Hiring staff for your villa in Mallorca: your own domestic employee or a service company

What registering a domestic employee in Mallorca really involves after the 2022 reform, what it actually costs, and when outsourcing housekeeping and maintenance pays off.

Almost every villa owner in Mallorca reaches the same point somewhere in the second or third year: the house can no longer be held together with occasional cleaning visits and someone permanent is needed. From there, two paths open up that most owners conflate, and the confusion is expensive. The first is to hire a person directly as a domestic employee, registered with Spanish social security under the owner's name, who thereby becomes an employer with every obligation that entails. The second is to contract a service company that invoices for the service delivered and carries the employment relationship with its own staff. These are not the same thing in different wrapping: the real cost, the legal liability, the cover during holidays and sick leave, and even the applicable tax treatment all change. And there is a third path, the most common and the most dangerous, which is paying cash to someone trusted with no registration at all. It is worth saying plainly: since the 2022 domestic employment reform and with the data cross-checking Spain's labour inspectorate now performs, that option has stopped being a grey area. A domestic accident, an argument that ends in a complaint, or a simple period of sick leave turns a modest monthly saving into a file with four years of back contributions, a penalty and, if there was an accident, direct liability for the owner.

Direct employment changed substantially with Royal Decree-Law 16/2022, which aligned much of domestic work with the general regime. The most relevant point for a villa owner is that withdrawal at will disappeared, meaning the ability to end the relationship without cause by giving notice and paying a small severance: today a dismissal has to be justified, and if it is not, it behaves like any unfair dismissal. Since October 2022 domestic employment also contributes to unemployment protection and to the wage guarantee fund, and since 2023 registration and contributions fall to the employer regardless of hours worked, including short arrangements of a few hours a week. On top of that come obligations few people associate with a private home: a daily record of working time, limits on so-called presence hours, thirty calendar days of holiday, two extra payments or their pro rata equivalent, thirty-six consecutive hours of weekly rest, the minimum wage applied in proportion to the hours worked, a thirty per cent ceiling on payment in kind if the person lives in, and, since prevention rules were developed for the sector, a risk assessment of the role. In economic terms, the practical rule is that the real cost of someone employed directly sits roughly twenty-five to thirty-five per cent above gross salary once contributions and the provision for severance are added, with reductions available in certain cases. A service company, by contrast, invoices with twenty-one per cent VAT, which a private owner cannot recover, but its price includes cover, training, insurance and the employment risk.

There is one nuance that is decisive in Mallorca and that almost no owner has in mind: the special domestic employment regime only covers household service provided within the family home. If the villa is operated as a licensed holiday rental, the changeover cleaning, the housekeeping during a guest stay and the welcome are not domestic service but economic activity: that staff cannot be registered as the owner's domestic employees, and doing so exposes the owner to reclassification. It is a frequent mistake in mixed-use houses, lived in during August and rented in June and September, and the sensible fix almost always means separating the two worlds, keeping family use in its proper regime and outsourcing everything tied to the rental operation to a company. Then there is the simple arithmetic of occupancy: a seasonally used villa rarely generates stable work twelve months a year. In winter there is surplus time and in July there are not enough hands, so a permanent contract is either underused for half the year or falls short exactly when the house is full. Outsourcing turns that fixed cost into a variable one and makes it possible to scale teams on changeover days without renegotiating contracts or relying on overtime that is hard to fit inside legal working hours.

That said, direct employment has real advantages and is not always the worse option. Someone who has been in the house for years knows how the home automation behaves, which cupboard does not close properly, where the stopcock is and what each member of the family likes, and that operational memory cannot be bought. For homes lived in most of the year, with a stable family and frequent presence, a properly drafted contract of your own is usually the best fit. The problem appears when that person is also the sole point of control of a house that stands empty for months: if they fall ill in August, if they leave, or if they simply take their holiday, there is no structure behind them. That is why the model that works best in south-west Mallorca tends to be hybrid: your own staff for the domestic, trusted side, and a company providing what a single person cannot, namely guaranteed cover during holidays and sick leave, teams for changeovers and deep cleans, coordinated trades for pool, garden, climate control and one-off breakdowns, public liability insurance, a key and access protocol, and a single point of contact who answers when the owner is two thousand kilometres away. Whichever formula you choose, three things are not negotiable: that everyone entering the house is registered by somebody, that a written employment or service contract exists, and that there is a record of who holds keys and codes. Putting that in order beforehand is far cheaper than sorting it out after a problem.