MAID RIGHT

The Maid Right franchise agreement requires general liability insurance on an occurrence form at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate. It requires auto insurance in the amounts your state sets, property and casualty insurance, statutory workers compensation, and employers liability at a $500,000 minimum.

The named insured on your certificate is your own legal business entity — the LLC or corporation you operate through. Maid Right, LLC is the franchisor. The agreement requires you to name Maid Right, LLC and its affiliates as additional insured, with a 30-day cancellation notice. The policy must be written by a carrier acceptable to the franchisor.

That satisfies your franchise agreement. Here is what that requirement leaves out — and why it matters for a business that sends people into someone's home every day.

The franchisor entity is Maid Right, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company with its principal place of business at 126 Garrett Street, Suite J, Charlottesville, VA 22902. It is part of the Premium Service Brands family. The 2025 franchise agreement (Section 16.2) requires you to name Maid Right, LLC and its affiliates as additional insured on every policy except workers' compensation and employers liability.

What the agreement requires you to carry:

General Liability at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, on an occurrence form. The occurrence form covers claims based on when the harm happened, not when the claim is filed. The policy must cover bodily injury, personal injury, death, and property damage from your business operations and your cleaners' conduct.

Business Auto Liability in the amount required by your state. The agreement names automobile liability as a required line but sets no franchisor-specified dollar minimum — your state's mandatory limits control.

Property and Casualty Insurance required by the agreement but not further specified in Item 8. Specific limits and coverage details are left to the Brand Standards Manual.

Workers' Compensation at the limits your state requires. 

Workers compensation pays medical bills and lost wages for an injured employee it is required whenever you have employees, and the Maid Right agreement makes it explicit.

Employers Liability at a minimum of $500,000. Employers liability covers lawsuits outside the workers' compensation system for example, a cleaner who sues you claiming your negligence caused her injury. The agreement requires a $500,000 minimum across each accident, disease per employee, and disease policy limit.

The agreement also requires every sub-contractor performing work on your behalf to carry the same types and amounts of insurance you carry, with Maid Right, LLC named as additional insured on their policies. You must maintain and provide proof of those certificates on request.

All policies must give the franchisor at least 30 days written notice before cancellation, material alteration, termination, or non-renewal and notice of any claim filed within 30 days of filing. Your policy must be primary and non-contributory, meaning your policy pays first before any franchisor coverage applies.

The 2025 Maid Right FDD contains no recommended-but-not-required coverage table. Section 16.2 defers to the Brand Standards Manual for limits beyond the stated minimums. No Section B items can be confirmed from the FDD text. Coverage recommendations appear in the gap section below, sourced from Rikor's benchmarks.

Note: The FDD is silent on crime coverage, EPLI, cyber liability, care-custody-control insurance, and any umbrella limit. The $500,000 employers liability minimum is below Rikor's $1,000,000 benchmark. The auto liability requirement defers entirely to state law, which in most states sets a floor far below what a cleaning operation needs.

That is what your franchise agreement requires. The rest of this article covers the exposure your model creates — starting with the one the FDD never addressed.

This is the question most Maid Right franchisees have never thought to ask because the franchise agreement never raised it.

Most residential cleaning FDDs require at least some form of employee-theft protection. Some require a janitorial bond. Some require a crime policy. The Maid Right agreement requires neither. The silence is a structural gap that many franchisees discover only when a client calls.

Here is what you need to understand about each instrument, starting with the one you probably do not have.

Your general liability policy will not pay for employee theft. General liability covers accidents — property damage and bodily injury your operations cause. Theft by your own employee is dishonesty, not an accident, and the standard policy excludes it. If a client accuses a cleaner of stealing, general liability is not the answer.

A janitorial or business-service bond is a fidelity bond that pays the client if your employee steals their property. It sounds like the right tool, but it carries two structural weaknesses. Most bonds pay only after the theft is proven a criminal conviction or an admission. The most common form this claim takes is a credible accusation with no witness and no proof, and that claim often triggers nothing. The second trap: after a bond pays, the surety expects your business to reimburse it. The bond is a credit instrument, not loss coverage.

A third-party crime policy is the better instrument. It pays when an employee steals from a client, without requiring a conviction, and it does not claw the money back. It is written as a two-party contract between your insurer and your business — real insurance coverage, not a surety arrangement.

