Pennsylvania sales tax
Yes, for both. Residential cleaning and commercial cleaning are taxable in Pennsylvania, according to the Commonwealth's Business One-Stop Shop, and the portal states no exceptions. The governing regulation, 61 Pa. Code 60.1, couldn't be retrieved for this page, so any exclusions in it are unconfirmed.
Pennsylvania gives a cleaning business a short answer: the house and the office land on the same side of the line. The part worth slowing down for is what the state's guidance does and doesn't say about exceptions. This page covers residential cleaning, commercial cleaning, conditions and exceptions, what it means for your books, and where your CPA comes in.
House cleaning is taxable in Pennsylvania. The source is the Business One-Stop Shop's help page for cleaning businesses, which treats residential cleaning as taxable.
Office and other commercial cleaning is taxable too, per the same help page. The Commonwealth also publishes a reference guide for cleaning businesses as a PDF. This page doesn't cover the tax rate.
Source: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Business One-Stop Shop, Reference Guide: Cleaning Businesses
The portal states no exceptions. The governing regulation, 61 Pa. Code 60.1, could not be retrieved from the official Pennsylvania Code site, so if that regulation carves anything out, this page can't confirm it. I'd rather tell you that plainly than guess at what it says.
When the rule covers house and office alike, the bookkeeping risk moves from sorting jobs to handling the tax itself. Collected sales tax belongs in a liability account until it's paid, and it never counts as income. My instinct with any rule is to go looking for the job that breaks it, and since the regulation's exclusions are unconfirmed, anything out of the ordinary goes on its own invoice line where your CPA can look at it directly.
If older invoices folded the tax into the job total, cleanup bookkeeping sorts those entries into the right accounts. For payroll and the minimum wage, see bookkeeping for cleaning businesses in Pennsylvania.
I'm a bookkeeper, not a CPA or an Enrolled Agent. I set up your books so collected sales tax stays out of income and every total ties back to an invoice. Whether a particular job is taxable, and what goes on your return, is a call for your CPA.
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 Pennsylvania 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
Collected sales tax on Pennsylvania cleaning jobs belongs in a liability account, apart from income, matched to the invoices it came from. Any job that doesn't fit the usual pattern gets its own line so your CPA can see it plainly. Grab a short call below and we'll look at how your invoices handle tax today.
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
Tell me how your Pennsylvania invoices handle sales tax today, and I'll show you where it lands in your books. The first conversation doesn't cost anything.
