Homes

House cleaning services in Bergen County, and the question of who the cleaner works for.

Accounts will be assigned rather than rotated, so the same people come back each visit, on this company’s own W-2 payroll. General liability, workers' compensation and the bond are bound before the first shift. This page also sets out what New Jersey law puts on a household that hires a cleaner directly — because that is the actual choice.

Request a walkthrough or call (201) 600-5056

Most of what a Bergen household is choosing between is not cleaning quality. It is whether the person in the house is your employee, nobody’s employee, or ours — and New Jersey answers that question differently in each case. Since July 2024 there has been a statute about it that names house cleaning by name, and it is the reason this page is organised the way it is rather than around a checklist.

The figures below are sourced at the end of the page, each with its vintage. Where an agency’s own published guidance is out of date — and in this subject a surprising amount of it is — this page says so at the point it matters rather than quietly using the newer number. The sources are listed at the end so you can check any of it.

The choice

Three ways a house gets cleaned in this county.

Roughly nine in ten cleaning businesses in Bergen County have no employees at all. That is not a criticism of any of them — it is the shape of the trade, and it is the fact that decides who carries the risk when someone is hurt in your house.

Hire an individual directly: About 636 Bergen households do it on the booksBLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, NAICS 814110 “Private Households,” Bergen County, private ownership: 636 establishments and 777 annual average employees in 2024; 591 and 773 in 2025. That is a separate industry from janitorial services, and it is one of the populations the Census Bureau's business statistics exclude by design.
Hire a business with no employees: 2,527 in Bergen County, averaging $22,353 in receiptsCensus Nonemployer Statistics 2023, NAICS 56172: 2,527 businesses with $56.487m in combined receipts, against 2,550 and $53.410m in 2022. Statewide the figures are 24,205 and $546.601m. The Census flags the county receipts cell, meaning its published value was altered by under two percent to protect confidentiality.
Hire a business with a payroll: About 335 in the countyBLS annual averages for private NAICS 561720 in 2023. Census County Business Patterns counts 248 establishments in the same industry that year, of which 142 have fewer than five employees and none reaches 250. A small W-2 employer is the ordinary case in this trade, not the exception.

One disclosure belongs with those numbers. The federal industry code for this trade folds household and commercial work into a single industry — it lists housekeeping and maid services alongside custodial services and washroom sanitation — so there is no residential-only federal figure at county level, and every industry number on this page is janitorial services as a whole. The two statistical programmes also use different universes and reference periods, so they are printed separately and never averaged.

The law

The New Jersey law that follows a cleaner into a house.

A household that hires directly can itself be a hiring entity under this Act, and the honest thing to say is that it depends on the arrangement rather than on anyone’s marketing. The State’s own guidance poses the question using a house cleaner and answers it carefully: “A cleaner comes to my house twice a month. She has other clients, and advertises her services like a business… Do I have new obligations…? — Likely not. If the cleaner owns their own business, and you are not directing their work, schedule, breaks, etc. then you’re likely not considered an employer under this law.” The words “likely” and “likely not” are the State’s, and they are reproduced here rather than resolved, because they are the actual state of the question.

“House cleaning” is in the statute by name

N.J.S.A. 34:11-70 defines a domestic worker as someone working in a residence providing, among other things, “housekeeping or house cleaning,” and lists six exclusions — family members; house sitters, pet sitters and dog walkers; people working at a home-based business; workers whose primary job is household repair or maintenance such as a roofer, plumber, mason or painter; State and federal employees; and kinship legal guardians. A cleaning company's employee is none of those. The same section defines a “hiring entity” to reach any corporation or limited liability company paying a domestic worker directly or indirectly. So this company is a hiring entity and its cleaners are domestic workers: the obligations do not disappear when a household buys from a company, they move onto the company.