When you add a third-party crime policy, ask for one specific detail: the Loss Discovered form. Crime policies come two ways. A loss-sustained form covers a theft only if it both happened and was found during the same policy period. A loss-discovered form covers a theft that is found during the policy period no matter when it began. That distinction matters for cleaning work, where employee theft is often a quiet pattern that surfaces long after it started. Rikor's recommendation for every residential cleaning operation is third-party crime at **$250,000** on a Loss Discovered form with a theft-of-customer-property endorsement.

Cleaning means working around a customer's belongings every day moving things to dust beneath them, wiping down surfaces, treating counters and floors. When something breaks or a surface is damaged, the client expects you to pay. Whether your policy agrees is a different question.

Standard general liability contains a care, custody, and control exclusion. That exclusion removes coverage for property that was in your care, custody, or control when it was damaged. A countertop your cleaner was treating, a glass piece she moved to dust behind, a piece of furniture she was cleaning around when it was scratched these are exactly the items that exclusion targets. The standard policy is most likely to deny coverage on the very things your cleaners touch most often.

The coverage written for this gap is care, custody, and control insurance sometimes packaged as bailee coverage. It covers damage to a client's property while it is in your cleaners' hands or while you are working on it. The Maid Right FDD does not require it. That means most franchisees carry a general liability policy that excludes their most frequent source of property damage claims, without knowing it. For a business whose entire job is handling and cleaning a customer's surfaces and belongings, this is not an optional add-on. It is the coverage that actually matches the work.

During busy stretches a spring-cleaning rush, a move-in season, a week when a regular cleaner calls out — many Maid Right franchisees bring in an independent 1099 cleaner to cover the load. That common practice creates two gaps that show up at different times.

The first gap appears at claim time. If the 1099 cleaner causes damage or is accused of theft at a client's home, your general liability policy may invoke a subcontractor exclusion that removes coverage for damage caused by an independent contractor. That exclusion applies unless the 1099 cleaner carried her own current general liability insurance — and a certificate of insurance that expired two months ago does not count. The Maid Right franchise agreement explicitly requires that any sub-contractor you use carry equivalent coverage with Maid Right, LLC named as additional insured. Most franchisees never collect these certificates for a day-worker called in on short notice.

The second gap shows up at the workers' compensation audit. A workers' compensation audit is the carrier's year-end review of your actual payroll. It adds any 1099 cleaner who could not produce her own certificate to your payroll, and charges premium on those wages as if she were your employee. This is not a claim event and has nothing to do with whether anyone was injured. It is purely a payroll reconciliation: the carrier was never told about that payroll, and the audit collects the premium that was always owed.

Both gaps close with one habit: collect a current certificate from every 1099 cleaner before she starts her first job, and check the expiration date rather than assuming it is still active. Rikor's subcontractor compliance monitoring tracks those certificates automatically, so a lapse surfaces before the next job — not during a claim or at year-end. See how subcontractor compliance works ->

Residential cleaning runs on a high-turnover workforce. You hire, you train, you occasionally terminate — and the more people who move through your business, the more often a former employee files a claim. Wrongful termination, discrimination, and harassment are the most common. The Maid Right FDD is silent on Employment Practices Liability Insurance, which is the coverage written for exactly these claims.

Employment Practices Liability Insurance (EPLI) covers claims by employees and former employees — wrongful termination, discrimination based on protected characteristics, harassment, and wage disputes. For a cleaning franchise with even a handful of employees, these claims are not hypothetical. High-turnover service businesses produce them regularly, and you are not automatically covered by anything Maid Right, LLC or Premium Service Brands carries on its own programs.

The FDD's silence on EPLI is the largest employment-related gap in the compliance picture. A defense alone on a wrongful-termination claim can cost $40,000 or more before the case settles. Rikor's baseline for a newer franchisee is standalone EPLI at $250,000, scaling toward $500,000 to $1,000,000 as your headcount grows past ten employees or your revenue passes $750,000.

One detail often missed: standard EPLI covers claims between you and your employees. Working in someone's home creates a second exposure — a client who alleges your cleaner behaved inappropriately toward them during a visit. A third-party EPLI endorsement extends coverage to those customer-facing claims. For an in-home cleaning business, it is worth confirming the endorsement is included.

The honest answer is that your premium depends on details specific to your operation — your state, your payroll, your headcount, and your actual claims history. What you can understand is how the number is built, and the part that catches franchisees off guard at year-end.

