What Is Each Chore Actually Worth?

The rate table

Change the times per week or the minutes and every rate recalculates. Set a chore to zero times a week to take it off the list — the remaining rates rise to absorb the budget.

Rounding to the nearest quarter is fine and makes the numbers easier for a child to hold in their head. The point of the exact figures is the ratio between chores, not the cents.

Where these numbers come from

Each chore is matched to the occupation that does the same work for a living, and priced at that occupation's national median hourly wage. That produces an adult market value:

market value = median hourly wage × minutes ÷ 60

Mowing a lawn takes 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's worth 85 cents. That ratio — roughly seventeen to one — is what most chore charts get wrong when they price mowing at $5 and bed-making at $1.

Your child's rate is then that chore's share of the weekly budget:

pay = weekly budget × chore's market value ÷ total market value of the list

So the relative prices come from wage data and the overall level comes from what families actually pay. There's no age multiplier anywhere, because there doesn't need to be one — an older child doing more and harder chores earns more automatically.

The one number 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. Time a couple of chores in your own house and put the real numbers in — the rates will be better than anything a chart can give you.

Why the same chore is worth more at 14 than at 8

Not because a fourteen-year-old deserves more per hour. Because the budget is larger and the list is different. An eight-year-old feeding a pet and making a bed has a list worth a few dollars of adult labour a week; a fourteen-year-old mowing and cleaning bathrooms has one worth twenty. The published averages move from $7.22 a week at eight to $13.13 at fourteen, so putting the same chores against the two budgets raises every rate by about 80% — which is the real answer to "how much should I pay a 12-year-old", and it depends on your list, not on their birthday.

Sources

• 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 28 July 2026.
• Federal minimum wage of $7.25, and the $4.25 youth opportunity wage for employees under 20 during their first 90 consecutive days — 29 U.S.C. §206(a) and §206(g). Checked 28 July 2026.
• Average weekly allowance by single year of age — $6.18 at five, $7.22 at eight, $8.53 at ten, $10.37 at twelve, $15.26 at fifteen, $25.01 at eighteen, and every age between — Greenlight, 2025 data. This is app data from families using Greenlight, with no published sample size or methodology; it is not a nationally representative survey. Checked 3 August 2026.
• What counts as compensation for IRA purposes — wages, salaries, tips, professional fees, bonuses and other amounts received for providing personal services, plus net earnings from self-employment — IRS Publication 590-A, "What Is Compensation?". That a contribution cannot exceed taxable compensation for the year is 26 U.S.C. §219(b)(1), applied to Roth accounts by §408A(c)(2). Checked 31 July 2026.

Once you've set the rates

Whether to pay for chores at all is a separate question, and one worth settling first — see should you pay kids for chores. If you'd rather pay a flat weekly amount than price each task, the allowance calculator works from age and scope instead, and how much allowance by age has the by-age chart.

For tracking what's actually been earned and owed, Bank of Dad keeps a running balance per child and logs every payment. If they're earning toward something specific, the savings goal calculator turns the weekly figure into a number of weeks.

Frequently asked questions