Thirteen terms, in writing, above five hours a month

N.J.S.A. 34:11-71(a) prohibits engaging a domestic worker — except for casual work, or work under five hours a month — without a written contract covering thirteen enumerated terms: duties, hourly and overtime wage, weekly schedule and hours, manner and frequency of payment, rest and meal breaks, paid or unpaid leave including sick time, paid holidays, other benefits, transportation, the value of housing if provided, sleeping and personal time for live-in workers, the term of the contract, and anything else agreed. It must be signed and dated by all parties after ample opportunity to review, in English and in any other language the worker prefers — with an affirmative duty on the hiring entity to find out which.

The required written contract may not contain a mandatory arbitration clause

Section 13(b)(1) of the Act, codified at N.J.S.A. 34:11-71(b)(1), provides that the written agreement it requires “shall not contain any ... mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreement for claims made by a covered domestic worker against a domestic work hiring entity regarding the local rights of the worker”. Two things in that sentence are easy to lose. The bar runs to what the required contract may contain rather than to arbitration generally, and the statute qualifies the claims as those “regarding the local rights of the worker” rather than any claim at all. The same subsection also bars non-disclosure, non-competition and non-disparagement terms that would limit the worker seeking compensation after the engagement ends.

The surveillance rule runs toward the worker

N.J.S.A. 34:11-75 provides that a hiring entity may not keep original copies of a worker's personal documents; may not monitor or record a domestic worker using a bathroom or similar facility, in the worker's own living quarters, or while dressing or changing; and may not monitor, record or interfere with the worker's private communications. Read the limits in the same breath: those prohibitions concern the worker's own use of those facilities and live-in quarters. This is not a rule against a homeowner having a camera in the kitchen, and anyone telling you it is has overstated it.

It has teeth, and one number still unfixed

Section 21(g), codified at N.J.S.A. 34:11-79(g), makes a knowing violation or knowing retaliation a crime of the fourth degree; any other violation is a disorderly persons offence carrying not less than $100 and not more than $2,000 for an initial violation, and not less than $200 nor more than $4,000 for each subsequent one, with each day and each worker a separate offence. Fixed remedies sit elsewhere: an hour of pay at the regular rate, capped at two hours, for each workday a meal or rest break was not provided. Complaints run two years from when the person knew or should have known. What is not settled is the amount of presumed damages, which the Act leaves to a regulation that has not been adopted.

If you hire direct

What the household picks up when it is the employer.

Workers' compensation: Required, with an exception that is not what it sounds likeR.S. 34:15-71 requires every employer to make sufficient provision for an injured employee. R.S. 34:15-92, headed “Domestic help excepted,” exempts employers of domestic workers from two specific sections — “but employers of domestic workers are required to provide written notice of insurance coverage and cancellation of a policy.” The “exempted from … but … are required to” construction does the work by itself. The State's own guidance is blunter: under the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, an employer who fails to insure is personally liable and faces penalties.
“It's only casual work”: A recurring schedule is not casualR.S. 34:15-36 defines casual employment, where not connected with the employer's business, as “employment not regular, periodic or recurring.” A cleaner who comes every other week is none of those three things.
Your homeowner's policy: It coordinates; it does not coverThe standard Homeowners 3 Special Form defines a “residence employee” to include someone whose duties relate to the maintenance or use of the residence premises, “including household or domestic services,” and its medical payments coverage reaches them. But both the liability and medical-payments sections exclude bodily injury to any person eligible for benefits required under a workers' compensation law. So it is a coordination rule rather than a bare gap — and it is the 05 11 edition; later editions exist and carrier forms vary.
Federal payroll tax: $3,000 in cash wages, in 2026IRS Publication 926, for use in 2026: cash wages of $3,000 or more in the year to any one household employee trigger social security and Medicare at 15.3 percent, and total cash wages of $1,000 or more in any calendar quarter trigger federal unemployment tax. The threshold is reset annually, so a figure from an earlier year's edition will be lower. The same publication says that where an agency provides the worker and controls what is done and how, the worker is not the household's employee.
State unemployment: $1,000 a year, cut from $1,000 a quarterR.S. 43:21-19(i)(1)(J), as amended by the same 2023 act — the chaptered law prints the superseded quarterly clause and the replacement annual clause side by side. The State's own guidance page still describes the threshold using 2023 and 2024 figures, two years stale as at September 2026, and still carries a banner saying regulations for the Act are under development.

