TWO MAIDS

The Two Maids franchise agreement requires general liability insurance on an occurrence form at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, including product liability. It also requires Employment Practices Liability Insurance — a coverage that protects you from employee claims of wrongful termination, discrimination, and wage disputes — at $1,000,000, with first and third-party coverage and a wage and hour defense sublimit of at least $100,000.

The named insured on your certificate is your own legal business entity — the LLC or corporation you operate through. Two Maids Franchising, LLC is the franchisor. The agreement requires you to name Two Maids Franchising, LLC as additional insured on your policy.

That satisfies your franchisor. Here is where the requirement ends and your real exposure as a pay-for-performance cleaning operator begins.

The franchisor entity is Two Maids Franchising, LLC, a Home Franchise Concepts brand. The 2025 franchise agreement (Item 8) requires you to name Two Maids Franchising, LLC as additional insured. An additional insured is a party other than your business that your policy covers for certain claims.

What the agreement requires you to carry:

General Liability at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, on an occurrence form, including product liability. The occurrence form covers claims based on when the harm happened, not when the claim is filed. General liability (GL) covers property damage and bodily injury your operations cause — a cleaner accidentally breaks a client's glass table, or a client slips on a wet floor during the clean.

Auto Liability at $1,000,000 per vehicle, covering owned, hired, and non-owned vehicles. Hired and non-owned auto (HNOA) extends to the personal vehicles your cleaners drive between homes — a coverage gap that surprises many franchisees.

Workers' Compensation at state-required limits, plus Employers Liability at $1,000,000 across all three limits. Workers' compensation pays medical bills and lost wages when one of your cleaners is hurt on the job. Employers liability (EL) covers lawsuits that fall outside the no-fault workers' compensation system — a worker who sues claiming your supervision contributed to the injury, for example.

Employment Practices Liability Insurance (EPLI) at $1,000,000, including first and third-party coverage and a wage and hour defense sublimit of at least $100,000. EPLI covers claims by current and former employees alleging wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, and wage violations. The wage and hour defense sublimit is a specific pocket for defending claims that you miscalculated or underpaid wages. In the Two Maids model, that sublimit is not a formality — it is a direct answer to the disputes that the pay-for-performance calculation produces.

Umbrella Liability at $1,000,000 per occurrence for 1–4 locations, with an aggregate that scales to $3,000,000 for 5–9 locations and $5,000,000 for 10 or more locations. A commercial umbrella adds a layer of limit above your GL, auto, and employers liability. It is a follow-form policy, meaning it follows the terms of the policies beneath it.

Surety Bond covering at least $25,000 for employee theft from a customer. This is the coverage behind "bonded" in your marketing. What it actually is — and what it cannot do — matters more than the dollar amount.

All policies must be written by a carrier rated A- VII or better by AM Best and must be admitted carriers. The agreement requires 30 days written advance notice of any material change, cancellation, or expiration.

The Two Maids 2025 FDD does not identify a recommended-but-not-required coverage table. No Section B coverages are stated.

Note: The FDD's GL requirement does not separately specify the products and completed operations aggregate or state a waiver of subrogation. Confirm a $2,000,000 products and completed operations aggregate with your carrier. The surety bond at $25,000 is notably low for the in-home theft exposure — see the gap-coverage section. The FDD requires a surety bond, not a third-party crime policy; both instruments are explained below.

That is what your franchise agreement requires. The rest of this article is about the exposure your specific model creates — starting with the one no other cleaning franchise agreement needs to address the same way.

Two Maids' Pay-for-Performance system means customers rate each clean on a 1–10 scale and that score directly affects what each cleaner earns on that visit. The brand's founders designed it as a quality incentive. From an employment law standpoint, it also means pay calculations can be disputed at any visit, across any team, at any time.

Your EPLI policy — Employment Practices Liability Insurance — is the coverage that responds to these disputes. EPLI covers claims by employees and former employees alleging wrongful termination, discrimination, wage miscalculation, and harassment. In a standard residential cleaning operation, EPLI is an elevated but manageable exposure because of workforce turnover. In a pay-for-performance operation, it is structural. Every cleaner whose pay was reduced by a low customer rating is a potential claimant. Every cleaner let go after a pattern of low scores has a wrongful-termination story to tell that connects performance to pay and employment status — exactly the chain an employment attorney builds a case around.

The FDD's requirement of $1,000,000 with a $100,000 wage and hour defense sublimit reflects genuine awareness of this. The wage and hour sublimit is specific: it funds the defense of claims that your compensation calculation shortchanged a worker. That sublimit should be treated as a floor, not a ceiling.

The third-party EPLI endorsement is also worth confirming. 

Third-party EPLI extends coverage to claims by customers or vendors — not just your own employees. A customer who alleges that your cleaner behaved inappropriately during a home visit can file a third-party EPLI claim. The FDD requires first and third-party coverage, which means your policy should already carry this; confirm with your carrier that it does, and that it is explicitly written into the endorsement — not assumed.