Workers' compensation is almost always the largest single line for a residential cleaning business, because the model is labor-heavy. Carriers price it with a formula: your payroll divided by 100, multiplied by your state's rate for the cleaning classification, multiplied by your experience modification factor. The cleaning classification is NCCI code 9014 — Janitorial Services by Contractor. The rate itself is set by your state's workers' compensation rating bureau — the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) in most states — not by the insurance company. The carrier applies the bureau's rate to your payroll. It does not pick the number itself.

Both workers' compensation and general liability are auditable. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares what you estimated at the start of the policy against what actually happened, then adjusts the premium up or down. For a cleaning business, both lines are typically rated on payroll, so the number moves with the wages you actually paid — including any 1099 cleaners who could not produce their own certificates.

Here is a simple, brand-specific example. Say you estimate $200,000 in payroll when the Maid Right policy starts. A strong year of new accounts brings you to $310,000 in actual payroll. At a workers' compensation rate near $3.80 per $100 of payroll for NCCI 9014, the audit adds about $4,180 on that $110,000 difference (1,100 multiplied by $3.80). That bill typically arrives as a single lump sum a few months after the policy year closes — which is also when a growing franchise feels cash pressure from reinvesting in new cleaners and vehicles.

The Maid Right FDD sets a baseline that satisfies the franchise agreement. It does not reflect the exposure a residential cleaning franchise actually creates. The gaps are not minor — the FDD is entirely silent on crime coverage, EPLI, and cyber. Experienced operators fill all three. The recommendations below are Rikor's baselines for a newer franchisee, calibrated to headcount and revenue.

Third-party crime coverage at $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form — the FDD requires nothing. This is the most important gap in the entire Maid Right compliance picture. Every major cleaning FDD requires at least a bond. Maid Right requires nothing. A third-party crime policy at $250,000 with a theft-of-customer-property endorsement and a Loss Discovered form is the benchmark recommendation. It pays without a conviction, does not seek reimbursement, and covers a theft pattern that surfaces after an employee leaves as long as it is discovered during the policy period. Carry it from the moment you have cleaners in clients' homes.

Care, Custody and Control coverage at a $150,000 baseline. The FDD recommends nothing and requires nothing. The standard general liability care-custody-control exclusion removes coverage for the items your cleaners handle and work on every day. A separate bailee or care-custody-control policy at $150,000 is Rikor's baseline; size it up for homes with high-value contents or commercial accounts with expensive furnishings.

Employment Practices Liability Insurance at $250,000, standalone. The FDD is silent. A high-turnover cleaning workforce is the textbook employment-practices exposure — wrongful-termination, discrimination, harassment, and wage claims. Rikor's baseline is $250,000 as a standalone policy, scaling toward $500,000 to $1,000,000 as your headcount passes ten employees or your revenue climbs past $750,000. Confirm the policy includes a third-party EPLI endorsement to cover customer-facing claims.

Employers Liability at $1,000,000, not $500,000. The FDD sets the minimum at $500,000. Employers liability answers a serious employee-injury lawsuit outside the workers' compensation system. Rikor recommends raising it to $1,000,000 — the cost difference between the two limits is small and the protection difference is meaningful.

Cyber Liability at $250,000. The FDD is silent. Maid Right franchisees use business management software, process online payments, and hold client contact and scheduling data. A breach of that data is a real exposure. Rikor's baseline for a newer franchisee is $250,000, scaling with revenue.

A confirmed $2,000,000 general aggregate and primary-and-non-contributory endorsement. The FDD requires both the $1,000,000 per-occurrence limit and the $2,000,000 aggregate. Confirm both are present on your actual policy. The franchise agreement also requires your policy to be primary and non-contributory — meaning your policy pays first — and that endorsement must be present for the franchisor to be properly covered as additional insured.

Umbrella — sized to your actual exposure. The Maid Right agreement mentions umbrella liability insurance in Section 16.2 but sets no required limit, deferring to the Brand Standards Manual. For a residential cleaning operation serving individual homes, the realistic worst case — a serious injury to a client or a slip-and-fall claim — usually sits inside a $1,000,000 general liability limit. An umbrella is not the first dollar to spend at startup; the crime policy, bailee coverage, and EPLI fill more critical gaps first. As you add commercial accounts that require higher certificates, grow a fleet of vehicles moving between homes, or take on facilities work where a premises injury could be severe, an umbrella becomes appropriate — sized to the commercial work you actually take on and the certificate limits those clients require.