Cleaning roster and timesheet, Excel and PDF: who is where, and the wages and time record the law says you must keep.
A weekly roster by person and day with site codes, a timesheet that calculates paid hours from start, finish and breaks, weekly totals for payroll, and printable versions of both, with the break and record-keeping rules on the page. Free, no email required.
How do you roster cleaners fairly, and what records do you have to keep?
Roster by site code and time, send it on Friday for the week after, and route every change after that through one named person. Roster the breaks rather than assuming them: for a shift of 4 to 6 hours one paid 10-minute rest break and one 30-minute meal break; 6 to 8 hours, two rest breaks and a meal break (Employment Relations Act 2000, Part 6D). The timesheet is the wages and time record under section 130 of the same Act: hours worked each day in the pay period and the pay for those hours, kept for 6 years, feeding the holiday and leave record under section 81 of the Holidays Act 2003. Travel between sites during a shift is paid time, and employees must earn at least the minimum wage ($23.95 an hour from 1 April 2026) for every hour. Across 4,483 publicly posted reviews of NZ cleaning businesses, punctuality is praised in 39% of positive reviews: it is won on the roster, not on the day.
The job this document is doing.
- —The roster changes by text on Sunday night and two people turn up at one site
- —Timesheets are reconstructed on Friday from memory and the holiday pay is wrong for a year
- —Breaks are not rostered, so nobody takes them and the business carries the liability
- —Travel between sites is unpaid because nobody realised it counts
Open it and use it today.
- 01Roster sheet: Monday date drives the headers; site code and times per cell; actual hours per person pulled from the timesheet
- 02Timesheet: one row per visit, paid hours calculated from start, finish and unpaid break, shifts over 8 hours flagged
- 03Weekly totals: hours and days per person per week, break entitlements to check
- 04PDF: printable roster with site codes and a weekly timesheet with signatures and the record-keeping rules
Free to use and adapt for your own business. Not legal advice: check contract terms against your own terms of trade and, where it matters, with a lawyer.
The law behind it. Employment Relations Act 2000, section 130 (wages and time record) and Part 6D (rest and meal breaks); Holidays Act 2003, section 81 (holiday and leave record); Minimum Wage Order (adult rate $23.95 from 1 April 2026). Checked on employment.govt.nz and legislation.govt.nz on 9 October 2026.
Why this document, and not another one.
| Measure (NZ cleaning services) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Punctuality praised, positive reviews | 39.1% |
| Reliability score, of four rated dimensions | 98.6 / 100 |
| Repeat-use language in positive reviews | 41.8% |
| Rude staff, negative reviews | About 5% |
From 4,483 publicly posted reviews of NZ cleaning services businesses (part of a 12,570-review property maintenance corpus), collected August 2026. Negative reviews score under 50 on any dimension; the cleaning negative sample is small (55 reviews), so its figures are rounded and reported as rank order. Full corpus, method and thresholds: the property maintenance methodology page. Full findings: the property maintenance research study.
Use it alongside
Cleaning checklist pack: end of tenancy, short-stay turnover, commercial
Three printable checklists: an end of tenancy clean written to the Residential Tenancies Act standard, a short-stay and Airbnb turnover list with a consumables restock table, and a daily-to-quarterly commercial cleaning schedule.
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