Housekeeping checklist: for home visits, hotel rooms and household staff

The housekeeping checklist for a home visit

A housekeeper cleaning a home works room by room in a fixed order: kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, living areas, entry, laundry, then a walk-through of the whole home. The list below has 43 tasks for a regular visit.

It is the same list the free checklist maker prints and that BroomBook’s crew app loads for a standard clean, so it is built for cleaning businesses and their housekeepers. It works just as well as a housekeeping checklist for home use, if you clean your own place or hire someone and want to agree on what a visit covers. Repeat the bathroom and bedroom sections for each room.

This is a regular visit, the kind a home gets every week or every two weeks. It keeps a clean home clean. It does not include inside the oven or fridge, baseboards by hand, blinds or window tracks. Those belong to a deep clean, covered in the deep cleaning checklist. If the home is a short-term rental, the job is a turnover with fresh linens and restocking, which the Airbnb cleaning checklist covers.

Hotel housekeeping checklist for a room turnover

A hotel room turnover resets a room after a guest checks out: strip the beds, clear the trash, check for left items, make the beds, dust, clean the bathroom, restock, vacuum and report anything broken. The list below has 34 tasks, in the order most room attendants work.

Every hotel has its own standards for how a bed is dressed, where amenities sit and how many of each go in a room. Use this list as the skeleton, then add your property’s par levels and layout photos. A stayover room, where the guest is still staying, is lighter: make the bed, empty the trash, replace used towels, top up amenities and tidy, without moving the guest’s things.

Two steps on this list matter most to the hotel, not just the guest. Logging left items protects both the guest and the room attendant. Reporting repairs, such as a dripping tap, a broken lamp or a stained carpet, lets maintenance fix them before the next guest finds them.

Housekeeping duties checklist for a live-in or full-time housekeeper

A housekeeper who works for one household every day keeps the home running: a kitchen reset after meals, laundry and linens, beds, tidying and a light clean of the rooms people use most. The list below has 19 daily tasks.

The full room-by-room clean from the first list usually happens once or twice a week on top of this daily round, often split across days: bathrooms on Monday, floors on Tuesday and so on. Write down which day each larger job happens, so both sides know what “done” means. The free cleaning schedule maker lays it out by day.

Errands, grocery runs, cooking, pet care and childcare are not part of housekeeping unless they were agreed at the start. If a family adds them later, that is a change to the job and usually to the pay. Put the agreed duties in writing.

Housekeeper vs house cleaner vs hotel room attendant: what’s the difference?

A house cleaner cleans several clients’ homes a week, often for a cleaning business. A housekeeper may mean the same thing, or a person who works for one household every day. A hotel room attendant, often also called a housekeeper, cleans guest rooms to the hotel’s standard.

In everyday speech the words overlap. Many people call a house cleaner their housekeeper, and many cleaning businesses use “housekeeping” in their name. What changes between the three is the checklist, which is why this page has one for each.

If you are hiring, name the job the way local applicants search for it and say clearly which one it is. The free job post generator for house cleaners covers this in its questions, and the guide on how to hire cleaners walks through finding, vetting and training them.

In what order do you clean a hotel room?

Strip and clear first, start the bathroom products so they can sit, make the bed, dust top to bottom, finish the bathroom, restock, and vacuum on the way out. Floors come last so nothing falls on a clean carpet.

1. Strip and clear. Take out linens, towels, trays and trash first. A room with nothing used in it is faster to clean and easier to check.
2. Check for left items. Do it while the beds are bare and the drawers are empty, before you put anything back.
3. Apply bathroom cleaner. Spray the tub, shower, toilet and sink and leave it. Most products work better with time on the surface, and many disinfectants need the surface to stay wet for the time printed on the label.
4. Make the bed. Dust from a fresh bed is less than dust from stripping one, so make it before you dust the room.
5. Dust top to bottom. Headboard, lamps and shelves, then desk and nightstands, then the things guests touch most: remote, phone, switches and handles.
6. Finish the bathroom. Scrub, rinse, polish, hang fresh towels and restock, then mop yourself out of the room.
7. Restock the room. Coffee, cups, water and paper goods to the room’s list.
8. Vacuum and check. Vacuum from the far side of the room toward the door, test the lights and TV, then report anything broken.

The same idea runs through every list on this page: top to bottom, dry to wet, and floors last. In a home, the crew starts the kitchen and bathrooms soaking, cleans the dry rooms while they work, and finishes at the entry, so nobody walks across a mopped floor.

How do housekeepers work safely with chemicals and heavy lifting?

Read every chemical label, use one product at a time, and never mix bleach with ammonia or acids. For the body, the biggest risks are bending, reaching and lifting, so raise the work to you with long-handled tools, fitted sheets and a well-kept cart.

