How Much Is a Stay-at-Home Parent Worth?

Being a stay-at-home parent is one of the toughest jobs out there—and it’s unpaid. If it were paid, the median annual salary would be $178,201, according to 2019 data from Salary.com. The total we calculated is even higher than that, at nearly $205,000 a year.

Why? Because many stay-at-home parents work around the clock, with 14-hour days—that’s a 98-hour work week. Managing a household comes with countless demands and to-dos, along with the stress of child-rearing. Younger children, especially, are particularly time-intensive, with nighttime feedings that make sleep a far-away fantasy. A stay-at-home parent wears many hats, from chauffeur to chef to laundry worker to house cleaner. 

Key Takeaways

• Roughly 1 in 5 parents are stay-at-home parents, according to the Pew Research Center.
• Stay-at-home parents often act as chauffeurs, chefs, nannies, tutors, and housecleaners. 
• During the pandemic, lockdowns left millions working remotely from home, and people became aware of what it is like to be a stay-at-home parent.

Child Care Provider

Stay-at-home parents provide full-time, live-in child care. This type of service from a professional provider usually comes with a host of perks, including health insurance, paid vacation, sick days, federal holidays off, and bonuses. These benefits are in addition to drawing a salary.

According to the International Nanny Association, the median hourly rate for a nanny is $25 an hour. For a 98-hour week (with 14-hour days—say, 6:30 AM to 8:30 PM), a stay-at-home parent with that hourly rate would make $2,450 a week or $10,608.50 a month.

Note: parents with children who don’t sleep through the night work even longer hours.

Private Chef

Meal preparation is one of the major tasks of most stay-at-home parents. From breakfast to dinner, there’s plenty of meal planning and cooking to be done. According to PayScale, a personal chef can earn an average of $25.86 an hour. If three meals and two snacks take someone two hours a day to prepare, that’s $362.04 a week, or $1567.63 a month.

Grocery shopping is another chore that needs to be factored in. A stay-at-home parent must drive to the supermarket, purchase the food and unpack it at home. Let’s say grocery delivery services charge a delivery fee of $20, and a stay-at-home parent shops twice a week. It would equal $173.20 a month ($40 / week x 4.33 weeks in a month) to get groceries.

House Cleaner

A clean and tidy home is the foundation of an efficient household. Typical cleaning duties include vacuuming, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing sinks, washing dishes, and making beds.

Professional maids or house cleaning service providers often charge by the hour, the number of rooms, or the home’s square footage. According to Housekeeper.com, cleaners make between $20 to $40 an hour on average in the U.S. Taking a median of $30 an hour, a stay-at-home parent working three hours a day for seven days a week would make $630 a week, or $2727.90 a month.

Important

If a stay-at-home parent were paid, their median annual salary would be over $178,000, according to Salary.com. Our total is even higher than that: $204,932.28 a year.

Driver

A private car service might seem like a high-end luxury to most, but the children of a stay-at-home parent get this service daily. Companies like Dryver, which provides personal drivers that use the client’s own car as the means of transportation, offer a glimpse into the cost of this task. If you hire Dryver, it costs between $25.95 and $32.95 an hour. If a stay-at-home parent were paid $30 an hour, they could $1818.6 a month driving two hours a day, seven days a week.

Laundry Worker

Professional laundry services charge by the pound. According to the website StreetEasy, laundry services in New York City, for example, charge anywhere from $1 to $2 a pound.

If a stay-at-home parent does 4 pounds of laundry per day, seven days a week, for $1.50 a pound, they would earn $181.86 a month.

How Many Stay-at-Home Parents Are Fathers?

About 1 in 5 (18%) of stay-at-home parents are fathers, according to Pew Research Center.

Do Stay-at-Home Parents Earn Money?

Some stay-at-home parents work part-time or freelance jobs to earn money but the role of a stay-at-home parent is a non-paying job in the traditional sense.

What Does a Homemaker Do?

A homemaker often cooks, cleans, cares for children, helps with homework, and may pay bills, keep household schedules, and do the shopping. An ability to juggle responsibilities and multi-task are key skills to have as a homemaker.

The Bottom Line

The daily work of a stay-at-home parent or homemaker can sometimes be taken for granted by other family members. However, these services could earn a homemaker a considerable wage if they took those skills to the marketplace.

Homemakers, in general, contribute a lot more to the home in addition to these tasks, and no amount of money can fill those needs.