This paper examines the local demand for, and the level of informality of, domestic help in the Sacramento metropolitan area of California. It departs from the prevalent analytical approach that looks at domestic work from the supply side (i.e., the workers' perspective), and instead examines it from the demand side (i.e., the employers' perspective). Using a quantitative analytical strategy, it looks at the employer–employee relationship as embedded in specific social and economic conditions, including the sociodemographic characteristics of the household and its head, and structured by the different types of the housework workers are hired to perform. We present four main findings. First, a sizable, domestic‐work market of global scale exists in the Sacramento metropolitan area; almost three fourths of the hired domestic workers are immigrants coming from three continents. Second, although almost half of the households sampled face a care deficit, only one third of them actually hire domestic help. Third, what determines the likelihood of hiring domestic help is not the presence of a household care deficit but the configuration of the household and its class position. Fourth and finally, informality of domestic work is gendered and varies proportionally to the level of intimacy of the task performed: the more intimate the task, the more feminine it is perceived of to be, the higher the level of informality. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.