Two things this section is deliberately not saying. It is not saying that hiring a housekeeper directly makes anyone a lawbreaker — the State’s own answer for the common case is the one quoted above. And it is not saying that ending an arrangement always triggers severance: the Act requires two weeks’ notice, four for a live-in worker, with severance where notice is defective, but it disapplies that requirement where the employer is an individual rather than an agency and the duties are complete with no longer a practicable need for the position. The accurate version is narrower and more useful: ending an employment relationship raises a statutory notice question with named exceptions, and cancelling a service contract does not. For completeness, and because the figure in the headlines is the wrong one here: New Jersey’s minimum wage rose to $15.92 an hour on 1 January 2026 for most workers, but a household is a small employer — the Wage and Hour Law defines that as one employing fewer than six people — and the small-employer rate for the same date is $15.23. That is a fact about a household employer’s own obligation, not about anybody’s rate.

What we do

Four kinds of visit.

Recurring housekeeping

Weekly, every other week, or monthly, with the house assigned rather than rotated, an arrangement written into the agreement rather than a roster that exists today. A maintenance visit keeps a house that has already been reset: floors, bathrooms, kitchen surfaces, dusting, beds and glass on a written frequency rather than whatever the day allows. This is the hub's own subject and the rest of the page is mostly about it.

Deep cleaning

The reset a recurring plan starts from, reaching the surfaces a maintenance visit is not scheduled to touch. It has its own page, because in a county this old three of those surfaces are ones federal law has written rules about. What a deep clean actually reaches.

Move-out and move-in

An empty house, cleaned end to end, with one number agreed in writing before the work starts so it does not move on you while you are already moving. Move-out cleaning, with published market ranges.

After a renovation

A different job from a deep clean. Construction dust keeps surfacing for weeks after the trades leave, and it gets into HVAC vents and filters, inside cabinetry, and under adhesive and label residue that ordinary cleaning will not lift. Post-construction cleaning.

Letting someone in

Screening, keys, and what a certificate does not do.

This is the part of the decision that is genuinely hard to verify from outside, so here is the mechanism instead, including the parts that limit what any company can honestly promise.

Assigned to the house, not rotated

Your house is assigned to a small team that keeps coming back. They learn where things go, which surfaces need care, and what you actually care about — none of which survives a rotating crew. The reason that is possible here is structural rather than aspirational: employees under a written contract, with a statutory notice period on termination, rather than a pool of subcontractors reassigned week to week.

What “background checked” actually means here

Records will be pulled per jurisdiction of residence and employment rather than from a single national file, at hire and again every year, and anything adverse will be reviewed against the role before an assignment is made. The reason for that phrasing rather than a reassuring adjective: the Government Accountability Office reported in 2015 that “private sector companies that compile and sell background information do not have access to FBI record checks. Rather, these companies obtain criminal history information directly from states or other sources.” Completeness varies by state — the number reporting more than 75 percent of arrest records with final dispositions rose from 16 in 2006 to 20 in 2012.

Why “vetted” is not a comparable claim

New Jersey's Opportunity to Compete Act, which governs when a criminal record may be asked about, reaches only employers with fifteen or more employees over twenty calendar weeks — and its definition of employee expressly excludes “any person employed in the domestic service of any family or person at the person's home,” along with independent contractors. Nothing in that Act requires anyone to screen a house cleaner at all. Which means “vetted” is an adjective anyone can print, and the only honest response is to publish the mechanism instead and let you compare it.

