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Parent Salary Guide Australia: Discover How Much You Should Earn for Parenting

Last updated: February 17th, 2025 Published on: March 29, 2019

Raising a family is a full-time job but imagine if you got paid for all those extra parental responsibilities. Parents juggle heaps of extra daily tasks, from playing chauffeur to whipping up meals and everything else that pops up. But have you ever thought about what your “parenting pay” would look like if you got a wage for all that hustle?

If you’re curious, give our parent salary checker a try to see what you could (and should) be earning. Discover the cash value of various parenting duties, so you can appreciate just how much hard work it takes to keep family life ticking along.

Go on – Give Our Parent Salary Checker for Australia a Whirl

You’re just seconds away from benchmarking your salary against professional roles. And it spins way faster than the washing machine.

We identified eight tasks that parents spend their time doing for their kids and found the salaries of the closest variations of the tasks in the workplace.

We gathered wage and salary data for these eight jobs (from an Aussie jobs site) and did so for 1,000 towns and cities.

So, when you enter your weekly hours into the tool, we convert them into yearly salaries for each of these jobs. Finally, we add everything up to give you a total yearly #ParentSalary.

As an example, if you spend seven hours per week cooking for your child, then over the 52 weeks of a year you’d spend a total of 364 hours cooking. And if the average wage for a chef in your town is $20 per hour, then the estimated salary for that one job alone would be $7,280! If you combined all the tasks mum takes care of on a daily basis, the average annual salary in Australia for a stay at home mum (or dad) would actually be pretty competitive – if only!

Input your estimates and see just how valuable all your hard work really is, and don’t be shy to share your findings on social media.

Tasks/jobs listed include:

Cooking => Chef

Cleaning => Cleaner

Driving => Taxi Driver

Teaching => Teacher

Organising => Personal Assistant

Washing => Launderette

Physical Health => Nurse

Mental Health => Psychologist

Study Finds Stay-at-Home Mums deserve a pay raise

Don’t take our word for it. A study found more than 200 mothers work an average of 98 hours a week at home – the equivalent two and a half full-time jobs.¹ This was completing tasks from educating to executive housekeeping.

Mums with kids between five and 12 years “clocked in” at 6:23 a.m. and “clocked out” at 8:31 pm.

The conclusion: a pay rise (or at least some pay) is deserved.

Giving Back to Parents

Show your parents the appreciation they deserve for all they do. Check out our Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards, or even send one of our thank you gifts. You can also get ideas for gifts using our helpful Father’s Day and Mother’s Day gift guides.