Commercial Housekeeper

A Commercial Housekeeper maintains the cleanliness, hygiene, and presentation of large-scale facilities such as hotels, hospitals, offices, and aged care homes. They supervise or perform cleaning operations across multiple areas, manage cleaning inventory and staff rosters, and ensure compliance with health and safety standards specific to their workplace setting.

Clean and sanitise patient or guest rooms, bathrooms, and communal areas using appropriate chemical cleaners and equipment. Operate industrial cleaning equipment including floor buffers, carpet extractors, and pressure washers. Inspect cleaned areas against workplace-specific cleaning standards and checklists. Report maintenance issues such as damaged fixtures or broken furniture to facility management. Stock and organise cleaning supplies, linen, and amenities across multiple storage locations. Schedule cleaning staff rosters and allocate tasks based on facility occupancy and seasonal demand. Train cleaning staff on proper use of chemical cleaners, personal protective equipment, and infection control procedures. Manage inventory of cleaning products and place orders with suppliers to maintain stock levels.

The standard entry pathway requires a Certificate I or compulsory secondary education (ABS skill level 5). Specific qualification requirements vary by employer and state. Some employers may accept equivalent experience. Check yourcareer.gov.au for available courses and dewr.gov.au/skills-reform/free-tafe for subsidised training options.

The pay ceiling is real and low. Even as a supervisor managing staff and budgets, you won't earn significantly more than tradespeople or office workers. You'll also deal with understaffing constantly: cleaning staff turnover is high, so you'll spend a lot of time training people who leave, and covering shifts yourself when others don't show up.

Jobs concentrate in capital cities and major regional centres where hotels, hospitals, and aged care facilities cluster. Regional areas have fewer roles but less competition. Practicality: you need to be near large facilities, so metro or established regional towns. Remote work doesn't exist in this role.

Published for ANZSCO unit group 8114, the wider group this job sits in, not for this job on its own.

This is the median for full-time employees who are not managers and are paid at the adult rate, before tax and salary sacrifice. It is a guide to what the work pays, not a wage rate.

Source: ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025, customised report.

• Adaptability and Flexibilitycore
• Attention to Detailcore
• Clean particular areas manuallycore
• Clean toilet facilitiescore
• Customer Needs Assessmentcore
• Incident Reportingcore
• Multitaskingcore
• Policy and Procedure Adherencecore
• Quality Assurance and Checkingcore
• Team Collaborationcore
• Time Management and Prioritisationcore
• Verbal Communicationcore
• Workload Self-Managementcore
• Basic Arithmetic and Numerical Accuracy
• Clean furniture
• Clean glass surfaces
• Clean public areas
• Clean surfaces
• Cleaning industry health and safety measures
• Complaint Handling
• Cultural Awareness and Sensitivity
• Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
• Inventory Tracking
• Process Improvement Identification
• Regulatory and Legislative Awareness
• Risk Identification

• ABS OSCA 2024, occupation definition and task statements
• ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025, customised report.
• ABS, 2021 Census of Population and Housing based on usual place of residence (Custom Report). OSCA Experimental Estimates.

Role data is drawn from official Australian Government sources, and each figure names where it comes from. Where a role is not in the ABS classification, the page shows no government figures for it. Data may not reflect every local variation.

Where our numbers come from.

What Commercial Housekeeper workers move into, from ten years of tax records.

Last updated: 30 October 2026