What a certificate of insurance does not do

The standard ACORD certificate says so on its own face: it “is issued as a matter of information only and confers no rights upon the certificate holder,” and “does not constitute a contract.” It also carries its own warning that if the certificate holder is an additional insured, the policy itself must be endorsed. So a certificate is evidence that a policy existed on the day it was printed, and nothing more. What is in force today and what binds before the first shift, including the endorsement pages themselves, are published on our credentials page.

The endorsement most policies leave out

General liability on its own excludes damage to the surfaces being cleaned. The care, custody and control endorsement is what covers the floor or the countertop we are actually working on, and it goes onto the policy at binding rather than after a claim finds the gap. What is in force and what binds before the first visit are both published on the credentials page.

On keys and alarm codes, with no legal claim attached: a unique alarm code per employee rather than one shared code, keys logged and signed, and the access arrangement written into the agreement rather than agreed at the door. That is the standard to hold any contractor to, and the one that will be written into this company’s agreement. There is one practical reason beyond tidiness — false alarm fees in Bergen County are set town by town, so a cleaner arriving with the wrong code is a cost that lands on the household — Franklin Lakes’ fines, one-minute cancellation and contact list show what that means in one borough. That is worth five minutes at the walkthrough.

When we come

When a Bergen house is actually empty.

When Bergen commuters leave, measured

From the 2020–2024 American Community Survey, table B08302, across the 396,813 Bergen workers aged 16 and over who did not work from home: 33,010 of them — 8.3 percent — leave before 6am; 205,041, or 51.7 percent, are gone before 8am; and 300,694, three-quarters of them, before 9am. At the other end, 36,952 do not leave until noon or later. That distribution is why a weekday daytime window is the recurring default rather than a preference.

But nearly one Bergen worker in five works from home

Table B08006 puts it at 90,241 of 487,054, or 18.5 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey for 2025 reports something that sounds contradictory: “In 2025, 35 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked.” Both are right, because they ask different questions — the Census asks about usual commuting means in a reference week, and the time-use survey asks whether any work happened at home on a day worked. Between them they are the reason nights, early mornings and weekends are ordinary scheduling options here rather than favours.

A residential route is a different road network

New Jersey's transportation department counts 2,997.56 public road miles in Bergen County, of which 2,413.24 — 80.51 percent — are municipal streets, against 106.37 miles of state highway, or 3.55 percent. Across 232.794 square miles of land that works out to 12.88 road-miles per square mile against 5.20 statewide: two and a half times the state's density, on 3.2 percent of its land. The department's per-municipality sheet lists all seventy Bergen towns, and twenty-five of them contain no state highway mileage at all. A commercial route runs on corridors. A residential one runs on side streets, and it is a different scheduling problem.

A vintage disclosure on the road figures, because the two published products disagree slightly. The county and jurisdiction totals come from the transportation department’s statewide report as refreshed in September 2026; the town-by-town breakdown exists only in an earlier March 2019 sheet, whose county total is 2,994.88 miles — 2.68 below the current figure. The densities and percentages here are computed from those two reports and the Census Bureau’s land areas rather than published anywhere as such.

Where we clean

Bergen towns this page is written for, and how that list was checked.

Ridgewood
Glen Rock
Wyckoff
Franklin Lakes
Ho-Ho-Kus
Allendale
Midland Park
Waldwick
Mahwah
Ramsey
Montvale
Woodcliff Lake
Park Ridge
Tenafly
Paramus
River Edge

Every name above is a Bergen County municipality in the Census Bureau’s 2024 county-subdivision file, of which the county has exactly seventy. A related trap for anyone comparing pages: North Bergen is a township in Hudson County, so a page about North Bergen is a Hudson County page. Ours is the shorter list on purpose.

Related: how house cleaning is priced here, deep cleaning, move-out cleaning, and the town pages for Ridgewood, Franklin Lakes and Wyckoff. Managing a building rather than a home? Commercial cleaning in Bergen County. Our registration, insurance and workers’ compensation status, and what binds before the first shift, are on the credentials page.

