THE MAIDS

The Maids franchise agreement requires general liability insurance at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, vehicle insurance at $1,000,000, workers' compensation as required by law, and a third-party fidelity bond at $25,000. Both The Maids International, LLC and The Procter & Gamble Company must be named as additional insured on every policy.

The named insured on your certificate is your own legal business entity — the LLC or corporation you operate through. The Maids International, LLC is the franchisor. The Procter & Gamble Company holds an ownership interest in the brand, which is why both entities appear on your certificate.

That satisfies the franchisor. Here is where the requirement ends and your real exposure as a team-based residential cleaning operation begins.

The franchisor entities are The Maids International, LLC and The Procter & Gamble Company. The 2026 franchise agreement (Article 12.1) requires you to name both as additional insured before attending the SMART Start Training program. Coverage must be underwritten by a company rated at least A-VI by A.M. Best — that is Best's rating system for a carrier's financial strength and size, and it sets the floor on which carriers qualify.

What the agreement requires you to carry:

General Liability at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, with a deductible no greater than $100,000. The aggregate is the most the policy pays across all claims in a year. The occurrence form covers claims based on when the harm happened — not when the claim is filed.

Vehicle Insurance at $1,000,000. The FDD describes this broadly. In practice it means commercial auto liability at $1,000,000 combined single limit — the total the policy pays per accident for bodily injury and property damage combined.

Workers Compensation as required by state law. Workers compensation pays medical bills and lost wages when an employee is hurt on the job. For a team-based cleaning business, this is the most premium-intensive line because every team member's payroll drives the calculation.

Employers Liability at $1,000,000 per accident, $1,000,000 per employee disease, and $1,000,000 disease policy limit. Employers liability covers lawsuits that go outside the workers' compensation no-fault system — a worker who claims an injury was caused by unsafe conditions, for example. The FDD's workers' compensation language implies statutory coverage; these employers liability limits reflect the Rikor benchmark standard.

Third-Party Fidelity Bond at $25,000. The franchise agreement requires a third-party fidelity bond or similar insurance covering employee theft from customers. The bond is the required instrument for the theft exposure the team model creates. The problem, as explained below, is the limit and the standard structure of how the bond pays.

All-Risks Property Insurance including fire and extended coverage. This covers your business property — HEPA vacuums, cleaning equipment, supplies — against physical loss or damage.

The 2026 franchise agreement does not include a separate recommended-but-not-required insurance table. There is no Section B from this FDD.

That is what your franchise agreement requires. The rest of this article is about what the team-based model actually creates — starting with the coverage set too low to handle it.

Theft from a client's home is the defining exposure of residential cleaning. The Maids' 22-Step team model makes it more complicated than nearly any other cleaning brand faces.

Here is why. When a solo cleaner enters a home and a watch goes missing, the business owner has one person to question and the client has one person to accuse. The accusation is focused. When a four-person team cleans the same home and the same watch goes missing, there is no clean attribution. All four people were in the bedroom. Any one of them could have taken it. None of them will admit it. The client knows that. You know that. And a bond written to pay on proven theft suddenly has no clear path to payment because there is no proof.

Your general liability policy will not pay for employee theft. General liability covers accidents property damage or bodily injury your operations cause unintentionally. Theft by your own employee is dishonesty, not an accident, and the standard policy explicitly excludes it. When a client calls and says something is missing from a home your team just cleaned, general liability is not the answer.

The answer is a third-party crime policy — sometimes called an employee dishonesty bond or fidelity bond. The Maids franchise agreement requires a third-party fidelity bond or similar insurance at $25,000. That amount is a compliance number, not a protection number. A single jewelry accusation, a watch collection, cash from a drawer, or a laptop taken during a deep clean can exceed $25,000 before a police report is filed.

A crime policy is a stronger instrument than a standard fidelity bond for one specific reason: it does not require a criminal conviction to pay. Most fidelity bonds include a conviction clause — the surety does not pay until the accused employee is convicted of theft. The most common claim in residential cleaning is a credible accusation with no proof, no witness, no admission, and no charge. That scenario often triggers nothing under a conviction-based bond. A crime policy uses a proof-of-loss standard: document the loss, cooperate with the investigation, and the policy responds to a genuine third-party theft. This difference matters most when four people had access and attribution is impossible.

