A new policy from nine ministries pushes the home services industry toward an employee-based model, ending the traditional information intermediary model and strengthening performance trust and integration with long-term care insurance.
When young couples relay messages across WeChat groups to find a reliable nanny, and when adult children of disabled elderly people repeatedly hit pitfalls trying to choose a compliant caregiver, the difficulty of finding household help has long since moved beyond mere consumer service into a structural pain point that troubles the entire society's nearby service delivery and reproduction order.
The new high-quality development policy for the household services industry, jointly issued by the Ministry of Commerce and eight other departments, introduces 19 measures, promotes standardized contracts, and connects to long-term care insurance. On the surface, it appears to be an administrative safety net for people's livelihood pain points, but in reality, it is a forced restructuring of the long-unruly household services market by state capital and regulatory forces.
Public discourse tends to simply blame the difficulty of finding household help on insufficient labor supply or young people's reluctance to take on manual work. This shallow intuition completely obscures the fundamental failure of the traditional household services agency matchmaking model in commercial logic.
For a long time, the vast majority of household services companies have essentially operated as information intermediaries that merely collect a per-head toll fee. They neither pay social insurance for their workers nor bear responsibility for service delivery, and some even hide workers' employment histories to close deals. This "asset-light matchmaking" model, with its extreme asymmetry between power and responsibility, directly leads to a loss of control once a match is made.
Over 60 percent of disputes stem from off-book private deals, which are essentially a joint rebellion by workers and employers against the exploitation of intermediary platforms.
To understand the capital underpinnings of this push toward disintermediation and standardization, one only needs to trace down the pipeline of industry data.
Tianyancha Professional Edition data shows that as of now, there are over 3.089 million household services-related enterprises in China in active or survival status, with more than 240,000 newly registered this year alone. By region, economically strong provinces such as Jiangsu, Shandong, and Guangdong hold the core share. Behind this vast corporate portrait sketched by Tianyancha are not 3 million modern service enterprises with high-quality delivery capabilities, but millions of micro-intermediary entities with extremely low entry barriers, operating on little more than a desk and a few phones.
The 20 million gap in supply is not a physical shortage of labor, but an avalanche in the supply of high-trust, professional, and standardized services.
The core weapon of the new policy lies in pushing small and medium-sized household services companies to transition to an "employee-based system" and forcibly opening the designated service channel for long-term care insurance. The essence of this move is to use the national-level payer of long-term care insurance amid the wave of population aging to force household workers, who have long operated outside the formal labor system, into the social security framework for industrial workers. Only when household workers obtain labor contracts, social security, and career advancement pathways can the incentive for off-book private deals be fundamentally severed and sustainable delivery trust be established.
For the more than 3 million traditional intermediaries in the market, the golden era of profiting from information asymmetry is definitively over.
In the second half of the household services industry's internal war, the competition is no longer about who has more nanny resources in WeChat groups, but rather about backend organizational management capabilities, digital credit risk control, and the ability to connect with payment channels such as long-term care insurance. Those micro-intermediary shell companies that cannot evolve toward an employee-based system or refuse standardized contracts and credit checks will ultimately be squeezed out entirely; meanwhile, platforms that can complete standardization upgrades and achieve large-scale service delivery will capture the most substantial compliance dividends in the trillion-yuan silver economy and childcare market.
