Sales Tax on Cleaning Services in Kentucky (2025)

Kentucky Flipped From Exempt to Taxable on January 1, 2023, and Most Small Cleaners Still Don't Know It

For most of Kentucky's modern tax history, cleaning services sat outside the sales tax base entirely. That changed with House Bill 8, passed in the 2022 legislative session, which added a long list of previously untaxed services to Kentucky's sales tax statute effective January 1, 2023. Cleaning made that list directly: KRS 139.200(2)(h) now taxes "janitorial services, including but not limited to residential and commercial cleaning services, and carpet, upholstery, and window cleaning services." The statutory language is deliberately broad, covering both residential and commercial work under a single taxable category, which puts Kentucky in a different posture than states like Iowa or Arkansas that maintain a residential carve-out.

Kentucky did build in one meaningful relief valve for small operators: a $6,000 de minimis threshold under KRS 139.470(23). A cleaning business with less than $6,000 in gross receipts from taxable services in the preceding calendar year is not required to register or collect sales tax on that service category going forward. This threshold matters most for very small solo operators or side-business cleaners just starting out; once a business crosses $6,000 in a prior year, registration and collection become mandatory for the following year, and there is no partial-year proration relief built into the statute.

Kentucky Cleaning Service Taxability Since HB 8

Registering and the $6,000 Threshold in Practice

Kentucky's flat 6 percent sales tax rate applies statewide with no local add-on, which simplifies the math considerably once you know a service is taxable, there is exactly one rate to apply anywhere in the Commonwealth. Businesses crossing the $6,000 threshold register with the Kentucky Department of Revenue and begin collecting on all taxable cleaning revenue going forward, not retroactively on the revenue that pushed them over the threshold. This is a rolling, look-back calculation based on the prior calendar year, so a business that earned $5,200 in cleaning revenue last year, then grows to $9,000 this year, does not owe collection obligations for the current year, but must register and begin collecting starting the following January based on this year's total. Track this number carefully if you are a growing solo operator, since crossing the line mid-year without applying the correct calendar-year logic is a common point of confusion.

Kentucky's Division of Sales and Use Tax can be reached at [email protected] or (502) 564-5170, and the department maintains a dedicated Janitorial Services FAQ on its TaxAnswers portal that walks through common scenarios, including the duct-cleaning question specifically: duct cleaning is taxable whether performed by a general janitorial company as part of a broader contract or by a specialized duct-cleaning-only business, since the statute taxes the service category regardless of the provider's specialization.

Worked Example: A $10,000 Monthly Contract Under the Flat Kentucky Rate

A cleaning business well above the $6,000 de minimis threshold, servicing a $10,000 monthly commercial contract in Louisville, applies Kentucky's flat 6 percent rate with no local variation to worry about: $10,000 × 0.06 = $600 in sales tax collected from the client and remitted to the Kentucky Department of Revenue. The invoice totals $10,600. Because Kentucky's rate does not vary by city or county, this calculation holds identically whether the contract is serviced in Louisville, Lexington, or a small town in eastern Kentucky, one genuine administrative advantage of the state's non-home-rule sales tax structure. Compare this to a business still under the $6,000 annual threshold servicing occasional small residential jobs: that business collects no tax at all on those services, provided its cumulative prior-year taxable service revenue stayed under the threshold, and its invoices should read as flat service fees with no tax line, since charging tax it is not required to collect creates its own compliance confusion.

The Transition Risk Still Catching Businesses Two Years Later

Even years after HB 8's effective date, Kentucky DOR continues to find cleaning businesses that never registered because the owner assumed cleaning services remained untaxed, a reasonable assumption if the business predates 2023 and no one flagged the change. If you started your cleaning business before January 2023 and have not revisited your tax registration status since, that is worth checking immediately, since the exposure compounds with every unregistered taxable invoice issued after the effective date, plus applicable penalty and interest under Kentucky's standard collection procedures. The $6,000 de minimis threshold offers real protection for small operators, but only if you are actually tracking your annual gross receipts against it rather than assuming your size exempts you by default.

The department's sales and use tax section is where subsequent guidance on the state's service tax expansion is posted, and that matters because the categories added in recent legislative sessions have been clarified administratively rather than by amendment. This state's full membership in the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board provides the second check: member states file annual taxability matrices using certified definitions, so a contractor can confirm a classification without waiting for a private letter ruling.

What HB 8 Changed for Bundled Facilities Contracts

HB 8 did not touch cleaning in isolation, it swept a wide range of previously untaxed services into Kentucky's sales tax base in the same bill, including services like landscaping and certain lodging-adjacent categories. For a facilities-management company that bundles cleaning with several of these newly taxable categories under one master services agreement, the practical effect since January 2023 is that nearly the entire contract value became taxable overnight, not just the cleaning line item. Businesses that structured their invoicing around a pre-2023 assumption that only a narrow slice of their services carried tax exposure need a full line-by-line review of their service catalog against the HB 8 statutory list, since the bill's scope was broader than most operators initially realized when it passed.

Kentucky's Division of Sales and Use Tax has continued issuing supplemental guidance in the years since HB 8's passage as edge cases surface, so a service classification memo written in early 2023 based on the bill's initial text may not reflect refinements the department has since published. Checking the TaxAnswers Janitorial Services FAQ periodically, rather than relying solely on your original 2023 compliance memo, is the more defensible practice going into an audit.