When you purchase a third-party crime policy, ask for the Loss Discovered form. Crime policies come in two versions. A loss-sustained form covers a theft only if it both occurred and was discovered during the same policy period. A loss-discovered form covers any theft discovered during the current policy period, no matter when it started. That distinction matters for a team-based operation because a slow theft pattern — a cleaner taking small amounts of cash from a recurring client over several months — is discovered long after it began. If you switched carriers at any point or have had coverage gaps, a loss-sustained form may deny months that fell under the old policy. Loss discovered closes that timing trap.

For most residential cleaning franchisees, workers' compensation is the largest insurance line by premium. For a team-based operator sending four workers to each home, the math is worth understanding clearly.

Workers' compensation is priced on a formula. Take your total payroll, divide it by 100, multiply by your state's rate for the class code, and multiply by your experience modification. The experience modification is a factor that adjusts your premium based on your claims history relative to similar businesses. The state's rate for NCCI code 9014 — Janitorial Services, by Contractor — is set by your state's rating bureau, which is an organization like the National Council on Compensation Insurance that governs workers' compensation rates for most states. The insurance company does not choose the rate. It applies the bureau's number to your payroll.

For a four-person team model, this means your payroll per job is four workers' wages, not one. If each cleaner earns $18 per hour and a team spends three hours at a home, that is $216 in payroll per visit. Run twenty visits a week and you add roughly $4,320 in weekly payroll across your teams. That payroll drives every workers' compensation calculation — and the carrier reconciles it at the year-end audit.

A workers' compensation audit is not a penalty. It is the carrier's year-end review that compares the payroll you estimated at the start of the policy against the payroll you actually ran, and adjusts the premium up or down. A franchisee who overestimated gets money back. One who underestimated receives a bill. For The Maids model, where adding one active team adds four workers wages per job, actual payroll can grow faster than a franchisee expects when the business adds recurring clients quickly.

Here is an example that fits this model. You start the policy year estimating $280,000 in payroll across your cleaning teams. A strong first year pushes actual wages to $390,000 as you add a third team and fill new client slots. At a workers' compensation rate near $3.80 per $100 of payroll, that $110,000 difference produces an audit bill of about $4,180 — delivered as a single lump sum several months after the policy year closes. If growth is significant mid-year, ask your carrier for a mid-term adjustment. 

Spreading the increase across remaining installments is much easier on cash flow than receiving a large bill after the year ends.

Misclassifying a worker — treating a team member as a 1099 subcontractor when the carrier or the state would classify them as an employee — does not cause a workers' compensation claim to be denied. It creates audit exposure at year end. When the carrier's auditor reviews payroll records and finds uninsured subcontractors who should have been employees, their pay gets added to the auditable base and charged premium. That bill arrives regardless of whether any claims were filed.

The Maids' system moves a team through a home systematically — wiping, polishing, handling, repositioning items to clean beneath and behind them. Things break. A HEPA backpack vacuum catches a power cord and pulls a lamp off a table. A cleaner moves a piece of decorative art to clean the shelf behind it and drops it. A glass item on a display surface gets bumped during a dusting pass.

General liability covers property damage your operations cause — but standard policies contain a care, custody, and control exclusion. That exclusion removes coverage for property your cleaners were actively handling or working on when it was damaged. The items your teams touch most often are the ones the standard policy is most likely to exclude.

The coverage written for this exposure is care, custody, and control insurance — sometimes called bailee coverage. It covers damage to a client's property while it is in your cleaners' hands or under their care. The Maids' FDD does not require it, and does not list it as recommended. That silence is a gap in the program, not a signal that the exposure is absent. For a business that runs a detailed multi-step cleaning process involving every surface in a client's home, care, custody, and control coverage is the line that matches the actual work.

The Maids model is team-heavy by design. Recruiting, training, and keeping cleaners who can perform the 22-Step system is a continuous operational task. High-turnover workforces produce employment claims. Wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, wage disputes — the more people you hire and let go, the more often one of those claims surfaces.

Employment Practices Liability Insurance — EPLI — covers claims by current and former employees. It pays defense costs and settlements for things like wrongful firing, discrimination based on a protected characteristic, and harassment allegations. In a team-based model where workers are inside a client's home together for hours, allegations of misconduct between team members — or between a team member and a client — can arise in ways a standard liability policy never addresses.

