How Much Is a Stay-at-Home Mom Worth?
Her hours, her kids' ages, and her area's wages — not a national guess.
By Jessica Winkler · Published by Digital Simplicity LLC · Last updated September 16, 2026
There's no replacing mom for any amount of money. Asking how much a stay-at-home mom is worth tries to put a number on something that's genuinely incalculable — time with your kids you'll never get back, the care that runs a home, the work and the rewards that come with it. Still, this can give you real insight into the dollar value of some of what you're doing: personalized to your hours, your kids' ages, and where you live.
Method
How this is calculated
Market replacement value here means one thing: what it would cost to pay someone else, at real market wages, to do the unpaid work you're doing — priced task by task, using your own hours instead of a national guess.
The model prices three roles: childcare (SOC code 39-9011), cooking in a private household (35-2013), and housekeeping (37-2012). Hours per role start from BLS American Time Use Survey data for people who aren't employed, using the figures for men and women combined, since this calculator has no gender input. Every hour is editable — these are starting points, not fixed answers.
Only primary activity time counts. ATUS also tracks secondary childcare — a child in your care while you do something else — and adding that on top of housework and cooking would bill the same hour twice. That's the single biggest reason this total runs lower than the published salary figures: they price several full-time jobs running in parallel; this prices measured time once.
Wages come from BLS OEWS, May 2025, localized to your metro where one is published, your state where it isn't, and the national rate as a last resort. Cooking wages don't publish below the national level outside New York, so most users see a national rate on that one line — labeled as such, not hidden.
Every line rounds to the cent before the lines are added, so what you see adds up exactly.
Sources
- BLS American Time Use Survey, Table 8C, "Time spent in primary activities ... by presence and age of youngest household child and sex, 2025 annual averages," not employed rows, combined-sex column.
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 annual release. National, state, and metro bulk files.
The published numbers
Why the published figures don't match yours
The published numbers don't agree with each other, and neither will match what this calculator returns for you.
Insure.com's 2025 Mother's Day Index puts a mother's unpaid work at $145,235 a year, pricing nineteen job categories — cook, chauffeur, laundry worker, elementary school teacher — as if she worked all of them at once. Investopedia cites a 2019 Salary.com figure of $178,201 for what's sometimes called a homemaker salary, then runs its own math to a higher number still: over $215,000. None of them uses your hours, your kids' ages or where you live.
This calculator doesn't do that. It prices three roles — childcare, cooking, and housekeeping — at the hours people in your situation report spending on each, counted once, never twice. That's why the default lands around $48,000 to $53,000: lower than any of the published figures, because each hour is counted once.
There isn't a financial decision sitting behind this number, and the arithmetic won't tell you where to spend less time. What it can do is point at where paying for a little of it back might be worth it. When I was working full time, occasional cleaning help — every two weeks some months, once a month in others — was the trade that felt worth making.
The hourly rate
A reasonable hourly wage for a stay-at-home mom
There's no single hourly wage for a stay-at-home mom, because you aren't doing one job. This calculator prices three, each at its own rate.
Nationally, BLS puts childcare work (SOC 39-9011) at $16.84 an hour, private household cooking (35-2013) at $25.81, and housekeeping (37-2012) at $17.83. The wage data covers the job, not who does it, so the rates are the same whether a mother or a father is home.
Your own rates can differ from these: BLS localizes wages down to the metro level for two of the three roles, and your specific state and metro rates are already in the table above. Cooking is the exception — it's a small, thin occupation in the wage data, and it publishes at the national rate for nearly everyone outside New York, so that one line runs the same no matter where you live.
A reasonable hourly wage, in other words, is whatever the market actually pays for that specific work where you live — not one flat number applied everywhere.
Limits
What this calculator doesn't include
- Gender input. No figure exists that would change the result by gender, and the wage data covers the job, not who does it.
- Household management, the "family CEO" work. No single occupation's wage fits it, so it isn't priced.
