When economists track inequality, they typically focus on income and spending.
But a significant share of the services that families actually consume – meals cooked at home, child care, housecleaning and lawn mowing – is produced by unpaid labor that never appears in these conventional measures.
As economists who study caregiving and inequality, we wanted to know whether accounting for unpaid work at home might change our understanding of inequality in American living standards – the gap between what richer and poorer Americans can actually afford to consume.
To find out, we conducted a study, published in the March 2026 issue of the Journal of Public Economics, in which we estimated the dollar value of unpaid housework and child care and added it to standard measures of income and spending for U.S. households from 1965 to 2018. Economists call these broader measures “extended income” and “extended consumption.”
We found that unpaid work used to significantly cushion inequality through the provision of many services. But we also determined that this cushion has been thinning for 50 years. Our findings indicate that the inequality in living standards has grown more than standard data suggest.
Counting unpaid work reduces inequality
To visualize these findings, consider the financial situation faced by two families.
While both have two adults and two children, their income from their salaries and other cash flows – including everything from stock dividends to Social Security benefits – is different. One has two earners bringing in a total of US$150,000. The other has a single breadwinner making $110,000 and a stay-at-home spouse. The lower-income family gets 45 more hours per week of unpaid chores done.
If every hour of those chores were worth $17, the typical wage for a housekeeper, that unpaid work would be worth roughly $39,780 a year. Factor it in, and the gap between the two families shrinks from $40,000 to just $220.
Extended income, the economic term that includes not just what’s in your paycheck but the value of doing the laundry, home repairs and other unpaid work yourself for your own benefit, tends to be more equally distributed than earned income.
The reason for this consistency is straightforward: Rich and poor families generally devote about the same amount of time to housework and child care.
A shrinking buffer
Because we valued everyone’s unpaid hours at the same wage in our study, adding unpaid work to income narrowed the gap between the top and the bottom somewhat.
But we also found evidence that this equalizing effect is eroding.
Between 1965 and 2018, the average amount of time that Americans devoted to unpaid chores at home fell, driven by changes in what women did. Their average number of hours fell from 37 to 24 per week. Meanwhile, men increased the time they spent on unpaid chores a little: Their number of weekly unpaid hours of work rose from 12 in 1968 to 15 in 2018.
To be clear, we did not try to figure out why these hours of unpaid work fell. Among the many reasons for the change could be the large increase in women’s employment and the growth of time-saving technology, such as dishwashers.
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Lowest-income families hit hardest
We studied these shifts by combining three national datasets: time diary surveys from the American Heritage Time Use Study, income data from the Current Population Survey and expenditure data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
To put a dollar figure on unpaid work, we valued each hour at what U.S. housekeepers typically earn in a particular year.
The decline in unpaid work hit low-income households hardest – not because they cut more hours, but because unpaid work made up a much larger share of their total income.
We found that the income gap between households near the top and those near the bottom between 1965 and 2018 grew around 40% using conventional measures. Once we added unpaid work, this gap grew by 66%. For household spending, the contrast is similar: conventional inequality barely budged – up 4%. When we incorporated the value of unpaid work at home, inequality grew by 18%.
Overall, we determined that a typical U.S. family’s extended income grew 40% from 1965 to 2018. That was a much slower pace than the 69% growth in the income they earned from their paid work and other cash flows over the same period.
Who lost the most
Conventional data suggest that the gap between middle-income and poor households was generally stable during this period. Once we accounted for unpaid work, however, that is no longer true: This gap grew substantially.
Single-parent families – mostly headed by single mothers – were hit especially hard. Their income from paid employment rose sharply, but this came with large declines in the value of their unpaid work at home.
While they could afford to spend more on purchased goods and services, once unpaid work is factored in, single parents saw no net improvement relative to married parents.
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What it means
The roughly 20-percentage-point increase in the share of women working outside the home over the past six decades was driven by expanded opportunity and economic necessity.
It has brought enormous economic benefits to those women and their families. But it has also meant that families – especially those with the least income – lost a cushion of services that women used to do in their own homes.
Our findings suggest that looking only at changes in income and spending can exaggerate improvements in living standards for the lowest-income Americans over the past five decades.
When you do fewer hours of chores that need to be done, you wind up paying other people to do them for you, and that costs money.
Otherwise, you have to make do with fewer services than you had before.