Your general liability policy will not pay for employee theft. GL covers accidents — property damage and bodily injury caused by your operations. Theft is dishonesty, not an accident, and the standard policy excludes it. When a client says one of your cleaners took something, GL is not the answer.

The Two Maids FDD requires a surety bond at $25,000 for employee theft. A surety bond is a three-party instrument: the surety company, your business, and the client who was harmed. It is what stands behind the word "bonded" in your marketing.

Here is what the bond actually does — and what it does not do. Most business-service bonds pay only after the theft is proven, which usually means a criminal conviction or a signed admission. The most common real claim is a client who says something is missing, no one admits to it, and there is no proof. That situation — the most likely form this claim takes — often triggers nothing from the bond. The surety also expects to be repaid by your business after it pays the client; it is a credit arrangement, not true loss insurance.

A third-party crime policy is the stronger instrument. It is a two-party contract between your insurer and your business. It covers theft of a client's property by your employees, pays without requiring a criminal conviction on a reasonable proof-of-loss standard, and does not seek reimbursement from you. It can be written at meaningful limits — Rikor's benchmark is $250,000 with a third-party theft-of-client-property endorsement.

If you carry a crime policy, ask for the Loss Discovered form by name. Crime policies come two ways. A loss-sustained form covers theft only if it both happened and was discovered in the same policy period. A loss-discovered form covers theft that is found during the policy period regardless of when it started. Employee theft in a cleaning operation is rarely caught the day it begins — it is a pattern surfaced over time. A cleaner who quietly took small amounts of cash from a recurring client over six months, noticed only after a client mentioned something during an account review, needs a loss-discovered policy to be covered properly. If you switched carriers mid-year or had any prior coverage gap, a loss-sustained form could deny the months that fell under the old policy. Loss Discovered closes that timing trap.

The FDD requires the surety bond — carry it for compliance. A third-party crime policy at $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form is the real protection behind the "bonded" promise.

Cleaning means applying chemicals to a customer's surfaces — and sometimes a product that works on most finishes damages a specific stone, sealant, or material. The client's marble countertop develops discoloration. The hardwood floor shows dull patches where the wrong solution was used. These claims are common, and whether GL pays depends on one distinction.

General liability covers property damage caused by your operations — but most GL policies contain a care, custody, and control exclusion. That exclusion removes coverage for property that was in your control when it was damaged, or that you were actively working on. A countertop your cleaner was wiping when the chemical etched it is exactly that kind of property. So the very surfaces your cleaners touch every day are the ones the standard policy is most likely to exclude.

The coverage written for this is care, custody, and control (CCC) insurance, sometimes called bailee coverage. It covers damage to a client's property while it is in your cleaners' control. The Two Maids FDD does not require it — which means a franchisee who relies only on the FDD list is exposed every day to the most routine damage claim the business produces.

Chemical damage also raises a completed operations question. Some stone reactions develop over a day or two. By the time the client notices, the team is gone and the job is closed. General liability covers completed operations claims — injury or property damage that surfaces after the work ends — but the care-custody-and-control exclusion still applies to the specific surface being cleaned. Rikor recommends CCC coverage for any cleaning franchisee, sized to the value of the homes your teams service. It is the coverage that matches what the work actually does.

Workers' compensation (WC) is the coverage that responds when one of your cleaners is hurt on the job — whether she slips on a wet entryway at a client's home, strains her back lifting equipment, or has a reaction to a cleaning product. Workers' compensation pays her medical bills and a portion of her lost wages under a no-fault system; she does not have to prove you were negligent to receive benefits.

The Two Maids model adds one factor worth naming. Because cleaner pay is tied to customer ratings, some workers feel pressure to move quickly. A cleaner rushing through a kitchen to stay on schedule is working in a wet environment with a time incentive the rating system created. Workers' compensation covers the injury regardless of what caused the rush. The employers liability line — $1,000,000 on all three limits, as the FDD requires — covers a lawsuit if the worker claims your system contributed to the conditions that hurt her.

One other point on overhead: if you bring in a 1099 cleaner for overflow during a busy week and she is hurt on a job, she is likely your statutory employee for workers' compensation purposes. 

Statutory employer means the law treats you like her employer even if the paperwork says otherwise. If she cannot show her own coverage, your WC policy responds as if she were your worker — and the cost of her pay is added to your payroll at the year-end audit. That addition is not a penalty; it is the carrier collecting premium that was always owed once the real payroll is known.

But it arrives as a lump sum, which surprises operators who did not track the 1099 paperwork. Collect a current certificate from every independent cleaner before she starts, and treat a lapsed certificate as no coverage at all.

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

Your premium depends on details specific to your operation — your state, your payroll, your headcount, your vehicle count, and your claims history. What you can understand is how the number is built, and the part that most often catches franchisees at year-end.

