Do Maid Services Do Laundry? What House Cleaners Will (and Won't) Do

Whether a maid service will do your laundry is one of the most common questions we get from people booking a first clean, and the answer is yes, with a scope that surprises people. At Maid Marines, laundry is a bookable add-on, but it covers your linens and towels, not your personal wardrobe. Most cleaning companies draw a line somewhere similar, and I think understanding why the line sits where it does makes the whole service menu easier to navigate.

The easiest way to think about it is that a cleaning visit is a block of skilled time. Every company has to decide what fits inside that block by default, what gets added on, and what doesn’t belong in it at all. Once you look at the menu that way, none of the pricing feels arbitrary.

A standard house cleaning includes the whole home, just not the laundry

A standard house cleaning covers your entire home, meaning the kitchen, the bathrooms, dusting in every room, and the floors throughout. It’s a full clean, which is exactly what our house cleaning visits are, and people sometimes assume the standard service is smaller than it actually is. If the kitchen needs real scrubbing and the bathrooms haven’t been touched in a month, the standard clean is the service that handles that.

What it doesn’t include is laundry, and the reason is mechanical rather than stingy. A flat-rate clean is priced by the size of the home. Laundry is priced by time, and worse, by machine time that nobody controls. A wash cycle plus a dry cycle can run close to two hours on its own, sometimes in a laundry room three floors away. Baking that into every clean would mean everyone pays for laundry whether they need it or not. Keeping it as an add-on means the people who want it pay for it and the people who don’t, don’t.

The laundry add-on covers linens and towels, and the scope is deliberate

Our laundry add-on is $40 on a standard clean, and it’s scoped to linens and towels, the sheets on your beds and the towels in your bathroom and kitchen, not anything hanging in your closet. That scope exists because linens are the laundry that actually belongs to the home. A clean bedroom with a bed still wearing last week’s sheets feels unfinished, and a scrubbed bathroom next to a pile of damp towels feels the same way. Linens complete the clean, which is why they made the cut.

Personal wardrobes didn’t, and I’d argue that’s a feature. Your clothes are full of judgment calls about what gets hung to dry, what shrinks, and what you’d rather nobody else touch, and a cleaner making those calls on the clock is how good visits go sideways. Keeping wardrobes out of scope protects your clothes and keeps the visit focused on the home.

Laundry sits in a family of add-ons that all work the same way. Washing dishes is $40. The inside of the fridge is $40 and the inside of the oven is $40 on a standard clean. Interior windows, the insides of cabinets, and an hour of organizing help are also bookable, with pricing that scales with the size of the home, and the full list lives on our services page. One detail worth knowing is that a deep clean or a move in or out clean already includes the fridge and the oven at no extra charge, since those services add baseboards, inside appliances, and a deeper scrub on top of everything the standard covers.

How much maids charge for laundry depends on how the visit is booked

On a flat-rate clean, laundry is a $40 add-on. On an hourly booking, it costs nothing extra, because hourly time is simply time. We charge $70 per hour per cleaner with a two-hour minimum, you set the priorities, and the cleaner works the clock. If laundry is the priority, laundry is what gets done, along with the dishes and the fridge and whatever else you put on the list.

This matters because some visits are genuinely laundry-heavy. If you’re picturing several loads of linens and towels, plus dishes, plus the inside of the fridge, you’ve stopped describing a standard clean with add-ons and started describing a custom scope. That’s what hourly is for. My rule of thumb is that once the add-ons you’re stacking start to rival the cost of an extra hour or two, you should book the time instead and point it wherever you want.

What house cleaners won’t do is a short list, but it’s a firm one

House cleaners won’t shampoo or steam-clean your carpets, won’t work around an active pest problem, and won’t take over your personal wardrobe. Those are the lines that come up most, and each one has a reason behind it.

Carpets we vacuum, thoroughly and on every visit, but shampooing and steam extraction are a different trade with different machines, and a cleaning crew pretending otherwise would do a worse job than the specialists you’d hire for it. Pest problems have to be solved before a cleaning makes sense, because cleaning an apartment that pest control hasn’t treated yet just resets the surfaces while the actual problem stays put. Get the treatment done first, and then a clean is the right follow-up. And the wardrobe line is the one we already covered. Linens and towels are part of the home, your closet is part of you, and the boundary keeps everyone comfortable.

The short version is that a standard clean covers the home itself, add-ons cover the tasks that vary from home to home, and hourly covers everything custom. If laundry is the part of your week you can never quite get ahead of, you can book a clean and add laundry right on the form, with the full price shown before you confirm anything.