Not listed? Call anyway. If we can route it properly we will take it, and if we cannot we will say so rather than being late every other week.

Every other week

What a recurring arrangement actually commits us to.

Most of what is written about house cleaning is about the cleaning. The arrangement is the part a household actually lives with — who turns up, on which day, and what happens the week something goes wrong. Here is ours, in advance, so it can be held against us rather than discovered.

The same person, and what happens when that is not possible

An account is assigned rather than rotated, so the person who cleans your house in March is the person who cleaned it in October — that is the arrangement, and it will be written into the agreement. When illness or leave makes it impossible, you will be told before the visit rather than after, along with who is coming instead. There will be no silent substitution.

A fixed day, and how far it can move

You will pick the day and the rough hour at the walkthrough, and it will stay. Where a week has to move — a holiday, a scheduling clash — it will move by agreement rather than by notification, and the default will be the same day the following week rather than a gap.

Skipping a week, and pausing entirely

Skip any single visit with a day's notice and there will be nothing to pay. There will be no minimum term, no cancellation fee, and no rate rise for coming back. Pause for a month, a season or a renovation and the account will stay yours in the same slot when it restarts, at the same rate unless a change was notified under the thirty-day rule below. A recurring price that depends on you not leaving is a price built on the wrong thing.

Changing what gets done, without renegotiating the whole thing

The written scope agreed at the walkthrough lists what happens every visit and what rotates. Moving an item between those two lists costs nothing and takes a message. Adding real work — a finished basement, an oven, a second kitchen — will change the number, and you will be told what it changes before it is done rather than seeing it on an invoice.

What a price rise looks like, in advance

New Jersey adjusts its minimum wage each 1 January for any rise in the consumer price index, so a recurring rate that never moves is a rate that quietly buys you less work. Where a rate has to change, it will change only at a visit you are told about at least thirty days ahead, with the reason in writing, and never because you have been a customer for a while.

Every line above is a policy this company has committed to and has not yet had occasion to apply — there is no account history behind any of it, and each moves to the past tense only when there is something to report. What a visit costs is on what it costs.

Arranging it for a parent

When the person paying and the person home are not the same.

Recurring house cleaning is sometimes arranged by an adult child for a parent still in the family home. Five things can be different when it is.

Who arranges it and who is home are usually two different people. The scope, the schedule and the invoice can sit with you while the visits happen at your parent's house — say so at the walkthrough and it will be set up that way from the first visit rather than retrofitted.
The work is lighter and the consistency matters more. A house that has been lived in for forty years is not a deep-clean problem; it is a keep-on-top-of-it problem, and the value is in the same person arriving on the same morning rather than in hours logged.
Nothing will be moved, thrown out or reorganised without being asked.
Access is arranged the way the household wants it — someone home, a key, or a code. What we will not do is take a key without a written record of who holds it and how it is returned.
If the house is eventually sold, the move-out clean is a different job, quoted on its own rather than as an upsell on the recurring one, and its page sets out published market ranges for it. That page is linked below.

The eventual sale is a separate job, with published market ranges on its own page: move-out cleaning. What a certificate of insurance does and does not prove, and what is not yet in place, is on credentials.

Questions

What households ask first.

How much does house cleaning cost in Bergen County?

It will be quoted flat by the home rather than by the hour, after a walkthrough or a run-through of square footage, bedroom and bathroom count and frequency, with New Jersey sales tax shown as its own line. A flat number means a visit that runs long is our problem rather than yours, which is the whole point of quoting it that way. The attributed industry ranges, and what actually moves a number within them, are set out on our house cleaning cost page.

Do I need to be home?

Not after the first visit, which is worth doing together so we can walk the house and note what matters to you. After that you can hand over access if you would rather not be home. Whichever way it goes, the access arrangement will be written down before the first visit — which code is used, who holds a key, and how both are logged. Ask any contractor for a unique alarm code per employee rather than one shared code; that is the difference between an audit trail and a shrug.

