House rules for a household with a helper

When it starts. When it ends. What happens in the evening. This is the single largest source of early disputes and neither side is being unreasonable when it happens.

Your hours say she finishes at seven. At half past eight the baby wakes. Nobody counts that as work, and across three months it becomes forty hours nobody counted. Write down the answer to one question: after her hours, is she asked or is she assumed? If she is asked, can she say no without it being awkward? If saying no is awkward, she will not say it, and you do not have an arrangement.

A migrant domestic worker is not covered by the Employment Act, so there is no statutory cap on her hours and no statutory overtime. (MOM, who is covered by the Employment Act, page last updated 24 July 2025.) What is required is adequate daily rest and one rest day a week, under the Employment of Foreign Manpower (Work Passes) Regulations. (MOM press reply on MDW workload, 2 March 2024.) The absence of an hours rule is exactly why the hours belong in writing. How to check the day adds up

One a week. Which day it falls on is agreed with her, not assigned to her. At least one rest day a month must actually be taken and cannot be compensated in money at any price. Any other rest day she agrees to work is paid at least one day's salary on top of the monthly wage. (MOM, rest days and wellbeing, page last updated 16 January 2026. The monthly rule has been in force since 1 January 2023.)

Write down what a rest day means in practice here, because this is where a rule that exists on paper quietly stops existing. A rest day with the toddler attached is a working day in comfortable clothes. A rest day that ends at six because you have plans is not a full day. Decide how much notice you give if you want to ask her to work one, and say plainly that she can decline.

Public holidays are a different matter. MOM's rest day rules cover the weekly rest day and say nothing about public holidays. (MOM, rest days and wellbeing, page last updated 16 January 2026.) So whatever you do about them is your own arrangement to make. Decide it now rather than on the morning of each one.

This part runs in both directions, and a list that only answers your questions will be read as surveillance.

Yours: whether guests come to the house, what happens when a rest day turns into a rest night, how the two of you reach each other in an emergency, which decisions she takes without asking and which she checks first.

Hers, and she is unlikely to ask: whether you come into her room, whether she can close the door, whether a call home in the evening is fine, whether a friend can visit, what happens to her food in the fridge.

Her phone is the one that gets written down badly. There is a reasonable conversation about whether a phone is in her hand while she is carrying your toddler down the stairs, and that is a safety point. It is not the same conversation as whether she may call her children in the evening, and if you merge the two she will only hear the second one.

The first breakage is not really about a plate. It is the afternoon she finds out which kind of household this is. If the first thing she breaks costs her money or produces a scene, you have taught her that things which go wrong are best managed quietly, and the leak under the sink gets managed quietly too.

Write down what to do when something breaks, when she is ill, when she cannot finish the day's plan, and who to call in an emergency. Put the numbers on the same page. A number she has to ask you for is a number she will not use.

Include the window rule here, because it is the one household task with a real chance of killing someone. Cleaning the outside of a window above the ground floor is allowed only with the grilles locked throughout and an adult physically present, and she is never on a stool, a ledge or a parapet, and never leaning out to retrieve something that fell. (MOM, guide for migrant domestic workers, checked 22 September 2026. The same restrictions are in the safety agreement you both sign: MOM, contracts and safety agreement, page last updated 23 April 2026.)

Holding her passport. MOM's position is that employers should not keep a worker's passport and should not press her to hand it over, and that she must have unrestricted access to it and to her belongings. (MOM, can an employer keep a worker's passport, checked 22 September 2026.) If she is Filipina, her verified contract goes further and says both passport and permit stay in her possession at all times.

Keeping her salary or her bank card. Since 1 January 2019 an employer must not hold a worker's salary or personal money, including her bank book or card. Salary is due no later than seven days after the end of each salary period, and if she asks to be paid into her own bank account you have to do it. (MOM, salary guidelines, page last updated 14 March 2024.)

Buying out every rest day. One a month has to be taken. An arrangement where she always takes the money is not a generous arrangement, it is a rule you are not allowed to make.

Sending her somewhere else to work. She may only work for you, at the residential address declared to MOM, on domestic chores. Helping at your shop or cleaning a second home is illegal deployment, with a financial penalty and a possible ban on employing anyone again. Care for a child or a parent at a relative's home is the narrow exception and MOM has to be told first. (MOM, employment rules for migrant domestic workers, page last updated 27 February 2026.)

A curfew, a phone check or an approval list for her friends, on the grounds of the bond. This is the most common one, and it rests on a misreading. MOM's security bond page lists two things that protect you: that you informed her of the work permit conditions, and that you reported a breach once you became aware of it. (MOM, security bond requirements, page last updated 2 February 2026.) Two. Inform, and report. Nothing on that page asks you to supervise her movements, read her phone or set a time by which she must be home.

It is written, and she has her own copy. In a language she reads. Not a list on the fridge in English that she nods at.

It existed before it was needed. A rule that appears the day after the thing happened is a reprimand wearing a rule's clothes, and it will be heard as one.

It applies to the whole house. If the rule is that shoes come off at the door, that includes your teenager. Rules that only bind one adult in a home are not house rules.

It says what, not who. "The kitchen is closed after nine" rather than "do not help yourself at night."

Somebody can change it. Put a date on it and look at it again at the end of the first fortnight, with her. Almost every first list contains one rule that turns out to be impossible, and finding that out in week two costs nothing.

This is the whole template. Twelve lines, and the value is in answering them concretely rather than in the formatting.

The working day starts at. The working day ends at. After that time she is asked, not assumed, and she can say no. Her rest day is. The rest day this month that is not for sale is. Meals: what she eats, who buys it, and whether the table is shared. Her room: who goes in, and when. Phone and visitors: what is fine, in both directions. Who gives instructions when more than one adult lives here, and whose instruction wins. What to do when something breaks. What to do when she is unwell. Who to call in an emergency, with the numbers written out.

Two lines that are not rules but belong on the same page: the date you wrote it, and the date the two of you will look at it again.

If you want the version with the room to fill in, the questions that surface the disagreements, and the wording that has survived contact with real households, that is what the onboarding workbook is for.