Housekeeper Job Description: Template, Duties, Requirements & Pay (2026)

A housekeeper cleans and services rooms and common areas — making beds, changing linen, vacuuming, sanitizing bathrooms, restocking supplies — in hotels, hospitals, senior living, offices and private homes. Below is a copy-paste housekeeper job description template, the requirements that actually matter, and the one number that should change how you write the posting.

What a housekeeper does

O*NET lists the work plainly: clean rooms, hallways, lobbies, lounges, restrooms, corridors, elevators and stairways; sweep, scrub, wax or polish floors using brooms, mops or powered scrubbing and waxing machines; clean rugs, carpets, upholstered furniture and draperies using vacuum cleaners and shampooers; carry linens, towels, toilet items and cleaning supplies on wheeled carts; empty wastebaskets and transport trash and waste; sort, wash, iron and fold laundry; and move furniture to arrange rooms.

The setting changes the job more than the title suggests. A hotel housekeeper works to a room quota against checkout times. A hospital or senior living housekeeper works to infection-control protocols and around residents who are in the room. An office cleaner works after hours, alone, to a building route. A private-household housekeeper often works unsupervised and takes on cooking, errands or childcare. Write the posting for one of those, not for all four.

Worth knowing before you write anything: the federal statistics for housekeepers are not the ones most articles quote. Maids and housekeeping cleaners are SOC 37-2012. Janitors and building cleaners are 37-2011, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics titles that occupation “janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners.” They are separate occupations with separate wages — $35,510 against $36,840 at the median — and the outlooks differ too.

Housekeeper job description template

Copy this into your ATS or job board, replace the bracketed fields, and cut anything that does not apply. It leads with pay, shift and location because those are what an applicant screens on before reading a duty list.

Requirements: what's required, what's preferred, and what kills applications

Housekeeping postings tend to fail by asking for things the job does not need, in a market where nearly every opening is a backfill. Here is what each line costs you.

How to customize it for your setting

Hotels

Lead with the quota and what happens to hours when occupancy drops — that second question is the one experienced hotel housekeepers actually worry about. Name the room-rate or travel benefit if you have one; it is genuinely differentiating and costs you little.

Senior living and healthcare

Say that residents and patients are present while you work, because that is a different job from cleaning empty rooms and some applicants specifically want it. Name the infection-control training you provide, and mention any path into a CNA or dietary role — our CNA job description covers the next rung if you run that ladder.

Offices and commercial buildings

This is usually evening or overnight, solo, on a route. Say so in the first two lines, and say whether the shift is a fixed four hours or a full eight. Part-time evening work is a feature for some candidates and a dealbreaker for others; being vague loses both.

Private households

The job is broader and the relationship is closer. Be specific about what is included beyond cleaning — laundry, ironing, errands, cooking, pets — and about whether the role is solo and unsupervised. Note that 13.7% of this occupation is self-employed, so you are often competing with independent cleaners setting their own rates.

If the problem is filling housekeeping and janitorial roles rather than describing them, the recruiting side is on our how to hire housekeepers and janitorial staff page, and the interview stage is covered in housekeeper interview questions.

Writing the ad version

The job description above is for your ATS and careers page. The ad that runs on social is shorter and answers three things in the first two lines: how much, what shift, where. Something like: “Housekeepers — $17–$19/hr. Day shift, every other weekend, 14 rooms. [Property], [City]. No experience needed, we train. Apply in 60 seconds.” Then two or three knockout questions on the form — availability, distance, ability to lift and stand — and nothing else.

“No experience needed, we train” earns its place in this category more than almost any other phrase, because the replacement math means your realistic pool includes a lot of people who have cleaned somewhere that was not a hotel. The general craft is covered in what makes a good job ad, and there are worked examples in help wanted ad examples.

Housekeeper, room attendant, janitor: which title to post

Hotels often post “room attendant.” Healthcare posts “environmental services technician” or “EVS.” Commercial cleaning posts “custodian” or “janitor.” Candidates search “housekeeping jobs” and “cleaning jobs” far more than any of the internal titles.

Two consequences. First, if your applicant tracking system requires the internal title, put the searched term in the posting text and the ad headline anyway. Second, be aware that janitor and housekeeper are genuinely different BLS occupations, not just different words: 37-2011 excludes maids and housekeeping cleaners by definition, pays a median of $36,840, and covers building-wide cleaning rather than room servicing. If you are hiring for a building route rather than rooms, you are hiring a janitor and should say so.

Janitor job description: the same duties, a different setting

Housekeeper and janitor describe the same cleaning work in different settings, and posting under the wrong one costs you applicants. Housekeeper generally means guest rooms, resident rooms and private homes — hotels, senior living, hospitals, private households. Janitor and custodian generally mean shared and public space — schools, offices, plants, retail floors — and usually carry floor machines, waste handling and minor maintenance with them.

The practical differences to write into a janitor posting that a housekeeper posting does not need: which shift, because most janitorial work is evening or overnight and that single fact decides whether a candidate reads further; whether floor equipment is involved, since a burnisher or an auto-scrubber is a skill and a selling point; what chemicals and what training; and whether the role includes light maintenance, which quietly turns it into a different and better-paid job.

If you are hiring for both, post them separately rather than as one combined ad. A candidate searching "janitor jobs" and a candidate searching "housekeeping jobs" are usually different people with different schedules, and a single ad that tries to describe both describes neither.

Janitor duties and responsibilities

Housekeeper and janitor are two different federal occupations, and the duty lists diverge more than the titles suggest. Housekeeping cleaners work in homes, hotels and resident rooms; janitors and building cleaners keep institutional and commercial buildings running. If you are writing the janitor version, this is the list.

