Printable Chore Chart by Age — Free, No Email Required

The chore list, by age

Every chore below is on the AAP's published list for that band, priced at what the same work is worth in the labour market. Set a chore to zero times a week to keep it off the chart; the remaining rates rise to absorb the budget. The minutes are editable because they are an assumption, not data — more on that below.

Where these chores come from

The American Academy of Pediatrics publishes a chore list broken into age bands on HealthyChildren.org, and this chart uses it as written. The 5–7, 8–10 and 11–12 bands are cumulative in the AAP's own wording — each one is "all of the above, plus" the next set — so a ten-year-old's list contains the younger chores too. The chores for thirteen and up come from a separate AAP article on household chores for adolescents.

There is no band below five, and none has been invented. That is where the AAP's list starts, and making one up for a three-year-old would undo the only reason this chart is different from the others.

The AAP's own case for chores is that they teach a child "life skills and how to cooperate with a group", and that "helping to keep the home running smoothly boosts a child's self-esteem". For teenagers it adds that caring for shared spaces "nurtures the concept of shared teamwork that will last into adulthood". Neither page cites research for those claims, so treat them as the Academy's position rather than as findings. Their practical advice is worth more: with a child new to responsibilities, introduce one task at a time, because a long list can be overwhelming. A fourteen-row chart on day one is the most common way this goes wrong.

What each chore is worth

Every chore is matched to the occupation that does the same work for a living and priced at that occupation's national median hourly wage, scaled by how long the task takes:

adult value = median hourly wage × minutes ÷ 60

Mowing the yard takes about 45 minutes and landscaping workers earn a median $18.82 an hour, so mowing is worth $14.12 of adult labour. Making a bed takes three minutes at housekeeping rates, so it is worth 85 cents. Your child's rate is then that chore's share of the week's budget:

pay = weekly budget × the chore's adult value ÷ the adult value of the whole list

So the relative prices come from wage data and the overall level comes from what families actually pay — by default, the average weekly allowance for a child of exactly this age among families using Greenlight in 2025. That figure is app data from a self-selected group of families, not a nationally representative survey, and Greenlight publishes no sample size or methodology. Override it with your own number whenever it doesn't match your household. The chore rate calculator uses the identical model, so the two pages will never disagree about what a chore is worth.

The one number here that isn't sourced

Minutes per chore. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes how long Americans spend on household activities in aggregate, but not a breakdown by individual task, and no other citable source has one. The durations loaded here are estimates — which is exactly why every one of them is an editable field, and why none of them is described as an average. Time two or three chores in your own house and put the real numbers in.

What the research actually says about chores

Pages about chore charts routinely gesture at "studies showing chores build responsibility". Almost always the study is the same one, and it is more specific — and more awkward — than the summaries suggest.

Marty Rossmann, emeritus associate professor of family education at the University of Minnesota, published Involving Children in Household Tasks: Is It Worth the Effort? in September 2002. She re-analysed data from Diana Baumrind's longitudinal study, begun in 1967 on families in the San Francisco Bay area, measuring participation in family work at ages 3–4, 9–10 and 15–16 against outcomes in the subjects' mid-twenties. The headline finding is that "the best predictor of young adults' success in their mid-20s was that they participated in household tasks when they were three or four".

The part that rarely gets quoted comes next: "if they did not begin participating until they were 15 or 16, the participation backfired and those subjects were less 'successful.'" Starting late was worse than the alternative, not merely less good.

And the part that cuts directly against the pay column on this page: Rossmann writes that children "should be involved in determining the tasks they will complete, through family meeting and methods such a weekly chore chart", and then, plainly, "They should not be made to do the tasks for an allowance."

That is a real tension and it would be dishonest to bury it on a page that prints a price next to every chore. So: the pay column is a toggle, and turning it off gives you the chart Rossmann describes — a weekly chore chart with the tasks agreed and no money attached. The argument on both sides is laid out in should you pay kids for chores.

Hold the finding loosely, though. It rests on 84 young adults from a single 1967 Bay Area cohort, it is correlational rather than causal, and Rossmann herself said she "would like to do more work in this area that would replicate the study with a larger sample of the population and groups that represent greater diversity". The original University of Minnesota page is no longer online; the document quoted here is an archived third-party copy. Several claims commonly attached to this study — that it controlled for socioeconomic status, or that it followed subjects into their thirties — do not appear in the document at all and are not repeated here.

Sources

• Age-banded chore lists for ages 5–12 — American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org, "Chores and Responsibility". Checked 3 August 2026.
• The chore list for adolescents — American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org, "Household Chores for Adolescents". Checked 3 August 2026.
• Median hourly wages, Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, via O*NET OnLine — landscaping and groundskeeping $18.82, maids and housekeeping cleaners $17.07, animal caretakers $17.00, childcare workers $16.82, laundry and dry-cleaning workers $16.78, dishwashers $16.73. Checked 3 August 2026.
• Average weekly allowance by single year of age, 2025 — Greenlight, 2025 data. App data from families using Greenlight, with no published sample size or methodology; not a nationally representative survey. Checked 3 August 2026.
• Marty Rossmann, "Involving Children in Household Tasks: Is It Worth the Effort?", University of Minnesota, September 2002 — a secondary analysis of 84 young adults from Diana Baumrind's longitudinal study begun in 1967. The University of Minnesota page is no longer live; quoted from an archived copy. Checked 3 August 2026.

Related

The chore rate calculator is the full pricing model behind the pay column, with your own chore list rather than the AAP's. To set the weekly budget in the first place, the allowance calculator works from age and scope, and the allowance raise schedule covers what happens on the next birthday. Once the chart is running, Bank of Dad tracks what has been earned and what is owed, and the savings goal calculator turns the weekly earnings into a date. All the free calculators are here.

For the other half of the fridge, the printable savings goal tracker prints what the earnings are for — one box per deposit, the running balance on each, and the date the goal is reached at the top.

Frequently asked questions