Who is a household employee?

If you hired someone to do household work and you could control what work he or she did and how the work was done, you had a household employee. This is true even if you gave the employee freedom of action. What matters is that you had the right to control the details of how the work was done.

Household work is work done in or around your home. Some examples of workers who do household work are:

• Babysitters
• Butlers
• Caretakers
• Cleaning people
• Cooks
• Drivers
• Domestic workers
• Health aides
• Housekeepers
• Maids
• Nannies
• Private nurses
• Yard workers

Workers who are not your employees: Workers you get from an agency are not your employees if the agency is responsible for who does the work and how it is done. Self-employed workers are also not your employees. A worker is self-employed if only he or she can control how the work is done. A self-employed worker usually provides his or her own tools and offers services to the general public in an independent business.