HOUSEHOLD HELP IN THE NETHERLANDS

Getting some household help in the Netherlands can make your hectic life a bit more manageable! It can be hard to keep your home clean and organized on top of handling work, kids, cooking and socializing. This article will give you a brief overview of how you can find and enlist some household help in Holland, and how much it might cost you.

• Quite a few Dutch households make use of a household help
• Usually, this means that they employ someone to come and clean their house a few times a week
• In Dutch, a cleaner is usually referred to as a ‘werkster’
• General household help is referred to as ‘hulp in het huishouden’
• Cleaners are very hard to come by in the Netherlands. So, this is what you can do to find one:

Finding Household Help

1. Hang a little card on the notice board of your local supermarket. Write: ‘hulp in het huishouden gezocht’ at the top of the card. This means that you are looking for household help. Specify:

• Which tasks you would like them to attend to
• How much experience you would like them to have
• What you are willing to pay
• That it would be useful if they spoke some English, if you do not speak Dutch yourself

2. Check the board at your local supermarket! See whether anyone has advertised their cleaning services

3. Place an ad in the local newspaper. Most newspapers have an section called ‘Kleintjes’. This means ‘little ones’. It has been created specifically for short notices and ads

4. Ask friends, neighbors and other acquaintances whether they have use a cleaner themselves, or know anyone who does

• Typically, you should expect to pay around € 10-15 per-hour for household help in the Netherlands
• Sometimes, you will be asked to subsidize your cleaners public transportation fare too
• You are not expected to withhold wage tax and social insurance contributions on the wages you pay your cleaner. That is, if they work fewer than three days a week for you
• If you employ your cleaner for three days a week, or more, then you are expected to withhold tax and social insurance contributions from their wages
• Your cleaner must declare their own earnings on their income tax return

• In bigger cities in the Netherlands, you will find commercial cleaning companies
• These companies cater for businesses
• They often offer an ‘on-the-side’ service, for household help too
• Their hourly rate will be slightly higher than that of an independent cleaner
• This is because the company will pay their employee’s taxes and contributions for them
• To source one of these companies online, in your area of the Netherlands, search for: ‘Schoonmaakbedrijven‘. This translates as ‘cleaning companies’. See whether the company offers ‘Huishoudelijk werk‘, or ‘household work’
• The term for cleaners who pay tax on their earnings in the Netherlands is ‘wit‘, meaning ‘white’. So, if you employ a ‘witte werkster‘, they may be a little more expensive, but will be working legally
• Unfortunately, there may be long waiting lists for these companies