Chemicals: labels and safety data sheets

Under OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard, employers with hazardous chemicals must have labels and safety data sheets for the workers exposed to them, and train those workers to handle the chemicals properly. For a hotel, that is the housekeeping department. For a cleaning business with employees, it is the owner. Keep a safety data sheet for every product in the van, on the cart or on a shared drive, and show new staff where it is.

The Washington State Department of Health warns that bleach mixed with ammonia makes toxic chloramine gases, and bleach mixed with acids, including vinegar and toilet bowl cleaners, gives off chlorine gas. Never put two products in the same toilet bowl, and rinse before switching products. Run the bathroom fan, and step out if you start coughing or feel dizzy.

Lifting, reaching and bending

OSHA’s ergonomics overview lists maids and housekeeping cleaners among the jobs at high risk of musculoskeletal disorders: injuries to the muscles, nerves, tendons and ligaments. OSHA’s housekeeping eTool, written for hospital housekeepers, names the same tasks a hotel or home housekeeper does every day: lifting mattresses to tuck in linens, moving beds, pushing heavy carts, and kneeling and long reaches to clean bathrooms. Its suggestions, which fit any housekeeping job:

• Use fitted sheets so you do not have to lift the mattress when changing the bed.
• Use tools with extended handles, or a step stool, to avoid reaching overhead and kneeling. Wear knee pads when you do kneel.
• Use carts with large, easy-rolling wheels, keep them maintained, and push rather than pull.
• Keep elbows close to the body and wrists straight, and pick tools with padded, non-slip handles.
• Alternate tasks, or rotate people through the hardest ones, so nobody vacuums or scrubs tubs all day.

Report pain early. A sore shoulder after a week of bed making is easier to fix by changing how the work is done than after a month. For the gear that makes this easier, see the supplies list for cleaning businesses.

How does a supervisor inspect a housekeeper’s work?

A supervisor inspects by walking the room with the same checklist the housekeeper used, ticking a second column, and noting anything missed. The point is to catch a pattern and fix it with training, not to catch a person out.

• Use the same list. If the housekeeper and the inspector work from different lists, they will disagree about what “clean” means. The checklist maker prints a second tick column for exactly this.
• Start where guests and clients look first. The bed, the bathroom mirror and sink, the toilet base, the floor behind the door, and the top of anything at eye level.
• Check by touch, not just sight. Run a finger along a shelf, a headboard or a door frame. Dust shows on a fingertip long before it shows in the room.
• Inspect a sample, then more where needed. In a hotel, the supervisor usually inspects rooms before they are released as ready. In a home cleaning business, the owner or a team lead checks a few homes a week, and new cleaners more often.
• Give feedback the same day. Show the person what was missed, in the room if you can, and say what good looks like. Note it if the same item is missed again.

Photos help when you cannot be there. A photo of each finished room is already the last step of the home list above, so an owner can check a home without driving to it.

How to use the checklist with your home cleaning crew

Give every cleaner the same list for the same type of clean, train on it before their first job, and update it when a client asks for something new. A list that changes from person to person is no list at all.

1. Start from the standard list. Build your version in the free cleaning checklist maker, add your business name, and switch off anything you do not include.
2. Add each client’s notes. Pets, alarm codes, the room they want skipped, the stone counter that needs a neutral cleaner. Put these on the job, not in a cleaner’s memory.
3. Train by shadowing. A new cleaner works two or three homes beside a lead with the list in hand, then cleans while the lead checks.
4. Split by room on a team. One person owns the kitchen, one owns the bathrooms, and whoever finishes first starts the bedrooms. Two people in the same small room slow each other down.
5. Close the loop. When a client complains, find the line on the list that was missed. If there is no line for it, add one.

For homeowners hiring one housekeeper, the same list does the same job: print it, agree what is on it at the first visit, and you both know what a finished visit looks like.

How BroomBook helps a home cleaning business (not a hotel)

We make BroomBook, a scheduling and booking app for residential cleaning businesses. It is built for crews that clean homes, not for hotel housekeeping departments, so if you run a hotel, a hotel operations system is the better fit.

• The right list for the job. The checklist matches the type of clean booked: standard, deep, move-out or Airbnb turnover. The standard list is the same one at the top of this page.
• A private crew link, nothing to download. Each cleaner opens their jobs from a private link and clocks in and out from the phone.
• Photos checked for you. Checklists are room by room, with photos. Each photo is checked against its checklist item, and the ones that need a look are flagged to the owner.
• Notes in each cleaner’s language. Job notes are translated into Spanish, French or Portuguese for each cleaner.

Pick something else if you run a hotel, do commercial janitorial work, need QuickBooks sync, or want an app from the app store: BroomBook has none of those. Otherwise, see all the features or try the demo.