MAIDPRO

The MaidPro franchise agreement requires general liability insurance on an occurrence form at a $500,000 combined single limit — covering bodily injury and property damage in a single bucket — with a broad form general liability endorsement, primary and non-contributory.

The named insured on your certificate is your own legal business entity — the LLC or corporation you operate under. MaidPro, LLC is the franchisor. The agreement requires you to name MaidPro, LLC and all Indemnitees as additional insured on your general liability policy, with 30 days prior written notice of cancellation by endorsement.

That satisfies the franchisor. Here is where the requirement ends and your real exposure as a growing, tech-enabled residential cleaning operation begins.

The franchisor entity is MaidPro, LLC, a Threshold Brands company. The 2025 franchise agreement (Section 10 and Item 8) requires you to name MaidPro, LLC and all Indemnitees as additional insured on your general liability policy. The policy must be primary and non-contributory — meaning your coverage pays first, before any policy the franchisor carries.

What the agreement requires you to carry:

General Liability at a combined single limit of $500,000, on an occurrence form, with a broad form general liability endorsement. A combined single limit — sometimes called a CSL — pools bodily injury and property damage into one shared bucket rather than listing them separately. The occurrence form covers claims based on when the harm happened, not when the claim is filed. The broad form endorsement expands the standard coverage to include damage to personal property of others resulting from your workmanship. The policy must be primary and non-contributory.

Business Auto Liability at $1,000,000 combined single limit, covering hired and non-owned automobiles. Non-owned auto covers vehicles your employees drive on company business — the personal cars your cleaners use to get between homes. Hired auto covers vehicles you rent or lease for the business. Together they protect the driving your operation depends on.

Workers Compensation at statutory limits — as required by the state or states where you operate — plus Employers Liability at $1,000,000 each accident, $1,000,000 disease each employee, and $1,000,000 disease policy limit. Workers compensation pays medical costs and lost wages when a cleaner is hurt on the job. Employers liability covers lawsuits that fall outside the workers compensation no-fault system. These are two separate lines; the FDD correctly addresses both.

Third-Party Bond at $25,000 per loss. This is the franchise agreement's answer to the question of what happens when one of your cleaners steals from a client. The bond is required; what matters — and what this article explains — is what a bond actually is and how it differs from a crime insurance policy when a real claim arrives.

The agreement does not require cyber liability insurance. It does not require employment practices liability insurance, known as EPLI. And while the franchisor may require higher limits at its discretion, no umbrella is mandated. Both missing lines are addressed in the gap-coverage section.

All policies must be written by admitted carriers. The agreement requires 30 days prior notice of intent to cancel by endorsement, plus notice of any claim filed within 30 days of filing.

The MaidPro FDD does not contain a separate recommended-but-not-required insurance table. The franchisor reserves the right to require higher limits at its discretion. See the gap-coverage section for Rikor's recommendations.

That is what your franchise agreement requires. The rest of this article is about the two exposures MaidPro's platform creates that the compliance minimum does not address.

This is the signature exposure of residential cleaning, and MaidPro's franchise agreement addresses it — but with the weaker instrument and a limit that would not survive a real claim.

The agreement requires a third-party bond at $25,000. The word "bonded" is part of how the MaidPro brand presents itself to customers. Here is what that bond actually is, and where it falls short.

A janitorial or business-service bond is a three-party fidelity instrument. The surety, your business, and the client. It pays the client when your employee steals their property — but it carries two traps most franchisees never know about. First, many bonds pay only after the employee is criminally convicted of the theft. The most common form this claim takes — a credible accusation with no witness, no proof, no arrest — can trigger nothing. Second, the surety then seeks reimbursement from your business after it pays. It is a credit instrument dressed as insurance. Your general liability policy will not fill this gap, because general liability covers accidents — bodily injury and property damage. Employee theft is dishonesty, not an accident, and the policy excludes it.

The instrument built for this exposure is a third-party commercial crime policy with a theft-of-customer-property endorsement. It is a two-party insurance contract between the insurer and your business. It pays without a criminal conviction, on a proof-of-loss standard, and it does not seek reimbursement from you. That is the coverage a growing residential cleaning business needs.

Rikor's benchmark is $250,000 on a 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 found during the policy period no matter when it started. That distinction matters for MaidPro operators: a cleaner skimming small items from a recurring client over several months is rarely caught in real time. She is noticed when she leaves, or when a client does an inventory months later. A loss-discovered form responds when the pattern surfaces. A loss-sustained policy could deny anything that began before the current term. Carry the bond the FDD requires for compliance — and pair it with a third-party crime policy at $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form for real protection.

