“I feel like by staying at home I am not adding any value to the household”
How many stay at home mothers feel this way? I have definitely felt it. And society doesn’t help. All around us in the words that people use and the things that we read, mothers are under-valued for what they do. This is not healthy. Mothers bring up the next generation of human beings. A stay at home mother adds tremendous value in teaching a values system and providing psychological safety for a child. All this has implications for a child’s mental development and future outcomes in life.
Since I am a numbers person I decided to put some calculations against the economic value of a stay at home mother. The point of this exercise is to show the value of a SAHM and validate that career choice. It is a choice just like deciding to be a working mother is a choice. It is a valuable choice.
Methodology
Correction: An earlier version of this blog had a math error in the nanny salary calculation
Other people have estimated the salary of a SAHM before. In fact the most often cited one at Salary.com puts it at around $178K in 2019 dollars. I don’t disagree that SAHMs are worth a lot! I also appreciate the data that salary.com collects. However, when I looked at their methodology I don’t quite agree with it. They (to promote the use of their salary tool) took the average of a basket of jobs that reflect the tasks of a SAHM and calculated that as the salary.
I want to go about this a little differently. I’m going to try to replace the SAHM role by each of its components. SAHMs are expert multi-taskers. Part of this blog post aims to highlight the fact that SAHMs perform roles akin to multiple full time employees, and each of them needs to be valued. I also decided to add one more economic piece – taxes. If I were a full-time employer, I’m also going to at the very least pay for the employer side of employment tax which is 15.3%. It’s something we do not see in our salaries, but it’s something an employer would. So for example, if you hire a nanny full-time in the U.S., you do pay for the employment side of taxes. If your taxes pay for teachers, the school system pays their employment taxes. This is a very invisible tax, but it exists, and should be accounted for when we want to economically value the work of a SAHM.
I recognize it is difficult to define a salary when salaries range a lot in the U.S. due to different costs of living, so for many of the examples. I take the median (I prefer the median because it eliminates extreme outliers that can influence an average), and where I cannot find the median, I fall back on the average.
Here we go.
SAHM salary part 1: over-time nanny and night nurse
The primary role of a SAHM is childcare. Unlike a nanny, she is expected to do so around the clock, so her workload is greater than 40 hours a week. In fact, many children don’t sleep well at night. I know for the first 3 months of my child’s life I don’t quite remember sleeping through the night either, so not only is a SAHM a nanny, she is also a night nurse . In my methodology, I am solving for a SAHM of a relatively young child.
I found nanny salaries by state via ZipRecruiter and estimated a median of $31,184 – this assumed 5 working days a week. I divided this by 5, and then multiplied it by 5 + (2*1.5) to account for overtime pay on weekends, to arrive at a salary of $49,894 for the SAHM, who works all 7 days, for a year.
I assumed that this SAHM would be on night duty 1/4 of the year. That’s not an unreasonable assumption for an early child motherhood, and should be compensated for. Why not? If your job told you to suddenly get up and go work in the middle of the night, you’d probably get paid for that (either through hourly or through a higher salary than a day worker). Night nurse salaries were a bit tougher to find. This article on What to Expect puts a range of $18 – 30 an hour. The average of that is $24 an hour. At 12 hours a night, that’s $288 a night. For a full year of 365 nights, a night nurse would charge $105,120, and so for a quarter year, the night nurse portion is a salary of $26,280 for the quarter year.
SAHM salary part 2: the CFO-accountant of the household
Many SAHMs control the household spending (women drive 70-80% of all consumer spending decisions). A SAHM who can control spending and keep the household at a high savings rate, plays as equal a role in helping the family achieve financial independence, as the husband who brings in the paycheck. I have seen incredible SAHM come up with beautiful budgeting and tracking systems for everything that they do. You’re the CFO! But let’s be fair most CFOs are managing budgets in the millions, not 5 – 6 figures. So I looked up the salary of an accountant instead. ZipRecruiter once again has a source for average accountant salary by state. Using the median, I come up with a salary of: $51,853 a year.
SAHM salary part 3: Teacher
Not all SAHMs home-school their children, but many of them are very involved with their children’s education, often going to the point of tutoring and helping the children with homework. In my research I have found better research on the effects of this in European papers than American papers, but generally, there are findings that indicate that a parental emphasis on psychological and emotional support for education can help their children overcome disadvantages and become successful educationally, and that by being emotionally close to children, encouraging curiosity and discussing ideas as late as teenage years have an impact on literacy and later on, learning in higher education (research performed by Professor Hartas in the UK, source 1 and source 2). Let’s take the SAHM who does also take on the role of home-schooling. I took entry level teacher salaries from the National Education Association which were available by state. The median of these was $38,098 for the year.
SAHM salary part 4: Private chef and housekeeper
According to a study sponsored by Campbell, a mom spends 46 minutes a day cooking. That translates to 279 hours a year. A SAHM is not just a cook. She is a private chef! She cooks to match the tastes of her family and sometimes on quite short order to meet the demands of her hungry children. I used Indeed to look up the average hourly pay for a private chef, which pegs us at $23.99 / hr. Multiplied that by 279 hours a year, you get a value of $6,713.
According to the American Time Use Survey the average female spends 2.16 hours a day on household activities. Subtracting the 46 minutes spent on cooking, this means that we still have to account for 1.4 hours a day, 511 hours a year. The median wage for a housekeeper is $13 an hour according to Salary.com so I went ahead and used that, and arrived at a value of $6,643 a year.
Putting it altogether
Nanny: $49,894 for 7 days (2 of which are overtime), 365 days a year
Night duty: $26,280 for 1/4 of the year
Accountant: $51,853 for a year
Teacher: $38,098 for a year, starting salary
Private chef: $6,713,for 46 minutes a day, 365 days a year
Housekeeper: $6,643, for 1.4 hours a day, 365 days a year
Total before employer tax: $179,481 in annual salary alone
Multiply by 1.153 = $206,941 in average economic value generated by a SAHM’s role in any given year.
I know that SAHM don’t actually draw a salary. And that my analysis here is, at the end of the day, just an exercise in math. However, I hope that through this analysis, I can encourage all of you out there, who do not see any value in a SAHM’s work, to see things through this lens and recognize, that you do an incredible job.
