The Calendar Group

Hiring guide

Household Manager

The steady hand inside your home — staff, service, supplies, and schedules, managed to a standard you never have to restate.

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

Compensation

$120,000–$180,000 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 household manager owns the inside of your home. The housekeepers know their zones, the pantry never runs out of the coffee you actually drink, the florist arrives before the guests do, and the calendar of deliveries, appointments, and school pickups holds together. It is the difference between a house that is cleaned and a home that is run.

The role sits between hands-on and executive. A good household manager still walks the rooms daily — checking the guest bath, straightening what the housekeeper missed — while also managing schedules, service standards, household accounts, and the small army of people who pass through your door each week.

Principals often reach for this hire when the family assistant is drowning or the housekeeper has been promoted past her comfort. It is the most common first management hire in a growing household, and getting it right sets the tone for every hire after.

What the role owns

  • Manage housekeepers, laundress, and other interior staff
  • Maintain service standards and daily walkthroughs of the residence
  • Run household calendars — deliveries, appointments, family schedules
  • Manage inventories of pantry, supplies, wine, and household goods
  • Coordinate dinner parties, holidays, and in-home events
  • Handle household accounts, petty cash, and expense tracking
  • Schedule and supervise routine vendors and service visits
  • Keep household manuals and preferences documented and current

What great looks like

A great household manager keeps a living preferences file — how you take your tea, which side of the bed gets the extra pillow — and trains every new hire from it.

They notice before you do: the burned-out bulb, the fraying towel edge, the housekeeper who has seemed off for a week.

They handle staff friction quietly and early, so you never learn there was friction at all.

They can flex from managing to doing without resentment — plating dinner themselves when the chef is out.

Their inventories are real. You could hand their binder to a stranger and the house would run for a month.

Interview questions worth asking

  1. 01

    Describe the household you ran most recently — square footage, staff count, family rhythm. What did a normal Tuesday look like?

  2. 02

    How do you document a family's preferences, and how do you train new staff to them?

  3. 03

    Two members of your team aren't getting along and service is starting to show it. Walk me through what you do.

  4. 04

    Tell me about an event you ran in the home from start to finish. What went wrong and how did you cover it?

  5. 05

    What household tasks will you still do with your own hands, and which do you believe a manager should never delegate?

Questions

Hiring a household manager, answered.

How is a household manager different from a house manager?
The titles blur in practice, but we draw the line at people. A household manager leads staff — housekeepers, laundress, sometimes a chef — and owns service standards across the home. A house manager often runs a residence with little or no staff beneath them, doing more of the work personally. If you have three or more interior staff, you are hiring a household manager.
How is this different from an estate manager?
The household manager runs the inside of the home; the estate manager runs the whole property. Grounds, building systems, capital projects, vendor contracts, and budgets sit with the estate manager. In larger households the two roles coexist, with the household manager reporting to the estate manager. In a single well-staffed residence without major grounds, the household manager may be all you need.
Should a household manager be live-in?
Usually not, in our experience. The strongest candidates in major markets have families and lives of their own, and live-out roles with predictable hours draw a deeper pool. Live-in makes sense for households with heavy travel who want continuity of presence, or remote properties. If you do go live-in, separate quarters with a private entrance matter more than principals expect.
What tenure should we expect from this hire?
Well-matched household managers commonly stay many years — this is a role where tenure compounds, because the value is in accumulated knowledge of your preferences and your people. Short stints in a candidate's history deserve a fair hearing; households change, families relocate. A pattern of them does not.

Begin

Looking for a household 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.