Do you bring your own supplies?

Yes, everything. If you would rather we use specific products on particular surfaces — stone, unsealed wood, certain finishes — tell us at the walkthrough and we will use what you provide on those.

What is the difference between a deep clean and a regular visit?

Surfaces, not effort: a recurring visit maintains a house that has already been reset, and a deep clean does the reset. The full scope, and the federal rules that happen to govern three of the surfaces it reaches, are on our deep cleaning page.

Is sales tax charged on house cleaning?

Yes. New Jersey's Division of Taxation lists “Cleaning Services (janitorial)” as taxable at 6.625 percent in its sales tax guide, alongside window washing and carpet cleaning — and that entry is unqualified: the guide does not name residential house cleaning separately, while the line immediately above it reads “Chimney Sweeping (residential)” and is marked exempt. Both lines were read in Technical Bulletin S&U-4 on 18 September 2026. There is a narrow statutory exclusion for services rendered by an individual who is not in a regular trade or business offering services to the public; on the face of those words, someone who advertises and keeps a client roster looks to be inside the taxable category rather than outside it. A quote from this company will show the tax as its own line so you can compare figures honestly. That statutory text was checked against a commercial reproduction because the Legislature's own database returned an error for the section.

What hours do you work?

The phone is answered at any hour, seven days a week, on a 201 number that rings in Bergen County rather than at an answering service in another state. Scheduling follows the same rule: nights, early mornings, weekends and holidays are ordinary options rather than favours, and the commuting figures above are the reason — three-quarters of Bergen commuters are gone by 9am, but nearly one worker in five usually works from home and one in eleven does not leave until noon. One caveat travels with all of this: inside Paramus, a borough ordinance restricts Sunday work itself, and our Paramus page quotes it with the date it was read. Whether a house clean is a work of necessity under it is unsettled and we found no case deciding it, so there Sunday will be a question for the household and the Borough Clerk rather than a booking taken on assumption.

Have you done this before?

Two questions there, and they have different answers. The company has not: this is a New Jersey company formed in August 2026 and taking on its first households. The person running it has — more than fifteen years working in this trade, for other people, and he started this company because he wanted to work for himself. Those years do settle the narrower question a household would actually be asking, which is whether any of them were spent in houses rather than in some other kind of building: they were. Homes are part of that work, alongside offices, medical and dental suites, warehouses, post-construction work and government buildings. What they do not come with is a reference — that work was done for other people, the houses and the accounts were theirs rather than his, and none of it is this company's to show. So take the entity as new, because it is, and the honest version of that includes the risk: of private-sector establishments born in the year to March 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 767,573 at birth, 621,249 surviving to March 2021 and 394,689 to March 2025 — barely half. That is all industries; BLS publishes no cleaning-specific survival series at this cut. Three things a household can act on rather than take on faith. The entity is on the public record — New Jersey number 0451519106, free to look up. No prepayment will be required. And under federal law a card issuer is subject to the claims and defences you would have against the seller, where the transaction is over $50, you have made a good-faith attempt to resolve it, and it happened in your own state or within 100 miles — a Bergen household and a Bergen company are comfortably inside that.

Sources

Every rule and figure, and where it was read.

