Unpaid Household Work: Estimated Value and Time Spent on Domestic Tasks and Caregiving

Filed 1h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Doh De Oh

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford, United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A GAO analysis estimates the national market value of unpaid household work, including cooking, cleaning and caregiving, at $5.6 to $6.0 trillion in 2024, equivalent to at least 19.2 to 20.2 percent of GDP. Most people (87.3 percent) spent time on such work daily, averaging about 3.72 hours, based on 2021-2024 American Time Use Survey data.

Women made up 53.9 percent of people doing this work despite being 51.2 percent of the population, and women and married individuals spent more time on child care than men and unmarried individuals, though men and women spent similar time caring for adults. None of this labor is counted in official GDP because it occurs outside formal market transactions.

GAO notes that including such unpaid work would have shown a smaller decline in economic output during the COVID-19 recession, and that valuing it could help inform caregiver retirement security policy.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Nearly four hours a day of unpaid work, worth trillions, and it still doesn't count toward the number the government uses to say how the economy is doing. That is a strange kind of bookkeeping, the kind where the actual work gets done but the ledger only tracks the part somebody got a paycheck for. If a number that big can be left off the books this long, it says more about who writes the books than about the value of the work.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Doh De Oh · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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