What full-time means for this specific permit
The permit route covered on this site is built around one worker, one household, on an ongoing, full-time basis — not a booking for a few hours or a handful of days. That’s part of why she’s generally expected to live in: the arrangement is structured as a household role, not a scheduled visit. When an agency or a government document refers to this category, that’s the working assumption behind it.
This shapes practical planning too — accommodation, meals, and how rest days are scheduled all follow from the fact that this is a full household role, not from a headcount of hours worked in a week. See the dedicated guide on the living arrangement itself for what that side of it involves.
- The standard permit is structured around one full-time role in one household.
- She’s generally expected to live in as part of that arrangement.
- This is a different structure from booking a service by the hour.
The other kind of arrangement — and why it’s not the same thing
A part-time or hourly cleaning arrangement, where someone comes in for a few hours a week rather than living in and working the role full-time, is a different kind of engagement — and in practice it typically sits outside the foreign-worker permit system this site describes. If that’s what a household actually wants, the permits, costs and process covered here aren’t the right reference.
It’s worth being clear about which one you’re actually looking for before you speak to an agency, because the two aren’t different tiers of the same service — they’re structured differently from the start, with different obligations attached to each.
What the law does and doesn’t fix about the working pattern
Within the full-time arrangement, the Employment Act entitles a domestic employee to one rest day a week — a real, legal entitlement, not a courtesy. What the Act doesn’t do is set a specific daily-hour cap for this category of work the way it does for many other kinds of employment; that particular protection doesn’t extend to a domestic employee under the current law.
That gap matters practically: it means the daily working pattern — when the day starts, when it winds down, how breaks work — isn’t something a statute spells out for you. It’s a term the household needs to set clearly in the arrangement itself, ideally in writing, rather than something left to be worked out informally after someone has already moved in.
Setting the pattern out clearly, since the law leaves it to you
Because the daily hours aren’t fixed by statute, the fair and practical move is to write down a realistic pattern before anyone starts — roughly when the day begins and ends, how breaks fit in, and how the weekly rest day is scheduled. That written expectation does more to prevent the role quietly expanding than any conversation held after the fact.
This is exactly the kind of detail worth including in your household brief before you talk to an agency, alongside the duties themselves — it tells a suitable agency or candidate what the day-to-day rhythm actually looks like, not just the task list.