Housework isn’t just about what gets done. It’s about who does it, and how often. Between the dishes, the laundry, the dust bunnies and the ever-returning to-do list, the upkeep required to keep a home running isn’t always a clean divide: Across the United States, men and women still spend their time differently at home.
Some of that gap has narrowed over the years, but not by as much as you might think, and not in the same ways across every task. New data from the Pew Research Center takes a closer look at how those hours break down, tracking how much time men and women spend on housework each day. And no, it doesn’t all come out in the wash.
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How did Pew researchers determine time spent doing housework?
To get a clear picture of daily life, researchers at Pew analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a long-running dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that tracks how Americans spend their time over a 24-hour period. Participants log everything from paid work to child care to chores, creating one of the most detailed portraits of daily routines available.
What is housework? In this case, it includes tasks like cleaning, cooking, laundry, yard work and household management. While the data is self-reported, it’s widely considered a gold standard for time-use research because it captures behavior in real time rather than relying on memory or perception.
Pew averaged data from the three most recent ATUS surveys (2022, 2023 and 2024). One important nuance: The survey captures a single day in the lives of participants. But when aggregated across thousands of people, consistent patterns emerge. For example, recent data shows that, on any given day, 86% of women and 71% of men report doing some form of household work—and that’s before you even start the clock on individual tasks.
How much time do American men and women spend doing housework?
The short answer: Women still do more—and by a meaningful margin. On average, women spend 2 hours 19 minutes per day doing housework, while men spend 1 hour and 34 minutes, according to Pew.
While that gender gap has narrowed over the years, it hasn’t disappeared, and it’s a statistically significant difference that adds up to several extra weeks of unpaid labor for women a year. Long-term research shows the ratio of women’s to men’s housework has gone from roughly 1.8-to-1 in the early 2000s to about 1.6-to-1 today, so it remains persistent.
Some of the imbalance comes down to longstanding expectations around gender roles. Even as women’s participation in the workforce has increased dramatically, their share of unpaid labor at home has not declined at the same rate. Research shows that women still spend more time on housework and caregiving, while men spend more time on leisure activities.
There’s also a broader time gap at play. Research from the Gender Equity Policy Institute finds that women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on child care and household work, which results in women having 13% less free time than men. Unpaid labor has real economic value as well. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that unpaid care and household work performed by women alone amounts to roughly $10 trillion globally each year—about 13% of global GDP.
In other words, it’s not just about who does the dishes tonight. It’s about who keeps coming back to them day after day.
How does housework differ across generations?
Younger men are doing more housework than previous generations, marking a shift that researchers have tracked steadily over the past two decades. In fact, the gap in core tasks like cooking and cleaning has shrunk by roughly 40% since the early 2000s, driven largely by men increasing their participation, according to a recent report in Science News.
But even among younger groups, the balance isn’t equal. Traditional roles established decades ago often remain in place, and women still spend more time on chores overall, according to the Pew report. Here’s how the data shakes out by age:
- 20s: Women (1:43), Men (1:02)
- 30s: Women (2:17), Men (1:25)
- 40s: Women (2:21), Men (1:29)
- 50s: Women (2:30), Men (1:41)
- 60s: Women (2:49), Men (2:05)
- 70s: Women (2:53), Men (2:15)
Interestingly, time-use data also shows that younger women are doing less housework than women in previous generations, but not enough to fully offset the imbalance.
What counts as “housework,” and what doesn’t?
Not all chores are created equal, and not all are distributed the same way. Studies like Pew’s consistently find that men and women tend to take on different types of tasks. Men are more likely to handle intermittent or outdoor work, like yard maintenance, home repairs or car care. Women, meanwhile, are more often responsible for daily, recurring chores like cooking, cleaning and laundry.
And as seen in the ATUS data, those daily tasks add up quickly: Women spend nearly twice the amount of time on food preparation and cleanup than men—about 52 minutes per day versus 28 minutes—and nearly three times the number of minutes doing laundry (14 minutes a day versus 5 minutes).
There’s also the question of “invisible labor,” which means the planning, remembering and staying one step ahead of what needs to be done next. While harder to measure, studies suggest women are more likely to carry that mental load as well, from tracking grocery lists to scheduling appointments.
Why does this even matter?
Most people don’t think of housework in terms of hours. It’s just part of the day that gets folded in alongside everything else. But if you want to better divvy up household chores—or highlight the invisible labor you do—this breakdown can help. Put numbers to it, and it stops feeling invisible. The work has always been there. The difference is seeing it.
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Sources:
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: “American Time Use Survey”
- Pew Research Center: “How Do U.S. Men and Women Spend Their Time?”
- Socius: “Who’s Doing the Housework and Childcare in America Now? Differential Convergence in Twenty-First-Century Gender Gaps in Home Tasks”
- Gender Equity Policy Institute: “The Free-Time Gender Gap”
- Science News: “Married men are doing more cleaning and laundry than in the past”
- Pew Research Center: “Among U.S. couples, women do more cooking and grocery shopping than men”
- McKinsey: “For mothers in the workplace, a year (and counting) like no other”
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