This is the gap that makes MaidPro different from any cleaning franchise that takes cash at the door.

Every time a client books through the MaidPro platform — or through your local account in the national booking system — that record includes their name, address, payment card data, home-access details, and service history. A franchise with two hundred active recurring clients has two hundred such records in the system. As your book of business grows, so does the data behind it.

MaidPro's 2025 franchise agreement requires no cyber liability insurance. That means when a breach happens — a compromised login, a payment card skimmer in the system, a phishing email that gives an attacker access to your client data — there is no policy to fund the investigation, the required notification letters, the credit monitoring service, or the third-party lawsuits that follow. Under state and federal breach-notification laws, a business that holds payment card or personal data must notify affected individuals when it is compromised. The legal cost of doing that starts at thousands of dollars for a modest breach and grows quickly.

Cyber liability insurance covers first-party costs — the investigation, the notification, the credit monitoring, the public relations response — and third-party claims from clients whose data was exposed. A residential cleaning franchise running on an online booking and payment platform carries this exposure every month, in every customer record, whether the FDD acknowledges it or not.

Rikor recommends cyber liability at $250,000 per occurrence and aggregate for a newer MaidPro franchisee, scaling as the customer database and revenue grow. It is one of two non-negotiable additions to the FDD minimum for a platform-dependent operation — and one the franchise agreement has left entirely out.

Cleaning means using chemicals on a customer's surfaces — stone countertops, hardwood floors, stainless fixtures, glass. When a product etches a counter or strips a finish, the client files a claim, and coverage depends on a distinction that catches most franchisees off guard.

The third-party bond behind the "bonded" marketing covers theft of a client's property. It does not cover accidental damage to it. General liability covers accidents — but the standard policy contains a care, custody, and control exclusion that removes coverage for property you were working on when it was damaged. The countertop your cleaner was treating is exactly that kind of property.

The coverage for this exposure is care, custody, and control insurance, sometimes packaged as bailee coverage. It covers damage to a client's property while your cleaners are in possession of it or actively working on it — the accidental scratch, the chemical etch, the cracked tile. The FDD does not require it. The bond does not cover it. Standard general liability may exclude it. For a business whose cleaners handle a customer's surfaces, fixtures, and furnishings all day, care, custody, and control coverage is the policy that matches the work.

Rikor recommends a $150,000 baseline, sized up for high-value residential clients.

Residential cleaning is physically demanding work — wet floors, bathrooms, stairs, repeated bending and kneeling, and cleaning chemicals used at close range. A cleaner who slips at a client's house is injured on the job, and that is a workers compensation claim even though it happened off your premises.

Workers compensation is built for exactly this situation: it pays the cleaner's medical bills and replaces a portion of lost wages, regardless of fault. MaidPro's franchise agreement requires it at statutory limits — whatever the state where you operate mandates. Employers liability sits above it at $1,000,000, covering lawsuits that fall outside the no-fault workers compensation system.

Two details determine whether this coverage works cleanly at year-end. First, classification: cleaning payroll belongs under NCCI code 9014, the standard classification for janitorial and cleaning services by contractor. Your workers compensation premium is built from that code and your actual payroll. The rate itself is set by your state's rating bureau — most states use the National Council on Compensation Insurance, known as NCCI — not by your carrier. The carrier applies the state's rate and runs the same year-end payroll audit.

Second, the audit. Workers compensation is an auditable policy. At year-end, the carrier compares the payroll you estimated when the policy started against what you actually paid, and adjusts the premium up or down. Any 1099 cleaner who cannot produce her own current certificate of insurance is added to your payroll at audit and charged workers compensation premium at your rate. That is not a penalty — it is the carrier collecting premium that was always owed on a real exposure. But for a franchisee who brought in overflow help during busy stretches without collecting certificates, it is a bill no one warned them about. Misclassifying 1099 workers creates audit exposure at year-end — not a claim denial at the time of injury.

Rikor's subcontractor compliance monitoring tool tracks those certificates in real time, so a lapse surfaces before the next job — not after the audit. See how subcontractor compliance works →

Collect a current certificate from every 1099 cleaner before she starts, and verify the date rather than assuming it is still active.

The honest answer is that your premium depends on details specific to your business — your state, your payroll, your headcount, and whether you have had claims. What you can understand is how the number is built, and where the year-end bill comes from.

Workers compensation is typically the largest line for a residential cleaning business because the model is labor-heavy. Carriers price it with a simple formula: your payroll divided by 100, multiplied by your state's rate for cleaning operations under NCCI code 9014, multiplied by your experience modification if you have earned one. The rate is set by the state rating bureau and applied uniformly — your carrier does not invent a number.

