Laundry attendant job description

The laundry attendant processes all hotel linen and terry through the on-premise laundry so that clean, correctly folded stock is available to housekeeping ahead of demand. The role collects and sorts soiled linen, operates commercial washers, dryers and finishing equipment, folds and stacks to property standard, removes damaged and stained items from circulation, restocks linen closets and floor carts, and maintains a clean, safe and compliant laundry area. The laundry attendant reports to the executive housekeeper or laundry supervisor.

Start of shift. Check the day’s occupancy and departure count, review linen stock on hand against par, inspect equipment and lint traps, and confirm chemical levels in the dispensing system.

Collection and sorting. Collect soiled linen from chutes, carts and floor closets. Sort by item type and soil level, pull heavily stained items for pre-treatment, and separate anything that must be handled under bloodborne-pathogen procedure.

Processing. Load washers to rated capacity rather than by eye, run the correct formula per classification, transfer promptly to avoid mildew and rewash, and dry to the right residual moisture for the finishing method.

Finishing. Feed the ironer or folder, fold to the property standard so pieces stack cleanly on the cart, and inspect for stains, tears and thinning during folding.

Condemning and inventory. Remove unusable items, log them so linen replacement cost is visible instead of showing up as a mysterious par shortage, and flag when a category is running below par.

Distribution. Restock linen closets and pre-stock attendant carts, prioritising the floors that start earliest.

Close of shift. Clean lint traps and floors, wipe down machines, report equipment faults, and record pounds processed for the day — the number every laundry productivity metric depends on.

Three steps, all measurable at your own property:

1. Daily pounds = occupied rooms × pounds per occupied room. Weigh a day’s soiled linen rather than assuming a figure; PPOR varies widely by service level, bed size and whether food and beverage linen goes through the same laundry.
2. Labor hours = daily pounds ÷ pounds per operator hour. PPOH depends far more on your finishing equipment than on the attendant: hand-folding terry and feeding an automatic folder are not the same job.
3. Attendants = labor hours ÷ productive hours per shift, rounded up. Productive hours means shift length minus breaks and cleaning-down time, not the scheduled hours.

Machine capacity constrains the same plan from the other direction: if washer and dryer cycles cannot physically process the poundage inside the shift, adding an attendant does not help. The laundry capacity calculator checks labor and equipment against each other in one pass.

State the warm-and-humid working condition honestly in the posting. Candidates who learn about it on day two are the ones who leave in week one.

Laundry labor is the largest controllable line in on-premise laundry cost per pound, ahead of utilities and chemicals. That means the laundry attendant schedule is also the main lever in an in-house versus outsourced comparison — and the most common reason an in-house rate looks artificially cheap is that laundry labor hours were left sitting inside the housekeeping payroll instead of the laundry one.

Price it properly with the hotel laundry cost calculator, then compare it against a vendor quote using in-house vs outsourced hotel laundry. If the role is combined with room cleaning at your property, split the hours on the timesheet, or both productivity numbers become unusable.

Define the laundry attendant alongside the room attendant, the housekeeping supervisor and the executive housekeeper, who owns the linen budget and par levels. Par counts themselves are set with the par level formula.