Hotel houseman job description, duties and headcount

Position: Houseman (House Attendant / Houseperson)

Reports to: Housekeeping Supervisor / Executive Housekeeper · Department: Housekeeping, Rooms Division · Shift: typically 8 hours; AM floor support or PM public-area shift

Position summary

Support the housekeeping team by keeping guest corridors, public areas and service areas clean and stocked, moving linen, trash and equipment through the property, and completing assigned projects so room attendants can stay in their rooms and rooms are released for sale on time.

Key responsibilities

• Stock floor linen closets and set up attendant carts with linen, terry, amenities and chemicals before the shift starts.
• Collect soiled linen and trash from floors and service areas and deliver to laundry, compactor or loading dock on the scheduled rounds.
• Clean and maintain guest corridors, stairwells, elevators and landings: vacuum, spot-clean walls and doors, dust ledges and fixtures, clean vending and ice alcoves.
• Clean assigned public areas — lobby, public restrooms, entrances, fitness and pool areas, meeting foyers — to the posted frequency.
• Move and handle heavy items: mattresses and bed flips, furniture, rollaways, cribs and equipment; assist with room moves and set-ups.
• Deliver guest requests (extra linen, irons, cribs) promptly and courteously, and respond to spills or incidents in public space.
• Assist with deep-clean and preventative-maintenance rotations: carpet extraction, drapery, high dusting, window and vent cleaning as scheduled.
• Report maintenance defects, safety hazards and out-of-order conditions to the supervisor immediately; place wet-floor and closure signage correctly.
• Maintain equipment and chemicals per training, labelling and safety-data-sheet requirements; keep service areas orderly and compliant.
• Handle lost and found strictly per property procedure.

Requirements

• Ability to stand, walk, bend, kneel and reach throughout the shift, and to push and pull loaded linen and trash carts.
• Ability to lift and move heavy items — state your property’s actual limit (commonly 25 to 50 lb) and any team-lift rule rather than copying a number.
• Comfort working around guests in public space with a courteous manner.
• Reliability on a fixed start time; weekend and holiday availability.
• Safe use of cleaning chemicals and powered equipment after training; ability to follow labelling and signage rules.
• Prior hotel or commercial cleaning experience preferred, not required.

Publish it as “houseperson” if your brand uses gender-neutral titles, and keep “houseman” and “house attendant” in the body so the posting still matches how candidates search.

Unlike a room attendant, a houseman’s work is not one repeated unit. It is a mix of fixed rounds, scheduled public-area cleaning and unplanned requests, and the unplanned share is what makes the role look under-utilised right up until it is short.

Time each block once with a stopwatch and you have the input the planner needs. The printable housekeeping checklist includes the public-area round so you can time it against a fixed task list rather than an estimate.

The honest method is workload over capacity, in minutes:

Housemen = (public-area minutes + linen and trash minutes + project minutes) ÷ productive minutes per shift, rounded up

Productive minutes are shift length minus breaks minus briefing and equipment time — on an 8-hour shift, usually 390 to 420 minutes. So 900 minutes of daily support workload at 405 productive minutes is 2.2 housemen, meaning three on the board unless you are willing to push a project to tomorrow.

Treat those ratios as a sanity check on the minute-based answer, not a substitute for it — they are common planning starting points, not an industry standard. The housekeeping staffing calculator takes your public-area minutes and rooms-per-houseman ratio and returns the houseman count alongside attendants and inspectors, plus the finish time each option implies.

The distinction matters for scheduling: attendant demand moves with departures, but houseman demand moves mostly with the building. A quiet Tuesday still has the same lobby, the same corridors and the same trash. Full write-ups: room attendant job description, housekeeping supervisor job description, executive housekeeper job description and the full department duty map.

Housemen normally sit at or just above the room attendant rate at the same property, because the lifting and the breadth of the job compete with warehouse and facilities work for the same candidates. For a market range you can defend in a budget meeting, pull your state or metro figure from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, occupation 37-2012 Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners, and read it alongside hotel housekeeping wages and budgeting. Do not publish a national average as your offer — the metro spread is wide enough to lose or overpay a hire.

Whatever the rate, the hours belong in your cost model. Houseman hours are housekeeping labor: include them in cost per occupied room and in minutes per occupied room, or attendants absorb the blame for support hours nobody counted. The housekeeping cost per occupied room calculator prices attendants, inspectors and housemen with benefit load and overtime in one figure, and the productivity calculator keeps support hours in MPOR where they belong.