- Opportunity-cost or lost-wage math. What quitting or cutting back costs in lost pay, lost raises and lost retirement is a different question, answered by the Stay-at-Home Parent Cost Calculator.
- Employer or payroll-tax treatment of hired help. Hiring a nanny or housekeeper for real brings payroll taxes — that's the Nanny vs. Daycare Calculator's territory, not this one.
- A general cost-of-living adjustment. Only the OEWS wage localization applies — no separate multiplier for how expensive your area is generally, just what these three jobs pay where you live.
- Driver and tutor time. Driving time is already folded into the childcare hours above — ATUS counts travel inside the activity it's for, so pricing it again would double it. Tutoring time isn't broken out separately in this model's data.
- Secondary childcare. Time spent supervising a child while doing something else isn't counted on top of the primary activities above — see how this is calculated.
- Non-US locations, inflation adjustment, or multi-year projections. This is one year, in current dollars, for a US household.
- Help already partly paid for. If you already have a nanny or a private tutor on payroll, this model assumes none of that. It's pricing fully unpaid labor, not topping off help you're already paying for.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
How much is being a stay-at-home mom worth?
Published estimates run from $145,235 (Insure.com's 2025 Mother's Day Index) to $215,000 (Investopedia's own total), and they don't agree with each other. Investopedia also cites a 2019 Salary.com figure of $178,201. Each prices its own set of tasks at national wages. None of them uses your hours, your kids' ages or your area's pay, and this calculator does.
What is the actual yearly value of being a stay-at-home parent?
At national wages and default hours, about $42,675 a year with a youngest child under 6, and $46,985 with a youngest child 6 to 17. That prices three roles, childcare, cooking and housework, at their national hourly rates, counting each measured hour once. Your own figure swaps in your metro or state wages and your own hours, so it can land above or below these.
What's a reasonable hourly wage for a stay-at-home mom?
Nationally, $16.84 an hour for childcare, $25.81 for cooking and $17.83 for housework, per federal wage data for those three jobs. There's no single wage, because the work is three jobs, each paid differently. The table above shows the rates where you live, and cooking stays at the national rate outside New York.
Is the stay-at-home mom "salary" figure real?
No — it's a replacement-cost estimate: what it would cost to hire someone else to do the work, not a wage you're owed or a check anyone's cutting. The work itself, raising kids and running a home, isn't something a dollar figure captures anyway. Treat any stay-at-home mom salary number as a curiosity, not proof of anything.
What should the salary of a stay-at-home mom be?
There isn't one figure — whatever your own hours and local rates add up to, not a flat number like $145,235 for every mother. Published averages price a hypothetical mother doing a fixed set of tasks nationally; real households differ by hours worked, children's ages, and where they live. This calculator exists to answer the specific version of the question instead of the generic one.
Why is the number higher when my youngest is older?
It's not a bug: in federal time-use data, parents whose youngest is 6 to 17 report more housework, cooking and childcare time than parents of under-6s. Housework goes from 1.11 to 1.27 hours a day, cooking from 1.61 to 1.82, and childcare from 3.30 to 3.51. The calculator loads those as starting values when you pick the older band, and every one is still yours to change.
Does this calculator say stay-at-home moms should be paid this?
No — this tool computes what replacing your work would cost, not who should pay for it. Whether a spouse, an employer or the government should cover any part of that cost is a policy question this calculator has no position on. What it returns is a market replacement value: the wages it would take to hire out the roles you're doing, priced at your local rates. That number doesn't change based on who, if anyone, ever pays it.
Related
Related tools
That page prices what leaving the workforce costs in lost income and lost retirement. This one prices what your unpaid work would cost to hire out — two different questions with two different answers. Stay-at-Home Parent Cost Calculator
For the month-to-month version of the money question, what a second income is actually worth after childcare and taxes runs that instead.
If you're weighing hiring some of this out for real, Nanny vs. Daycare Calculator prices a nanny against daycare, payroll taxes included.