How to Start a Cleaning Business in Texas

Texas is one of the friendlier states in the country for starting a cleaning business: no personal income tax, low formation cost, no statewide cleaning license, and a population large enough to keep crews busy in any of the major metros. The two things to learn before you hang out your shingle are the sales-tax rule on commercial cleaning — yes, you collect it in Texas — and the non-subscriber workers' comp regime, which is uniquely Texan and changes how you think about employee injury risk. Everything else is straightforward.

1. Pick a business structure

For a one-to-three-person crew, the practical comparison is a Texas LLC versus a sole proprietorship. The sole prop is free, requires no state filing, and lets you start tomorrow. It also leaves your personal assets on the hook for any customer claim — slip-and-fall in a client's home, property damage, an employee driving a company vehicle. In Texas, where private workers' comp is optional and many small operators choose to opt out, that personal exposure matters even more than it does in other states. Most operators with even one employee or a single commercial account form an LLC.

To form one, file a Certificate of Formation — Limited Liability Company (Form 205) with the Texas Secretary of State through SOSDirect. The filing fee is $300, plus a 2.7% credit-card surcharge if you pay online — call it about $308 all-in. SOSDirect filings are processing in roughly two business days as of mid-2026. Mail filings take much longer, and a $25 expedite fee drops mail processing to about ten business days.

If formation paperwork isn't where you want to spend your first afternoon, services like Northwest Registered Agent will file the Certificate of Formation and serve as your registered agent for a modest annual fee.

2. Register with the state

Run a name search in SOSDirect to confirm the name you want is distinguishable from existing Texas entities. The Certificate of Formation asks you to name your governing authority (members or managers), your registered office, and your registered agent. Texas requires the agent to be either a Texas-resident individual age 18 or older, or an organization registered to transact business in Texas. The entity cannot be its own registered agent, and the registered office must be a physical Texas street address — no P.O. boxes, no mailbox stores, no answering services.

Texas does not require an annual report to the Secretary of State. Instead, every LLC and corporation files an annual Public Information Report with the Texas Comptroller, due May 15 each year, alongside a Franchise Tax Report. Most cleaning businesses are well under the 2026 no-tax-due threshold of $2.65 million in annualized total revenue, so the franchise tax itself comes out to zero — but the PIR still has to be filed every year, and missing it eventually triggers forfeiture of your entity.

3. Get your EIN and a business bank account

Apply for a free Employer Identification Number at irs.gov. It takes about ten minutes; there is no fee, despite what several look-alike sites claim. With the EIN letter and your stamped Texas Certificate of Formation in hand, most banks will open a business checking account the same day. From day one, run every dollar of cleaning income and every supply purchase through that account — paired with QuickBooks or a comparable books platform, that single habit makes franchise-tax filings, sales-tax filings, and year-end tax prep dramatically easier.

4. Business licenses and permits

Texas does not have a statewide cleaning-business license, and none of the four largest metros — Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio — issue a general "city business license" either. What you do file depends on how you operate:

• DBA / Assumed Name Certificate with the county clerk in your principal county of business. Harris County (Houston), Dallas County, Travis County (Austin), Bexar County (San Antonio), and Tarrant County (Fort Worth) all run online assumed-name filings. The filing is valid for ten years and is required any time you do business under a name other than your legal name or your LLC's exact registered name.
• Sales-tax permit with the Texas Comptroller — free to obtain. If any of your work is taxable commercial cleaning (see the next section), you'll need this before your first invoice goes out.
• Certificate of Occupancy from the city's development services office if you operate from a fixed commercial premise, which most cleaning operators don't.

Special-purpose districts (TIRZs, MUDs) can have their own rules, but they rarely apply to cleaning operators that travel to client sites.

5. Sales tax on cleaning services

This is the section to read twice. Under Tex. Tax Code §151.0048 and the Comptroller's Rule 3.356, "real property services" — explicitly including janitorial and custodial services — are taxable services in Texas:

• Commercial / nonresidential cleaning is taxable. Cleaning offices, warehouses, restaurants, retail spaces, parking lots, and similar nonresidential property is subject to 6.25% state sales tax plus local sales tax up to 2%, for a maximum combined rate of 8.25%. Comptroller publication 94-111 ("Cleaning and Janitorial Services") is the operator-friendly explainer; 34 TAC §3.356 is the underlying rule.
• Residential cleaning of family dwellings is generally not taxable when performed as a traditional personal household service — the Comptroller's example is a self-employed housekeeper treated as a direct household employee. The picture gets less clean once you run a business that dispatches crews into homes; whether that crew-based residential work qualifies for the household-services exemption is a contract-and-facts question the Comptroller doesn't answer with a bright line. When in doubt, register for a sales-tax permit (it's free), and read Pub. 94-111 against your specific contract before invoicing.
• Pressure washing of buildings, swimming-pool cleaning, and air-duct cleaning are specialized services with their own rules — they're taxable as cleaning services in many cases even when bundled with residential work. Confirm the classification before you bid.
• New-residential-construction cleanup performed as part of the construction contract is exempt. Routine post-construction maintenance cleaning of an existing building is taxable when nonresidential.

