Caregivers, Housekeepers, and Domestic Workers

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In-home caregivers, home health aides, housekeepers, nannies, and household employees.

The belief that keeps this workforce out of the system is that household work — work in a private home — is not covered. That is mostly wrong.

Labor Code § 3351(d) includes as an employee "any person employed by the owner or occupant of a residential dwelling whose duties are incidental to the ownership, maintenance, or use of the dwelling, including the care and supervision of children, or whose duties are personal and not in the course of the trade, business, profession, or occupation of the owner or occupant."

You are inside the definition. The question is whether an exclusion applies — and the exclusions are narrow.

The exclusions, and how small they are

§ 3352 excludes a residential employee who worked less than 52 hours or earned not more than $100 during the 90 days before the injury.

Fifty-two hours in ninety days is about four hours a week.

A housekeeper who cleans one house one day a week is over that line. A part-time caregiver is far over it. Almost anyone doing this work regularly is covered.

The other exclusion that matters: a person described in § 3351(d) employed by their own parent, spouse, or child is excluded. Working for a family member is different from working for a family.

And most homeowner's policies cover this

Standard California homeowner's and renter's insurance policies commonly include workers' compensation coverage for residence employees, precisely because of § 3351(d).

Which means the family you work for may have coverage they do not know they have.

Ask. And if you are told there is none, verify it rather than accepting it — a homeowner's policy declaration page will say.

If there genuinely is no coverage: the Uninsured Employers Benefits Trust Fund pays benefits, and § 3706 permits a civil action against the household employer where § 3708 presumes negligence. How.

Immigration status does not affect eligibility.

If you are an IHSS provider

In-Home Supportive Services providers occupy a different position, because the payer, the employer of record, and the person you actually work for are not the same entity — and the arrangement varies by county.

Which means the first question in an IHSS injury is: who is the employer, and who carries coverage? That is answerable, and it should be answered before anything else. Do not accept "you're not an employee" from anyone who is not looking at the paperwork.

What this work does to people

Backs and shoulders — the dominant injury. Lifting and transferring a person who cannot support their own weight, alone, without equipment, in a bathroom or a bed that was not designed for it.

This is the same mechanism that hospitals are required to eliminate. 8 CCR § 5120 requires acute care hospitals to replace manual patient handling with lifting devices and lift teams — because doing it by hand injures people. A caregiver in a private home does the same lift, alone, with none of that. Low back injuries. · Shoulder injuries.

Knees, from stairs, kneeling, and floor-level care. Knee injuries.

Hands and wrists, from cleaning, wringing, gripping, and repetitive tasks. Carpal tunnel and repetitive strain.

Chemical exposure, from cleaning products used in unventilated bathrooms — and occupational asthma from cleaning chemicals is common and almost never claimed. Chemical exposure.

Falls, on stairs, wet floors, and unfamiliar homes.

Infectious disease exposure, in care work.

Assault and injury during care — including from clients with dementia. This is a work injury, and if it involved a violent act it opens the psychiatric rating exception under § 4660.1(c)(2)(A). And where you work for an agency rather than a household, § 6401.9 requires it to maintain a Violent Incident Log and make it available to you. How.

And psychiatric injury. Isolation, round-the-clock responsibility, and caring for someone who is dying are real occupational stressors. Psychiatric injury claims.

What to keep

Anything showing you worked there and how much — texts, a calendar, Venmo or Zelle records, a schedule, a note on the fridge. In cash employment this is the case.

The names of anyone who saw you working there.

And write down the hours. The 52-hour threshold is the whole coverage question, and it is measured over the 90 days before the injury.

Frequently asked questions