Both workers compensation and general liability are auditable. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares what you estimated at policy start against what actually happened, and adjusts the premium up or down. For a cleaning franchise like MaidPro, both lines are typically rated on payroll, so the adjustment tracks your actual wages — including any 1099 cleaners who could not produce certificates.

Here is a practical example tied to growth. Suppose you estimate $160,000 in payroll when you renew your MaidPro policy. A strong year of new recurring clients and added cleaners brings your actual payroll to $240,000 — an $80,000 difference. At a workers compensation rate near $3.60 per $100 of payroll for residential cleaning in many states, that gap produces an audit addition of approximately $2,880. That bill usually arrives as a single lump sum a few months after the policy year closes, right when a fast-growing franchisee feels the cash pressure most.

For a residential cleaning franchise with ten to twenty employees, a complete program — general liability at raised limits, auto, workers compensation, cyber, third-party crime at a real limit, EPLI, and care-custody-control coverage — typically runs in the range of $8,000 to $14,000 per year. The workers compensation line and the employment practices exposure are the two factors that push a cleaning program above what a bare-bones general liability quote suggests.

The practical move on audits is to estimate payroll close to reality. If you add cleaners quickly mid-year, ask your carrier for a mid-term adjustment to re-rate the policy based on the new projection. Spreading the difference across the remaining installments is far easier on cash flow than a single large bill after the year ends. The audit is reconciliation, not a penalty — and if you overestimated, it refunds the difference.

MaidPro's FDD gets some things right — employers liability at $1,000,000, hired and non-owned auto at $1,000,000, and an admitted-carrier requirement. But experienced operators running a tech-enabled cleaning business know the gap section is where the real program is built. Rikor's recommendations below are calibrated to a newer franchisee's profile, with guidance on when they scale.

Third-party crime policy at $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form — replacing the bond as your primary theft protection. The $25,000 bond satisfies the FDD requirement; keep it for compliance. But the third-party crime policy at $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form is the coverage that actually responds when a cleaner steals from a client — without a conviction requirement, without reimbursement, and without the timing trap that would miss thefts discovered after a cleaner departs. This is the most important upgrade from the FDD minimum for any residential cleaning operation.

Cyber liability at $250,000 — the FDD requires nothing. MaidPro's booking platform stores client payment data, home addresses, and access details at scale. A data breach triggers notification obligations under state and federal law; the cost of that process alone begins at thousands of dollars before the first lawsuit is filed. A cyber policy at $250,000 funds the investigation, the notification letters, the credit monitoring service, and the legal defense against client claims. As your customer database grows past a few hundred active accounts, consider scaling toward $500,000. For a platform-forward cleaning franchise, this is a non-negotiable gap to close.

EPLI at $250,000 — the FDD does not require it. A high-turnover in-home cleaning workforce is the textbook employment practices exposure: wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, and wage claims. MaidPro's agreement requires no employment practices liability insurance (EPLI). Rikor recommends standalone EPLI at $250,000 for a newer franchisee, scaling toward $500,000 to $1,000,000 as you pass ten employees or $750,000 in annual revenue.

Raise the GL limit to $1,000,000 per occurrence / $2,000,000 aggregate. The FDD sets a $500,000 combined single limit, which is below the $1,000,000 per occurrence standard the market expects. Most commercial accounts will send back a certificate of insurance request that requires $1,000,000 per occurrence. Raising the GL limit also preserves access to a wider field of admitted carriers. The cost increase is modest and the access benefit is immediate.

Care, Custody and Control coverage at $150,000. The third-party bond covers theft of a client's property; it does not cover accidental damage to it. General liability excludes property in your care, custody, or control. That leaves the most common physical claim a cleaning crew generates — an etched counter, a scratched floor, a broken antique — without dedicated coverage. Care, custody, and control coverage is built exactly for this gap. Size up for high-value residential clients.

Umbrella — driven by your exposure. A commercial umbrella adds a limit above your general liability, auto, and employers liability for a claim that exceeds the primary stack. For a mostly residential MaidPro operation, the realistic worst case — a cleaner injures herself or a homeowner on a residential property — generally sits inside a $1,000,000 primary limit. The first dollars are better spent on cyber, EPLI, and the crime upgrade described above. An umbrella becomes appropriate as you add commercial facility accounts that require $2,000,000 or higher on their certificate of insurance, run a larger fleet of cars between locations, or reach a revenue scale where a single large premises-liability event could exceed the primary limit. At that point, a $1,000,000 umbrella above a proper primary stack is a straightforward and cost-effective addition.