The workday doesn’t end for millions of American workers when they clock out and go home—there are floors to mop, meals to prepare, and kids to tend to. There’s no paycheck for those chores that keep a household running, but a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report estimated the labor is worth up to $6 trillion a year, or one-fifth of GDP.
All that output isn’t counted in GDP because no money changes hands. Yet, over 87% of Americans age 15 and older did some unpaid household work on a typical day, according to GAO’s September report, spending an average of 3.72 hours on those tasks.
“Without those activities, we really wouldn’t have a functioning formal economy,” Misty Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, told Fortune. She said if families stopped cooking and providing childcare themselves, much of that work would have to be bought from the service economy instead.
“The value of the money that we make in our jobs would be reduced because it would be more expensive for us to survive,” she said, “because we would be looking at the formal labor market for those services.”
GDP counted one job, but not the other
One reason economists care about unpaid household labor is that it changes how economic growth looks over time. When women’s access to higher education and higher-paid jobs opened up in the 1960s, GDP recorded the gains of when women entered the workforce without accounting for the corresponding loss of household labor, which “artificially boosted” the economy’s growth rate, according to Nancy Folbre, an economist who wrote the book Making Care Work.
GAO found this discrepancy in historical data. From 1965 through 2020, conventional GDP grew an average of 6.3% a year, while a different measure from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that accounted for household labor showed that average growth was 6.1%.
That gap changes how well-off a household looks on paper. Folbre noted that a second paycheck technically raises total income for a family, but if working leaves less time to handle necessary tasks at home, families could spend some of that additional income replacing work they once did themselves.
“Just looking at individual earnings or family income without taking into account unpaid work just gives a very misleading picture of relative living standards,” she said.
Who still does the unpaid work
Unpaid labor historically fell on the shoulders of the women in the household, and the burden hasn’t disappeared. GAO found 54% of people doing unpaid household work between 2021 through 2024 were women, and they spent more time than men caring for children.
Despite more women starting to out-earn men, they still do twice the cooking and cleaning around the house compared to their lower-earning male partners.
“It is still predominantly the mother and women who are picking up the majority of this invisible burden of having to multitask their paid labor with making sure everybody’s needs in the household are met,” Heggeness said. “We’re not kept in the data, and then we wonder why are women today so stressed and frizzled.”
Women juggle being both the breadwinners and the home managers, and 48% face burnout at work compared to 36% for their male colleagues.
Folbre said valuing unpaid labor in economic terms should not be read as encouraging women to go back to the home, but rather as a way to help share the unpaid labor more equitably.
“It kind of tempts people to think it would be really great if we returned to the good old days, and I think that is really wrong, because however valuable that unpaid work might be, it’s very disempowering,” she added.
The GAO report invites economists to “rethink efficiency,” according to Folbre. By counting activities like cleaning and caregiving as part of workers’ productivity, the idea of efficiency broadens beyond just their job output.
“The whole productivity debate is so focused on the measurement of what people are doing at the office, but the productivity of taking care of other people is also really, really important,” she said.