Charge the right rate (state + the local rate at the service location, not your office), file your DR-equivalent return on the schedule the Comptroller assigns you, and keep a copy of the customer's resale or exemption certificate in any case where you're not collecting tax on what looks like a taxable transaction.

6. Insurance and bonding

Carry general liability from the start. Texas doesn't mandate it, but commercial clients and property managers almost universally require $1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate on a Certificate of Insurance before you set foot on site. Simply Business is one of the easier paths to compare quotes for a small cleaning operator; a local broker can be worth it once you start carrying multiple commercial accounts.

Then there is workers' compensation, which works differently in Texas than anywhere else. Texas private employers are not required to carry workers' comp. If you opt out as a "non-subscriber," you must:

1. File DWC Form-005 (Employer Notice of No Coverage) with the Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation, within 30 days of hiring your first employee, again every year between February 1 and April 30, and within 10 days of terminating any existing policy.
2. Post Notice 5 ("Notice to Employees Concerning Workers' Compensation in Texas") in a place where employees can read it, in English and Spanish, with specific minimum type sizes.
3. Report to TDI any work-related injury that costs an employee more than one day of lost time, plus all occupational illnesses and deaths.

The trade-off: as a non-subscriber, you lose the exclusive-remedy defense that workers' comp normally provides. An injured employee can sue you directly in tort, and you cannot raise contributory negligence or assumption-of-risk defenses. Most operators that opt out still buy a private occupational accident or non-subscriber employer liability policy to cover that exposure. Subscribing to workers' comp instead is a perfectly normal choice — it costs more in premium but buys legal certainty.

Texas does not require any kind of state cleaning bond. Janitorial service bonds in the $10,000–$25,000 range are a market expectation for higher-end residential and many commercial accounts, but they are a sales credential, not a state rule.

7. Hiring and payroll

Texas adopts the federal $7.25/hour minimum wage with no higher state rate, and state law preempts cities from setting a higher local minimum. The market in Houston and the DFW metroplex pays cleaners well above the minimum anyway, but the legal floor is the federal floor.

There is no state paid sick leave and no state paid family leave. The Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio paid-sick-leave ordinances were enjoined by Texas appellate courts and further preempted by HB 2127 (the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, effective September 1, 2023). What you offer your employees in terms of paid time off is up to you and your contract.

For worker classification, Texas uses the IRS common-law multi-factor test — there is no AB 5-style ABC presumption. That gives you more flexibility than California operators have, but the IRS test still trends toward employee classification for cleaners doing scheduled work on the operator's account, and federal misclassification penalties bite the same here as anywhere else. Gusto handles federal payroll, new-hire reporting to the Texas Workforce Commission, and Texas unemployment-tax filings out of the box; the hiring guide walks through the structural questions of when to convert your first 1099 worker to W-2.

8. Get your first clients

Texas cleaning markets are dispersed: Houston, the DFW metroplex, Austin, San Antonio, and the smaller-but-real metros like El Paso, Fort Worth, and Corpus Christi each behave a little differently. Generally:

• Residential operators lean on Google Business Profile, Nextdoor, and local Facebook groups, with referrals from realtors and property managers covering move-in/move-out work.
• Commercial operators spend more time on direct outreach to office building managers, retail chains, restaurants, and small healthcare practices. LinkedIn matters more than reviews here.

In both lanes, online reviews compound. Set up the Google Business Profile the same week you incorporate, ask every happy client for a review within 48 hours of the job, and use a tool like NiceJob to automate the ask once volume justifies it. The lead generation page has the longer playbook.

9. Pick your software stack

For a Texas operator running lean — no state income tax, optional workers' comp, low formation cost — the low-cost-cleaning-business stack is the right reference point. The two tools that earn their keep first are a field-service platform like Jobber for scheduling, quotes, invoicing, and the client portal, plus QuickBooks for books and sales-tax reconciliation. Payroll, insurance, and reviews fill in as you hire your first employee, sign your first commercial account, and start asking for reviews at the door.

A note on accuracy

Every fee, threshold, and rule above is current for Texas as of May 2026. SOS filing fees, the franchise tax no-tax-due threshold, the Comptroller's rulings on cleaning services, and TDI non-subscriber notice forms all change over time — verify with the Texas Secretary of State, Texas Comptroller, and Texas Department of Insurance before relying on a specific number for a filing or a tax decision. This guide is editorial, not legal or tax advice.