Workers' compensation is usually the largest single line for a cleaning operation 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 code, multiplied by your experience modification. The per-$100 rate for each class code is set by your state's rating bureau — in most states, the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI). The classification code for residential cleaning is NCCI 9014 — Janitorial and Related Services. The insurance company does not set that rate; it applies the state bureau's number and then runs the same kind of year-end audit to true up the bill.

Both workers' compensation and general liability are auditable. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares the payroll or revenue you estimated when the policy started against what you actually paid and earned, then adjusts the premium up or down. For a cleaning operation, both WC and GL are typically rated on payroll. If you added cleaners mid-year and your actual wages finished above your estimate, the audit charges premium on the difference.

A concrete example. Say you estimate $240,000 in payroll across your cleaning teams when the policy starts. A strong second half — new accounts, expanded territory — pushes you to $340,000 in actual wages. At a workers' compensation rate near $4.50 per $100 of payroll for residential cleaning under NCCI 9014, the $100,000 payroll difference adds about $4,500 to the year-end audit bill. If you also paid $35,000 to a 1099 overflow cleaner who could not produce a certificate, that amount gets added to the base as well. The bill arrives as a single lump sum several months after the policy year closes. It is a reconciliation, not a penalty — the carrier is collecting what was always owed once the real numbers are known, and it runs both ways: if you overestimated, you get money back.

The practical move is to estimate payroll close to reality. If you add cleaners during the year and your payroll grows materially, ask your carrier for a mid-term adjustment — a re-rate applied to the remaining months of the policy. Spreading the increase across the rest of the term avoids a single large lump sum arriving in spring.

The Two Maids FDD is more thorough than most cleaning franchise agreements — it requires EPLI at $1,000,000, a scaling umbrella, and recognizes the in-home theft exposure with a required surety bond. Where experienced operators go further is in replacing a weak crime instrument with a real one, adding care-custody-and-control coverage the FDD does not mention, and confirming that the EPLI structure fits the way the business actually operates. The recommendations below are Rikor's baselines for newer franchisees, calibrated to your headcount and revenue.

Third-Party Crime coverage at $250,000 — pair with the surety bond, do not rely on the bond alone. The FDD's $25,000 surety bond satisfies compliance. It is not the coverage that answers a real theft-from-a-home claim. A third-party commercial crime policy at $250,000 on a Loss Discovered form pays without requiring a conviction, does not seek reimbursement from you, and covers the slow pattern of employee theft that is never discovered on day one. Rikor's benchmark is $250,000. Carry the bond for compliance and the crime policy for protection.

Care, Custody, and Control (CCC) / Bailee coverage — do not skip it. The FDD does not require it. The GL care-custody-and-control exclusion removes exactly the claims your cleaners create — damage to property they were handling when something went wrong. A scratched countertop. A discolored floor. A broken fixture. Rikor recommends CCC coverage as a baseline for any cleaning operation; size it to the value of the homes your teams regularly service.

Cyber Liability — $250,000 baseline. The FDD does not require it. Two Maids runs online booking, stores customer payment data, and uses a customer-facing rating platform — a real data exposure. Rikor recommends $250,000 for a newer franchisee, with the social engineering sublimit confirmed. Social engineering means fraudulent emails that trick you or an employee into wiring money. Scale toward $500,000 as your revenue grows past $750,000.

EPLI — confirm the structure and sublimit explicitly. The FDD requires $1,000,000 with a $100,000 wage and hour defense sublimit. Confirm the policy is standalone — not a GL sublimit — that it includes first and third-party coverage as required, and that the $100,000 wage and hour sublimit is explicitly written into the policy rather than assumed. In a pay-for-performance model, that sublimit is the pocket that defends pay-calculation disputes. It should grow as your headcount grows past fifteen.

Umbrella — driven by your commercial exposure, not only location count. The FDD's umbrella requirement scales with location count, which is reasonable for residential work. What it does not capture is the certificate requirements commercial accounts impose. A commercial client who requires $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 on a certificate may need more than the FDD-based umbrella provides. For mostly residential cleaning, the FDD-required umbrella is appropriate. The trigger to raise it is taking on commercial accounts with certificate requirements that exceed your current umbrella aggregate.

A confirmed $2,000,000 products and completed operations aggregate. The FDD names $2,000,000 general aggregate but does not separately confirm the products and completed operations aggregate — the limit that covers claims arising after the job is done. A chemical reaction to a countertop that appears 48 hours after the clean is a completed operations claim. Confirm with your carrier that the completed operations aggregate is $2,000,000 and sits separately from the general aggregate.

Independent contractors liability — confirm it is not excluded. Any GL policy you carry should confirm it has not excluded independent contractors. A policy with a subcontractor exclusion provides no coverage for damage caused by an uninsured 1099 cleaner you brought in. Remove the exclusion or add an independent contractors liability endorsement before the next overflow worker starts.