Kentucky
Kentucky's sales tax reaches janitorial services, and the statute as effective August 1, 2026 names residential and commercial cleaning both, along with carpet, upholstery, and window cleaning. Kentucky also has state income tax withholding, and the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
If you clean homes in Kentucky, the house and the office down the street land in the same taxable category. That makes the sales tax answer simple and the bookkeeping a little less forgiving, because every residential ticket carries tax. Here I cover sales tax, the employee or subcontractor test, payroll registration, the minimum wage, and how to set up your books so none of it catches you off guard.
Residential and commercial cleaning are both taxable under KRS 139.200(2)(h), in the version effective August 1, 2026. Where it gets more involved is cleaning inside restoration and construction work, which I cover on the Kentucky sales tax on cleaning page. How it applies to your own contracts is a question for your CPA.
Source: Kentucky General Assembly, KRS 139.200, Imposition of sales tax (effective August 1, 2026)
Kentucky's unemployment insurance law uses the common-law test, which asks who has the right to control the work. You'll find it in KRS 341.050(1)(a). The way a W-2 employee and a 1099 subcontractor each show up in the books is in 1099 subcontractors vs. W-2 employees. Whether a specific cleaner is an employee is a legal question, so take that one to your CPA or an employment attorney.
Source: Kentucky General Assembly, KRS 341.050, Covered employment
Kentucky has state income tax withholding under KRS 141.310, and the Kentucky Department of Revenue is the agency behind it. Unemployment insurance is a separate registration.
Source: Kentucky General Assembly, KRS 141.310, Withholding of tax from wages
Source: Kentucky Office of Unemployment Insurance, Kentucky Unemployment Insurance Portal (KUIP)
Who files and deposits what, between your payroll provider, your CPA, and me, gets agreed before the first run. Filing questions belong with your CPA.
Kentucky's minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, effective July 1, 2009. As of October 20, 2026, no change had been announced in KRS 337.275 or the U.S. Department of Labor's state table. The Kentucky Labor Cabinet's page could not be retrieved for this page, so check it for anything newer.
Source: Kentucky General Assembly, KRS 337.275, Minimum wage
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, State Minimum Wage Laws (July 1, 2026)
With residential work taxable, the sales tax line shows up on nearly every invoice you send. I want to know where every single number came from, and in Kentucky that means the tax on each invoice ties back to a job, and the month's total ties back to what you owe the state. That money sits in its own account, apart from income, so a good month never looks better than it was.
Labor gets the same treatment. Wages booked at the rate you actually pay, recorded against the jobs they belong to, are what payroll for cleaning businesses is built around.
Rules checked against the sources above as of October 20, 2026. Rates and rules change; confirm current figures with the agency or your CPA.
About Figure Eight Financial
Figure Eight Financial is Dave Gordon’s bookkeeping practice for residential and commercial cleaning companies. I work with owners in Kentucky and across the country, and I’m a Certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor.
Before bookkeeping I studied computer science at Penn State and spent a career at IBM as an engineer, so I build the books as a system: data comes in once, lands in the right place, and ties back to a statement. I’m a bookkeeper, not a CPA or Enrolled Agent. I keep the books your CPA works from, and the tax decisions stay with your CPA.
Credentials and memberships reported by Figure Eight Financial.
More about DaveHow I Help
House cleaning is taxable in Kentucky too, so the sales tax line shows up on nearly every invoice you send. My part is tying the tax on each invoice back to a job, keeping the month's total in its own account apart from income, and recording wages against the jobs they paid for. Book a short call below if your revenue and collected tax have been sharing a line.
The core service. Transactions recorded and categorized, every account reconciled so the books and the bank agree, and monthly reports that arrive explained, split by residential and commercial and sliceable per contract.
The full picture of how this works for a cleaning companyFor the months where nothing got entered at all. I fill in the missing periods from the ground up, pulling bank feeds, statements, and receipts until every month has a complete set of records.
How catch-up bookkeeping worksFor books that exist but can’t be trusted. I audit what’s there, fix the unreconciled accounts, duplicate transactions, and wrong categories, and tie every balance back to a statement.
How cleanup bookkeeping worksYour crews paid on time, every pay period, with each payroll run recorded in the books so labor shows up against the jobs it belongs to.
How payroll worksRecurring invoices that match your contracts, an aging report you can trust, and follow-up on slow payers handled by a process instead of your evenings. Built for net-60 commercial accounts.
How invoicing and receivables workA file built right for a cleaning company from day one, or rebuilt after the DIY version drifts, and then I teach you to run it. I’m a Certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor, and this is honestly my favorite part of the job.
How a proper setup worksWe start with a short call about your business and where the books stand. The first conversation doesn’t cost anything.
I take a look at what you’ve got, your QuickBooks file, your spreadsheet, whatever exists.
You get a written proposal with the price, so the decision is yours with the number in hand.
Let's Connect
If your Kentucky books mix collected sales tax in with revenue, call me up. We'll sort it out together, and the first conversation doesn't cost anything.
