Rachel*, 34, is an author and freelance writer from Hertfordshire who pays a cleaner £12.50 an hour to come weekly – and keeps it a secret from her friends and family.
It started when she and her husband moved from a small flat to a house over six years ago, when cleaning went from a struggle to barely manageable.
“It felt like this was something that was going to take a load off in terms of time and energy,” she tells i, “so we could actually enjoy our free time and not spend it on chores.” Since having her first child they increased the cleaner visits from fortnightly to weekly because, as she says, “it’s impossible to keep on top of everything, I genuinely don’t know how people do it”.
As of 2023, 17 per cent of UK households pay someone to help with their home cleaning, a 70 per cent increase on the number of households doing so in 2018. Search for cleaners has escalated too, something that Kanika Srivastava, marketing manager for cleaning company Molly Maid, attributes to a combination of the pandemic increasing hygiene concerns, and Brexit leading to a shortage of cleaners.
But paying someone to do domestic work can feel uncomfortable, to the point that some would rather pretend they don’t use a cleaner at all. “I feel a lot of middle-class guilt about ‘taking the easy way out’,” Rachel explains.
Heidi Phillips based in Neath, South Wales owns a cleaning company and says she regularly gets clients booking cleaners who don’t want anyone to know. She agrees this insecurity is, in part, a kind of class anxiety.
“I’ve been running my cleaning business for over 10 years. Back in the 80s having a cleaner was mainly for people with extra money who were a bit better off, where maybe the husband worked and the wife stayed home. That was the traditional way it worked.
“Now we’ve moved on and most people work, but you still get a handful of people who book a cleaner and worry people are going to see them as entitled or ‘better off’. I even had a customer tell me that her friends were telling her she was really posh because she had a cleaner.”
Rachel says she realises it is still a privilege to be able to afford a cleaner at all, which is a big part of why she doesn’t like to talk about it. “For lots of people that is a privilege they don’t have, which means they either have to run around and do it themselves on top of all the other things they also have to do and end up even more exhausted than I am. Or their house is a mess.”
But this anxiety is often complicated by the way that domestic work is gendered. Rachel says that the house being unclean felt like a reflection on her.
“It feels like there is some kind of internal and external pressure for me to look like I’ve got my shit together, and that my home is a reflection in the same way that my physical appearance and the work I’m putting out is. Everything feels so public-facing even though it’s only friends and family seeing my house, I don’t want it to look like I’ve let myself go, or I’m not in control of everything.” This shame, she notes, is not one that her husband shares.
“I think it’s partly a personality thing and it just doesn’t bother him as much fundamentally. But from a mental load perspective, he doesn’t see it as something he should be overly worried about.”
Domestic work like cleaning and ironing has long been devalued. It is either gendered as ‘women’s work’ or not seen as a skill worth investing in. Despite being aware of this, Vic Patersen, 49 from Lincolnshire says she still feels like she should be doing the ironing, rather than paying someone else.
“I wouldn’t try and fix my car myself – so I pay someone to do it faster and better. When I look at it logically that way it makes perfect sense. It’s only when I look at it emotionally that I think ‘oh my god, I’m a grown woman and I can’t iron’.”
This shame persists even though she is very familiar with the fact that ironing is a specific skill. “When I was in my 20s my mum actually worked in an ironing service. She wasn’t at all embarrassed about what she did – she could iron sheets in five minutes flat, it was phenomenal. But it was really difficult for me to admit that I couldn’t do the ironing, it felt like some kind of failure.”
“I feel this real tension,” Rachel adds. “Yes this [cleaning] is work and it should be valued and I am valuing it by paying someone to do it rather than doing it for free myself. But at the same time is it exploitative that I’m paying somebody worse off than me to come and clean my home? Or am I supporting a self-employed woman whose job it is to clean.”
Heidi says that part of this tension is down to the way that cleaning as a job is regarded.
“People still think that people who clean have no education or aspiration” Heidi adds “and that is completely incorrect. But I think it’s a belief that still persists now.”
People’s tense relationship with employing cleaners bleeds out of immediate circles and can be a cause for judgement, regardless of circumstances.
Abbey Robb was queuing with a friend in a cafe one day when she was rudely interrupted by a stranger “I said something to my friend about my cleaner and [the person] standing in front of us turned around and went ‘oh, that must be nice for some’.”
Abbey, an integrative therapist based in London, has an invisible disability. Because of this, she says she gets a lot of judgement from people that the adjustments she’s making are because she’s lazy or entitled.
“When I get the lift rather than the stairs,” she tells i, “that’s seen as lazy. And when I pay for a cleaner, rather than people understanding that this is an adaptation that I’m doing so I have a decent quality of life, the first response is to dismiss me or put me down.”
Since that incident, she will not mention that she has a cleaner.
The devaluation of domestic work is reinforced by the wages – cleaners in the UK on average make £11 an hour which is less than living wage. Heidi, Abbey and Vic all pay the people they employ more than the voluntary real living wage (£12 for the rest of the UK and £13.15 for London) and say that despite shame and judgement, this is a use of their money that they feel is more than worth it.
“When I do talk to people I know who know that I don’t have very much money, they ask why I’m spending money on a cleaner,” Abbey says. “And I’d tell them it’s because it means that I can go out and work and earn money. If I had to clean my own house and keep it spick and span and tidy, there’s a good chance that I’d be too tired to do my job.”
But Rachel still feels uneasy.
“From a perspective of balancing the load for women, I pay for childcare so that I can work and if I didn’t pay for a cleaner, I would then be cleaning in my free time when I actually want to be able to spend that time with my child. And it feels like it should be one and the same – it’s providing employment to somebody else for work that is valuable and freeing up my time to balance work, parenting, family life and all the rest of it. But it does feel more like a guilty secret.”
Names have been changed
'President Musk' is flexing his muscles and revealing how weak Trump is