Daily: gather and empty trash and recycling from every station on the route; sweep, mop, vacuum and spot-clean floors; clean and sanitize restrooms and restock consumables; disinfect high-touch surfaces — handles, rails, switches, shared equipment; wipe glass and entry doors; clean break rooms and shared kitchens; police entrances and grounds for litter; deal with spills and hazards immediately and place wet-floor signage.

Periodic: strip, wax and buff hard floors; extract carpet; wash interior windows; dust vents and high surfaces; deep-clean restrooms and kitchens on a posted rotation.

Building responsibilities that are not cleaning: minor repairs — a running toilet, a burned-out lamp, a loose handle; ordering and stocking supplies against a budget; reporting anything that needs a trade; setting up and breaking down rooms for events or meetings; and on many routes, unlocking in the morning or locking and alarming at night. That last one is a trust responsibility on an entry-level wage and it belongs in the posting, because it changes who should apply and it changes the background check you run.

Safety and chemical handling: using the right dilution, never mixing products, wearing the PPE the SDS calls for, and knowing where the safety data sheets are. A posting that mentions chemical safety training reads as a building that is run properly.

The numbers behind the posting

BLS puts janitors and building cleaners at a median of $17.71 an hour, $36,840 a year (May 2025), with 2,432,600 employed, 2% growth to 2035 and about 321,800 openings a year — again almost entirely replacement. Note that this occupation explicitly excludes maids and housekeeping cleaners, so if you are benchmarking pay for a hotel room attendant or a residential housekeeper, the janitor median is the wrong number to use.

The duty split that decides applications is day route versus night route. A day janitor works around occupants and needs the customer-facing temperament; a night janitor works alone, covers more square footage per hour and is doing the floor work. They are different jobs with different candidate pools, and one posting that hides which it is will underperform both.

Hotel housekeeper job description

A hotel housekeeper, usually titled room attendant or guest room attendant (GRA), cleans and resets guest rooms to a standard and a quota. O*NET lists “Guest Room Attendant (GRA)” and “Room Cleaner” among the reported titles for maids and housekeeping cleaners (37-2012), so the pay and outlook figures above apply. The work is organized around the room board: checkouts that must be turned before check-in, stayovers that need a lighter service, and rooms the front desk needs first.

A hotel housekeeper job description should list:

• Clean and reset assigned checkout and stayover rooms to the property’s standard: strip and make beds, replace linen and towels, clean and sanitize bathrooms, dust, vacuum and empty trash
• Restock amenities, coffee, glassware and supplies; stock and push the housekeeping cart
• Update room status through [the housekeeping app or phone system] so the front desk can sell the room
• Report maintenance problems, damage, lost and found items and anything unsafe
• Follow key control, privacy and do-not-disturb policies and guest-request procedures
• Handle chemicals by label and safety data sheet, and follow the property’s sharps and bodily-fluid procedure

Then put in what hotel candidates actually compare: the number of rooms per shift (and how many are checkouts), start time, weekend and holiday rotation, whether hours are guaranteed when occupancy drops, and any room discount or meal benefit. If there are turndown or evening shifts, list them separately. For supervisory and laundry roles, see the housekeeping supervisor job description and laundry attendant job description; the hiring side is on our hospitality recruiting page.

Environmental services (EVS) technician job description

An environmental services technician (EVS tech) is a housekeeper in a hospital, clinic or long-term care facility. O*NET lists “Environmental Services Aide” and “Environmental Services Worker” as reported titles for the same occupation, 37-2012. The duties overlap with hotel work, but the standard is infection prevention rather than guest presentation, and patients are usually in the room.

The job has a regulatory floor. Where EVS staff can reasonably be exposed to blood or other potentially infectious materials, the OSHA Bloodborne Pathogens standard, 29 CFR 1910.1030, applies. It requires the employer to “determine and implement an appropriate written schedule for cleaning and method of decontamination,” says contaminated broken glassware “shall not be picked up directly with the hands,” requires training at initial assignment and “at least annually thereafter,” and requires hepatitis B vaccination to be made available within 10 working days of initial assignment to employees with occupational exposure. Those are employer obligations, and naming them in the posting (“paid bloodborne pathogens training, hepatitis B vaccine offered at no cost”) tells candidates the department is run properly.

An EVS technician job description should list:

• Clean and disinfect patient rooms, bathrooms and high-touch surfaces using the facility’s products and contact times
• Perform discharge (terminal) cleans and turn rooms quickly for the next admission; update bed status in [the bed-tracking system]
• Follow isolation signage and wear the required PPE for each room
• Clean ORs, procedure rooms and the emergency department between cases where assigned
• Collect and remove trash, linen, regulated medical waste and sharps containers per policy
• Clean spills of blood or body fluids using the facility’s spill procedure
• Operate floor equipment and report damaged furniture, equipment or safety hazards

In the posting, name the shift (EVS runs 24 hours in most hospitals), which areas the role covers, whether floor care is included, and whether you pay for training and certification. The hiring advantage over hotels is usually benefits and an internal path into patient care roles; say what that path is. If the role is mainly stripping, waxing and burnishing floors, it is closer to our floor technician job description. OSHA content here is general information, not legal advice.

Cleaning a commercial or institutional building rather than rooms and homes? BLS counts janitors and building cleaners as a separate occupation from maids and housekeeping cleaners — different work, different pay and a different candidate pool. The janitor and custodian job description covers it.

Employment, openings, wage and entry-requirement figures: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections, National Employment Matrix, occupational projections and worker characteristics, 2025–35, for maids and housekeeping cleaners (SOC 37-2012) and janitors and cleaners except maids and housekeeping cleaners (SOC 37-2011). Tasks and work context: O*NET OnLine 37-2012.00. Both read at source 8 September 2026. Campaign figures: Boostpoint 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark. Last updated September 2026.