How Much Is Your Unpaid Work Worth?
Unpaid work rarely makes the news, yet it fills a large part of every week. In the United States the average woman spends about 4 hours a day on housework and caring for relatives, and the average man about 2.5 hours. In low-income countries the load is far heavier — heavy enough to keep many people out of paid jobs and out of school.
The Unpaid Work Calculator puts a price on the chores and care you do for free, so you can decide how to spend your time. There are only 24 hours in a day. Should most of them go to chores — or would a paid job plus some outside help leave your family better off?
Below you will find out:
- how much your unpaid work is actually worth;
- why economists put a money value on housework; and
- what can be done to share the load more fairly.
What Is Unpaid Work, Exactly?
Unpaid work is work you are not paid for. Every time you cook, clean, do the laundry, buy groceries, or look after children, sick, elderly or disabled relatives, you are doing unpaid work.
It is often called unpaid care, which makes it sound like something other than work. Look closer and it looks just like a job: it takes your time and energy and produces goods (meals, snacks, clean clothes) or services (cleaning, care, transport). Often it is also a worse job — repetitive, with no promotions, no pension and no career path, and sometimes without so much as a thank-you.
Because nobody is paid for it, unpaid work stays largely invisible. Oxfam's 2020 report Time to Care: Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis valued the unpaid care work of the world's women at at least $10.8 trillion a year. An hour of cooking or cleaning is hard to price, so many governments — especially in the Global South — do not measure the time spent on it at all.
The burden is heaviest in rural communities and low-income countries: according to Oxfam, women there can spend up to 14 hours a day on care work, up to five times as much as men. Even in OECD countries it is unevenly shared — women do about 4 hours of unpaid work a day on average, roughly twice as much as men.
Full-Time, Part-Time, or Stay-at-Home Parent (SAHM/SAHD)?
Unpaid work can take so much time that many people switch to part-time work or stay at home to cope. The calculator checks whether it makes more financial sense to do everything yourself or to share it — with family members or with paid services — and compares the options side by side: stay at home, part-time (20 h/week), full-time (40 h/week) and your current hours. For each one it shows how many chores you still do, how many must be outsourced, and what is left of your net pay after paying for help.
How to Use the Calculator
- Pick your country. The preset fills in the currency, measurement system, a typical wage, tax rate and typical market prices for each chore. Presets are available for the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany (eurozone), Canada and Australia; 20 currencies are supported, including USD, RUB, EUR, GBP, JPY and CNY.
- Enter your pay — per hour, week, month or year. The calculator converts it into an hourly wage using your paid hours per week. If you are not working now, enter the pay you would expect for the job you would do, and choose "per hour". For the United States the default is $23.11/h, the median hourly wage of all occupations in May 2023 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).
- Enter the tax rate. Chores are paid for from take-home pay, so the comparisons use your net wage.
- Estimate your chores. How many hours a week do you spend cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, shopping, looking after children or adults, on repairs and gardening, and driving family members around? Next to each chore is the price of hiring someone to do it.
- Simulate a scenario. Choose what share of the chores to outsource to paid services and what share to hand over to family, and see the effect on your monthly budget.
The default prices are rounded typical market rates. They vary a lot between cities, so replace them with quotes from your area for a more accurate result.
Two Ways to Value Unpaid Work
- Replacement cost — what it would cost to hire someone to do the same chores: hours × market price for each task. This is the headline figure of the calculator and the method most statistical offices use for household satellite accounts.
- Opportunity cost — what you could earn in those hours at your own gross wage. This shows what your time is worth to you, but it overstates what you could really earn: nobody can turn every free hour into paid work.
That is why the calculator never raises your paid work above 40 hours a week. Regular overtime harms both mental and physical health in the long run — hours freed beyond that limit are counted as free time, not as extra income.
American and Metric Measurement Systems
Time is measured the same way everywhere, but laundry is not: wash-and-fold services in the US charge per pound, while most of the world charges per kilogram. Choose US customary (lb) or Metric (kg) — the weight and price convert automatically, and the result shows both units, e.g. 15 lb (6.8 kg) at $1.75/lb ($3.86/kg).
How It Is Calculated
- Hourly wage = weekly pay ÷ paid hours (monthly pay × 12 ÷ 52; yearly pay ÷ 52).
- Net hourly wage = hourly wage × (1 − tax rate).
- Replacement value = Σ hours × market price per hour + laundry weight × price per lb or kg.
- Opportunity cost = total unpaid hours × gross hourly wage.
- Per month = per week × 52 ÷ 12; per year = per week × 52.
Example. You earn $23.11/h, work 30 hours a week, pay 20% tax and do 27 hours of chores a week. At the default US prices those chores would cost $701.25 a week to outsource — $3,038.75 a month or $36,465 a year. An hour of your work brings in $18.49 after tax, while an hour of outsourced chores costs $25.97 on average. So buying help in order to work more would lose money — except for laundry: 15 lb at $1.75/lb is only $13.13 per hour of your laundry time, less than your net wage.
Why Unpaid Work Matters: the Care Diamond
If you are happy with the amount of housework you do, you may wonder why anyone should care — and why put a price on it at all? Nobody is going to pay you for it (although some countries, such as Sweden, do compensate part of family care through generous paid parental leave).
In Unpaid Work and the Economy: Linkages and Their Implications, Indira Hirway of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College explains the reason. In a well-functioning society, care is provided to everyone who needs it by at least one of four institutions: households, the state, markets and voluntary (non-profit) organizations. Together they form the Care Diamond. When some of them are missing, the government is expected to fill the gaps — and when it does not, the whole load falls on households, most often on women.
Measuring unpaid work in money makes this hidden load visible, so it can be taken into account in family decisions, in economic statistics and in public policy.
The Triple "R" Approach: Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute
- Recognize — count unpaid work and give it a value. This calculator does exactly that for your household.
- Reduce — cut the time chores take: time-saving appliances, batch cooking, online grocery delivery, and public services such as affordable childcare and running water.
- Redistribute — share the work more fairly: between partners and family members, and between households, the state and the market.
Try the scenario block: see how outsourcing a quarter of your chores or handing some of them over to your family changes both your budget and your free time.