The household-service industry is a vital livelihood sector, playing an important role in improving living standards, stabilizing and expanding employment, promoting urban-rural integration and driving consumption growth. Recently, the Ministry of Commerce, together with several other departments, issued the 'Several Policy Measures to Promote High-Quality Development of the Household-Service Industry,' proposing 19 specific measures across five areas including stronger support for household-service enterprises. What concrete steps will increase the supply of quality services, and how can the household-service credit-information platform work better? Our reporters looked into it.
How to fix the 'small, scattered, chaotic' problem: cultivating branded enterprises and promoting standardization. 'Hard to find a nanny, even harder to find a good one' was once a real headache for many families. As living standards rise and demographics shift, consumer demand is moving from 'whether there is' to 'whether it is good,' with clear trends toward personalization, quality and diversity.
In recent years China's household-service industry has grown rapidly: practitioners exceed 30 million and the sector is worth over 1.3 trillion yuan. Yet against strong demand, the shortage of quality supply remains acute, and 'bottlenecks' such as opaque pricing and hard-to-verify worker credentials persist, becoming stumbling blocks on the road to high-quality development.
With demand upgrading on one side and supply shortfalls on the other, how to break the deadlock? Facing new trends, policy has struck a 'combination punch.' Kong Dejun, director of the Ministry of Commerce's Department of Trade in Services and Commercial Services, said that to strengthen policy support the ministry will back enterprises in innovating service models, exploring smart scenarios and expanding home-based elderly and childcare services, and cultivate a group of leading branded enterprises.
Addressing the 'pain point' of opaque pricing, the policy measures require enterprises that grade workers and differentiate prices accordingly to set reasonable grade standards based on key information such as years of experience, track record, skill certificates and user reviews, and to display clear prices to consumers.
For a long time the household sector has been 'small, scattered, chaotic' unable to meet daily consumer needs and unable to provide stable, long-term skills training, process control and after-sales guarantees.
Earlier this year the General Office of the State Council issued the 'Work Plan to Accelerate Cultivating New Growth Points in Service Consumption,' explicitly calling for converting intermediary-model household firms to employee-model ones and cultivating a group of industry leaders. Already many enterprises are exploring professionalism, standards and digital efficiency to expand their space.
Next, the Ministry of Commerce will work with relevant departments to guide the formulation of standards for home elderly care, organizing and storage, and enterprise digitalization, giving full play to the foundational and leading role of standardization in expanding and upgrading household services, and accelerating high-quality development.
How can practitioners have prospects and dignity: improving the social-security system and enriching training resources. The household-service industry connects livelihood expectations on one end and employment needs on the other. China's market has entered the trillion-yuan range and absorbed a large labor force. Yet weak professional identity, insufficient social security and limited skills-upgrade channels constrain the stable growth of the workforce. The policy measures target these pain points, holding up an 'umbrella' for workers.
Aiming at the high share of flexible employment and low insurance coverage among household workers, the measures propose improving the social-security system for flexible workers and raising their participation rate, guiding platforms to support flexible workers in joining basic pension and medical insurance through models such as 'voluntary individual plus platform subsidy.'
Wen Siyao, deputy director of the National Healthcare Security Administration's Department of Medical Service Management, said that in 2025 the number of flexible and other workers including household workers participating in basic medical insurance reached 69.82 million, up more than 20 million from the start of the 14th Five-Year Plan. To encourage participation, the administration is planning a special campaign to expand and improve insurance coverage and strengthen workers' sense of access to medical care.
Lin Shuli, deputy director and first-rank inspector of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security's Department of Migrant Workers, said the ministry will enrich vocational-training resources, strengthen surveys of workers' training willingness, and fully implement a four-in-one project model of 'job demand plus skills training plus skills evaluation plus employment service' to improve training quality and effectiveness.
The new profession of long-term care worker is growing fast. Wen Siyao said the administration is working with relevant departments to build a long-term-care profession tightly linked to long-term care insurance, fostering a professional workforce. By the end of June, nationwide certified long-term-care workers exceeded 50,000, and localities are exploring differentiated payment mechanisms tied to skill levels to motivate workers to upgrade their skills, so quality talent can be attracted, retained and well used.
How to build mutual trust between the two sides: continuously optimizing and upgrading the household-service credit platform. Information asymmetry is a long-standing pain point: consumers do not know workers' true backgrounds and service quality is hard to trace, constraining healthy industry development. As key infrastructure for trusted consumption, the household-service credit-information platform is being continuously optimized, building a 'bridge of trust' between consumers and workers.
Building on this, platform development is pushing in three directions. Process 'imperceptibility': organize enterprises to sort out blockers in queries, embed worker registration and use into business workflows, and achieve integration of 'consumer places order, enterprise dispatches, worker accepts and authorizes query simultaneously, results pushed directly to consumer,' minimizing repeated filing.
Service 'inclusiveness': for high-volume enterprises, proactively coordinate one-on-one data-interface plans; for small and medium firms, promote standardized third-party interfaces and support their joining the platform; leverage women's federations and other groups to promote the 'Household Credit Check' app and mini-program and guide women workers to register and use the platform.
