Sales Tax on Cleaning Services in Pennsylvania (2025)

Pennsylvania Taxes Cleaning: Both Residential and Commercial

Pennsylvania is one of the states operators most often get wrong, because the assumption that "services are usually exempt" doesn't hold here. Under 72 P.S. §7201(k)(14) and (o)(12), and the implementing regulation at 61 Pa. Code §60.1, building maintenance and building cleaning services are subject to the Pennsylvania sales and use tax whenever the service is performed inside the Commonwealth. The regulation is specific about what falls under that umbrella: janitorial service, maid or housekeeping service, office or interior building cleaning, window cleaning, floor waxing, bulb replacement and other lighting maintenance, chimney cleaning, acoustical tile cleaning, venetian blind cleaning, cleaning of enclosed telephone booths, and degreasing at service stations.

Pennsylvania's own Business One-Stop Hub states this plainly on its cleaning-business guidance page: residential and commercial building cleaning services are subject to sales tax in the Commonwealth. That means a solo house cleaner running a route through the Pittsburgh suburbs owes the same tax treatment on labor as a commercial janitorial contractor servicing a downtown office tower. The exemption that many operators expect from states like Virginia or Wyoming simply does not exist in Pennsylvania's statute.

Rate Stack: 6 Percent Base, Two County Add-Ons

Pennsylvania's statewide sales tax rate is 6 percent. Only two counties layer anything on top: Allegheny County (Pittsburgh and its 130 municipalities) adds 1 percent for a 7 percent combined rate, and Philadelphia adds 2 percent for an 8 percent combined rate, since city and county boundaries in Philadelphia are identical. Every other county in the state charges the flat 6 percent with no local add-on, which is unusually simple compared to a state like Oklahoma or South Carolina where hundreds of local jurisdictions each set their own rate.

A Pittsburgh-area contractor billing that $10,000 monthly account collects $700 in sales tax on top of the service fee, remits it to the Department of Revenue through myPATH, and keeps the $10,000 as revenue. Get the county wrong on a multi-site contract and you either undercollect and eat the shortfall, or overcollect and have to issue a credit, and neither is a good look on a renewal call.

The One Real Carve-Out: Itemized Employee Costs on Office Cleaning

There is a narrow exception worth knowing, and it only applies to interior office building cleaning. Since April 1, 1995, and reaffirmed by the Department of Revenue's Sales and Use Tax Bulletin 2025-01 (issued March 12, 2025), a vendor can exclude separately itemized employee costs, meaning wages, salaries, bonuses, commissions, benefits, expense reimbursements, and payroll withholding taxes, from the taxable service fee, as long as those costs are specifically broken out or stated in aggregate on the invoice. If the employee costs aren't itemized, the entire gross fee is taxable. The bulletin lays out three computation methods: the gross fee method (when costs aren't itemized, tax the whole fee), the service fee method (tax only the fee remaining after subtracting itemized employee costs), and an average employee cost or average service fee method that a vendor may use across its whole Pennsylvania book of business, at its own risk if audited.

This carve-out only reaches the supplied-employee cost layer for interior office cleaning contracts, generally where a facilities company places workers on-site under a service agreement. It does not exempt maid service, window cleaning, or general janitorial work performed under an ordinary service contract without that specific supplied-labor billing structure.

What Stays Off the Tax Base

Not everything a cleaning company touches is taxable in Pennsylvania. The regulation and related letter rulings draw a fairly firm line between cleaning/maintenance and repair:

• Building repair services on structures permanently affixed to real estate are nontaxable. The regulation is explicit that "building repair services" is a distinct category from "building maintenance or cleaning services," even though the line between a repair and a maintenance task isn't always obvious on a mixed-scope job.
• Residential air conditioning maintenance and repair has been nontaxable since July 1, 2000.
• Interior and exterior painting, wallpapering, and similar wall/ceiling/floor coverings are excluded from the definition of building maintenance or cleaning services.
• Grease trap cleaning for food service or restaurant establishments is specifically exempted.
• Laundering, dry cleaning, or cleaning of everyday wearing apparel and shoes has been exempt since July 1, 1971, along with coin-operated self-service laundering of apparel or household goods.
• Sales to qualified charities, religious organizations, nonprofit schools, volunteer fire companies, the federal government, or the Commonwealth and its subdivisions (including public school districts) are exempt from tax on building maintenance and cleaning services, unless the purchase relates to an unrelated trade or business.

The department's sales, use, and hotel occupancy tax section collects the bulletins and rate notices that sit around the regulation, and the local rates in Philadelphia and Allegheny County mean a statewide contractor administers more than one combined rate. The AICPA state and local tax resource center is the useful second reference for companies with work in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, since a crew route in that corridor can cross three tax regimes in a single week.