get it all done, it sounds like your cleaner thinks she can work faster to get it done in the same time. Which could be taken lots of ways - she's been working slowly at cleaning your current house, or she's optimistically thinking she can work faster (but risk is that corner's get cut/quality of cleaning goes down). Or maybe it's fair that cleaners have 'gears' and if she works harder she can reliably get the same amount of work done in the same time? Bit like someone who does a higher pressure job having more responsibility for more pay.

I think fairest thing to do would be tell her that you'll maintain the hourly rate, but pay her for extra time (30 mins, 1 hr, whatever seems reasonable for the difference in size). She's less likely to rush and cut corners, and if she finishes a bit earlier then so be it. Unless her issue is that she doesn't have time in her diary to fit in the extra required (maybe she's booked solid with other clients, or got school pickups that limit how long she can work for etc).

It's self employed versus employed. I presume the therapist you refer to is an employee, not self employed?

Self employed need to be paid, probably 50-100% more than minimum wage just to come out with minimum wage after all the costs they have to bear which employees don't, i.e. lack of holiday/sick pay, unchargeable admin time, travel costs, risk of bad debts, liability insurance, etc.

If minimum wage is, say, £12, then anyone self employed in whatever role needs to realistically be charging £20 per hour to cover all the risks, costs, unpaid hours, etc which employees get covered for by their employer.

Exactly. If she doesn’t want to stick to the hourly rate you agreed and maybe work a bit more if she’s underestimated the time it would take, then off she pops.

I guess she might have another regular job on directly afterwards that can't be moved, so she wouldn't be able to cover the physical space and tasks in that time, but she would if those tasks were in a smaller house. But then is she saying she'll work quicker and more efficiently if you give her more money? Or she needs a extra person with her?
Yeah. It does seem a little bizarre tbh.

I think she is trying it on. She’s hoping to rush round in the same time she used to work and cram it all in. I would say that is unacceptable and you want her to work to the same standard as she always has.

The choices are:
A) she works the same amount of hours at the same rate and just does the work she can achieve in that time. (Make sure to give her a priority list of jobs you would like first)
B) She works more hours at same rate and does all jobs properly.

Therapist was really just a profession I could think of that get paid a reasonable amount per hour, but not more than £30. In my mind I was thinking self employed therapists. Something like £15 - £20 sounds reasonable if you include the factors you’ve mentioned, but at the same time annual insurance isn’t that costly. I know many people who do casual / unskilled work who simply have to go without holiday pay. I suppose it depends how casual or how committed you are with the cleaning job as to how much of a financial commitment you’d need it to be.

I imagine that she has revised her opinion of how much you can afford to pay her and wants a pay rise. Greedy and dim.

On £5 how much was she making?😂
Deary me talk about Scrooge.

Your cleaner is stupid and / or greedy.

The average uprating is 300% so £36 an hour is equivalent to min wage.
For example, Dp's business will return a gross profit of £35000 per £100000
Most employed people have very little idea of the financial metric used to calculate OCR.
How many items does a checkout person have to scan to cover her salary and the costs to employ them? The answer is a lot.
I do wish schools would include business studies within the curriculum this might do away with the lowly view of the poor people attempting to provide services to misers with a wholly incorrect view of value/profit.

Well she can’t have used more than a fivers worth of products in one clean… so over an 8 hour clean I’d have said an additional £35 on top of her cleaning fee.
Deary me talk about stupid!

You do get that the £5 an hour is on top of the hourly rate, exclusively for the products used during the clean ? It takes me about three hours to do a full weekly clean - I’d have to go some to spend £15 worth of products in that time.

I don't know where you live but my cleaner definitely does not earn minimum wage, not even close.

It would seem rates are highly variable! £37 per hour is ridiculous though. Unless they’re also cooking you dinner and ironing your clothes and turning down your duvet and putting a chocolate mint on your pillow.

And there's another differential between self employed people who work full shifts in a single location and people who have to cobble together an income from two hours here and two hours there in different locations working for different people with travelling time unpaid.

It drives me mad when MNers talk about nannies ' salaries and self-righteously say "I pay my cleaner more than that!" Yes, of course you do, for a two hour shift with no NI, no holiday pay, no sick pay...

The statement How many items does a checkout person have to scan to cover her salary and the costs to employ them? The answer is a lot doesn’t sit well with the poor people attempting to provide services to misers with a wholly incorrect view of value/profit. The check out person’s job is quantifiable, she’s employed. The cleaners job is also quantifiable in terms of the profit she is making because she’s cleaning in other people’s homes, and apart from travel, she has no other overheads if she’s charging clients for cleaning materials at a set rate.

And you went on to question how much profit the cleaner would make from charging an extra £5 an hour to cover her preferred cleaning materials. Well that would depend on how much of those cleaning products - which over say a three hour clean, would be charged at £15 - were actually used on that clean and how much was left to use for other clients cleans. If she’s charging everyone at the same rate then I suspect she’s making a tidy profit - I wouldn’t come anywhere near using £15 of cleaning materials on a standard three hour clean.

This.

I’ve been charged anything from between £15 per hour and £50 per hour for cleaning (agency that were the worst of the lot). I’d agree that the hourly rate of a cleaner should be the same in any home but that you may require more hours than expected. I think she’s probably turned up and thinks that you can afford more so she’s trying her luck!

That being said, a good cleaner is worth their weight in gold so if she’s done a good job and is worth it (and is fully insured) I’d be tempted to just pay her more and keep her sweet. If she not great then find another.

They will either be new or crap.

Most outside of London, like me, never advertise as the work finds us, and then some.

Yes...basically this is 'now I see how rich you are, I'm upping my rates as you can afford it'. Not an approach I'd be happy with. She should have come by the house, discussed the job, and agreed rates. She may well have charged you a higher hourly rate than some of her other clients but upping it based on your house size after agreeing a rate doesn't bode well for the future.