The Calendar Group

Hiring guide

House Manager

A hands-on manager for a single residence — part organizer, part doer, keeping one home running smoothly day to day.

Begin a search for this role(877) 404-5290

Compensation

$90,000–$150,000 base

Typical base compensation, major U.S. markets, 2026. Scope, travel, and household complexity move the range.

We advise on offer structure — schedule, housing, benefits, bonus — before every search. The right package is how great people stay.

A house manager keeps one residence running, largely with their own two hands. They let the plumber in and stay to watch the work. They restock, reorder, reset the guest room, meet the deliveries, walk the house each morning with a practiced eye. Where larger homes need someone to manage staff, this role suits the home that needs one very capable person.

It is the right hire for a substantial residence with a small footprint of help — perhaps a housekeeper a few days a week — where the principal wants a single trusted point of contact for everything the house needs. The house manager may cook occasionally, drive occasionally, wrap gifts in December, and handle the alarm call at midnight.

The best candidates are natural generalists with hotel-level standards and no task beneath them. What you are buying is judgment and ownership: the confidence that when you travel, the house is watched by someone who treats it as their own.

What the role owns

  • Perform daily walkthroughs and keep the residence guest-ready
  • Schedule and supervise vendors, deliveries, and service calls
  • Manage household supplies, errands, and returns
  • Coordinate with part-time housekeepers or other occasional staff
  • Prepare the home for the family's arrivals and departures
  • Handle household bills, receipts, and basic expense tracking
  • Oversee routine maintenance and seasonal upkeep
  • Serve as first call for alarms, emergencies, and after-hours issues

What great looks like

A great house manager finds the problem on Tuesday's walkthrough, not when you point it out on Saturday.

They keep a simple, current record of every vendor, warranty, and service date — nothing lives only in their head.

They are equally at ease supervising a contractor and scrubbing the sink themselves; you never sense a task is beneath them.

They communicate in the register you prefer — a weekly summary, a quick text, silence unless it matters — and hold to it.

They anticipate the calendar: the house is ready for winter before the first frost, not after.

Interview questions worth asking

  1. 01

    Walk me through your morning routine in the last house you ran — literally, from the moment you arrived.

  2. 02

    Tell me about a time something failed in the house while the family was away. What did you do in the first hour?

  3. 03

    What do you keep in your house manual, and when did you last update it?

  4. 04

    Which tasks did you do yourself in your last role, and which did you bring people in for? How did you decide?

  5. 05

    How do you handle a principal who changes plans often — arrivals moved up, guests added last minute?

Questions

Hiring a house manager, answered.

How is a house manager different from a household manager or estate manager?
It is mostly a question of how much sits beneath them. A house manager runs one residence hands-on, with little or no staff. A household manager leads an interior team. An estate manager adds grounds, systems, budgets, and projects across a significant property. The titles get used loosely in the market; we look at the actual scope, not the business card.
Can a house manager also cook or drive?
Often, and hybrid roles are common at this level — house manager and occasional cook, house manager and driver. Be honest about proportions in the search: a role that is genuinely half cooking needs a candidate hired for that, at compensation that reflects it. Hybrids succeed when the split is stated plainly, and fail when the second job was left out of the conversation.
Full-time or part-time?
A primary residence the family lives in year-round generally justifies full-time; the work is daily even when the family travels. Part-time house management suits smaller secondary homes, though at that point a property caretaker may be the better-shaped role. If you find yourself designing a twenty-hour week, tell us — the right structure is often different from the first instinct.
What should we check in references?
Ask prior principals two things: what the candidate handled without being asked, and what happened the first time something went badly wrong. Competence shows in the first answer, character in the second. Verify actual dates of employment and the real scope — titles in private service inflate easily, and a reference call is where the true shape of the last role emerges.

Begin

Looking for a house manager?

Tell us about the household and the role. A senior advisor — not a coordinator — will come back to you within one business day.

Held in confidence. No obligation.