Parent Salary Calculator USA: Discover How Much You Should Earn for Parenting

Last updated: February 17th, 2025 Published on: April 1, 2019

If you got paid for the laundry list of responsibilities that comes with parenting, from chauffeuring to cheffing, what might your parent salary be?

If you’re curious, give our Parent Salary Calculator a go and see what you could (and should) be earning for all your extra effort. Discover the cash value of your parenting duties, so you can appreciate the hard work it takes to keep a family going.

Our Master Methodology

You might be wondering, how does a parent salary calculator work? We identified eight essential tasks for any household and found the closest professional equivalent of that task to estimate the value of the time spent on each one.

Next, we gathered wage and salary data for these eight jobs (from a 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.

This allowed us to estimate the parent salary of a working or stay at home mum/dad salary. For those full-time homemakers, it’s possible that your house parent salary could be quite competitive.

How Our Parents’ Salary Estimator Works: Examples

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!

Input your estimates and see just how valuable all your hard work really is.

Tasks/jobs listed include:

Cooking => Chef

Cleaning => Cleaner

Driving => Taxi Driver

Teaching => Teacher

Organising => Personal Assistant

Washing => Launderette

Physical Health => Nurse

Mental Health => Psychologist

Grown Up Kids – Take Note

If you’re a bit older and have realises what your parents have done for you over the years or want to find the best gift for parents from your first salary, check out our Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards ahead of these special occasions – or maybe send them one of our thank you gifts. You can also get ideas using our helpful Father’s Day and Mother’s Day gift guides.

Of course, whether you tell your parents your salary is up to you. Those wondering ‘should I tell my parents my salary?’ can consider how the information will be used and the level of openness in their relationship with their parents.

But we think parents certainly deserve some appreciation for all their years of unpaid parenting.