The Maids franchise agreement does not require EPLI. That is a notable gap. A team-based cleaning operation with high turnover, multiple workers sharing client space, and constant hiring and letting-go is exactly the profile that generates employment claims. Rikor's benchmark for a cleaning operation is $250,000 as a starting point for a newer franchisee, scaling toward $500,000 as headcount passes ten employees or revenue passes $750,000.

Take EPLI as a standalone policy, not as a sublimit attached to your general liability. A GL sublimit for EPLI shares limits with your property-damage and bodily-injury claims. If a claim-heavy year runs the GL aggregate down, there may be nothing left when an employment dispute arrives. The standalone policy keeps those limits separate and fully available.

The honest answer is that your premium depends on details specific to your operation. What you can understand is how the number is built — and the parts that catch franchisees at year end.

General liability for a residential cleaning franchise is typically rated on payroll. The carrier estimates your wages at the start of the policy and charges premium per $1,000 of those wages. 

Workers' compensation follows the same payroll basis. At year end the carrier audits actual payroll and adjusts the premium. Both lines are auditable, and for a team-based model they move together as your team count and client volume grow.

The Maids franchise agreement requires general liability, vehicle insurance, workers compensation, a fidelity bond, and all-risks property coverage. That is the compliance floor. The gap between that floor and a program that fits a four-person team model is meaningful. The recommendations below reflect Rikor's benchmarks, calibrated to a newer franchisee's operational profile. These are starting points — they scale as your headcount, revenue, and team count grow.

Third-Party Crime Coverage at $250,000 — not the FDD's $25,000. This is the most important gap in The Maids' coverage stack. A four-person team creates a theft attribution problem no other residential cleaning model faces to the same degree. The accusation comes in, four people had access, and there is no clean way to resolve it without legal costs. The FDD's $25,000 fidelity bond is a compliance minimum — it does not cover a real jewelry, electronics, or cash loss from one home. 

Rikor's benchmark is $250,000 on a third-party crime policy with a Loss Discovered form. The conviction-clause limitation of a standard fidelity bond makes it unreliable for the accusation-without-proof scenario that is most common in team-based residential cleaning. A crime policy responds to that scenario. A bond often does not.

Care, Custody, and Control Coverage at $150,000 — carry it, the FDD does not mention it. The standard general liability care, custody, and control exclusion removes coverage for property your cleaners were handling when it was damaged. For a business whose entire model involves handling every surface in a client's home, that exclusion creates a structural gap every job. Carry care, custody, and control coverage at $150,000 as a starting point and size it up for clients with high-value art, antiques, or collectibles.

Employment Practices Liability at $250,000, standalone. The FDD requires nothing here. For a team-based operation with high turnover and multiple workers sharing client spaces, the EPLI exposure is real. Start at $250,000 as a standalone policy — not a sublimit on your general liability — and scale toward $500,000 as your headcount climbs past ten or your revenue passes $750,000. EPLI that shares limits with general liability is EPLI that runs out when you need it most.

Cyber Liability at $250,000. The FDD does not require it. The Maids runs online booking, client scheduling, and payment processing across its network. Those systems hold customer names, home addresses, payment card data, and scheduling information — exactly the kind of personally identifiable information that triggers data-breach response costs, state notification requirements, and credit monitoring obligations. Rikor's baseline for a newer franchisee is $250,000, scaling with revenue as the client database grows.

Umbrella Coverage — driven by your actual operations. The FDD does not require an umbrella. A commercial umbrella adds a layer of limit above your general liability, commercial auto, and employers liability for a claim that exceeds the primary stack. For a residential cleaning business sending teams of four to private homes, the realistic worst case — a serious bodily injury at a client's property, a vehicle accident transporting a team between jobs, a cumulative-injury lawsuit from a team member — can approach or exceed a $1,000,000 primary limit as your operation grows. An umbrella becomes more important as you add commercial accounts that require higher certificate limits, grow your vehicle fleet, or scale to higher revenue where a single serious loss could materially affect the business. For a newer franchisee with one or two teams and purely residential work, the better first priority is getting the crime, EPLI, and care-custody-control coverages right. An umbrella fits the conversation once those foundations are in place.

Confirmed Employers Liability at $1,000,000. Verify that your policy sets employers liability — the sublimit covering lawsuits outside the workers' compensation no-fault system — at $1,000,000 per accident, $1,000,000 per employee, and $1,000,000 policy limit. This is the Rikor benchmark standard, and the premium difference from lower limits is typically small.