P.L. 2023, c.262 — the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, chaptered text as posted by the New Jersey Legislature. N.J.S.A. 34:11-70 definitions and exclusions; 34:11-71 the written contract, its thirteen terms, the five-hour threshold, the arbitration prohibition and the language requirements; 34:11-74 termination notice, severance and its exceptions; 34:11-75 documents, monitoring and private communications; 34:11-79 penalties and the two-year window, including the presumed-damages regulation that has not been adopted. Approved 12 January 2024, effective 1 July 2024. The chaptered text was extracted and read, and sections 13 and 21 were checked against their codified numbers — 34:11-71 and 34:11-79 — on 18 September 2026. Also R.S. 43:21-19(i)(1)(J) as amended by the same act, where the chaptered text prints the superseded quarterly threshold beside the replacement annual one.
New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development — the employer guidance for the Act, retrieved 2 September 2026, for the house-cleaner example and its hedges and for personal liability on failure to insure. Noted in print above: that page still describes the unemployment registration threshold using 2023 and 2024 figures, and still carries a banner saying the Act’s regulations are under development. NJDOL public notice on the 2026 minimum wage, which sets $15.92 for most workers and $15.23 for small employers and seasonal employment from 1 January 2026, both under N.J.A.C. 12:56-3.2. "Small employer" is defined at P.L.2019, c.32 as one employing fewer than six people.
Workers’ compensation — New Jersey Title 34, Chapter 15, in the Division of Workers’ Compensation’s compilation revised 15 December 2025: R.S. 34:15-71, R.S. 34:15-92 “Domestic help excepted,” and R.S. 34:15-36 on casual employment.
Insurance forms — the Insurance Services Office Homeowners 3 Special Form, edition 05 11, for the definition of a residence employee and the workers’ compensation exclusions in the liability and medical-payments sections. Later editions exist and carrier forms vary. The ACORD 25 Certificate of Liability Insurance, for the certificate’s own disclaimer and its additional-insured note.
Screening — U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-15-162, Criminal History Records, February 2015, footnote 5, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics survey figures for 2006 and 2012. P.L. 2014, c.32, the Opportunity to Compete Act, N.J.S.A. 34:6B-13 and 34:6B-14, for the fifteen-employee threshold and the exclusion of domestic service from the definition of employee.
Federal consumer and tax rules — 15 U.S.C. § 1666i, read from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. IRS Publication 926, Household Employer’s Tax Guide, for use in 2026, for the annual thresholds and the agency passage; those thresholds are reset each year.
Sales tax — New Jersey Division of Taxation, Tax Topic Bulletin S&U-4, revised July 2022, where “Cleaning Services (janitorial)” is listed taxable and “Chimney Sweeping (residential)” exempt on the line immediately above. N.J.S.A. 54:32B-3(b)(4) for the individual-not-in-trade exclusion, verified only against a commercial reproduction because the Legislature’s own database returned an error for that section.
Industry counts — U.S. Census Bureau Nonemployer Statistics 2023 and 2022, NAICS 56172; County Business Patterns 2023 for the establishment size distribution; and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for Bergen County, private ownership, NAICS 561720 and 814110, annual averages retrieved 2 September 2026. BLS figures are revised with later releases. Census industry descriptions for the definition of 561720, which does not separate household from commercial work. BLS Business Employment Dynamics, survival of private sector establishments by opening year, all industries.
Households and geography — 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates for Bergen County, tables B08302 departure time and B08006 means of transportation. Five-year estimates average responses collected across sixty months and cannot describe a single year. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey for 2025, released June 2026, for the share of employed people doing some work at home. 2024 Census Gazetteer files for Bergen’s seventy county subdivisions, its 232.794 square miles of land, and the confirmation that North Bergen township is in Hudson County.
Roads — New Jersey Department of Transportation, statewide mileage by county and jurisdiction, refreshed September 2026, and the March 2019 Bergen County sheet, which is the only product published at municipal level. Densities and percentages are computed from those two reports and the Gazetteer land areas.

Published 2 September 2026. Federal and State citations are to the chaptered law, the current regulations and the agency pages, each with the date it was read given in its own entry above. Where an agency’s own published guidance is out of date, this page says so at the point it matters rather than quietly using the newer figure.

Start with a walkthrough.

We will walk the house, agree what is in scope and how often, and give you one flat number with the schedule attached. Anything signed in your home carries three business days to cancel in writing, as our own policy. No charge for the visit.

Request a walkthrough or call (201) 600-5056