Memorandum
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- Derek Weston via Fortune | FORTUNE
- Date
- Filed
- Economy·5 min to read
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GAO Report Values Unpaid Household Labor at Up to $6 Trillion a Year, Excluded From GDP
ReGAO Report Values Unpaid Household Labor at Up to $6 Trillion a Year, Excluded From GDP
A Government Accountability Office report estimates unpaid household work is worth as much as $6 trillion annually, or one-fifth of GDP, and its absence from official statistics distorts measures of growth, living standards and productivity.
Unpaid household labor — the cooking, cleaning, caregiving and errands that keep American families running — is worth as much as $6 trillion a year, according to a September report from the Government Accountability Office. That figure equals roughly one-fifth of U.S. gross domestic product, yet none of it appears in the official economic statistics that shape policy debates and public perceptions of growth.
The reason is definitional. GDP measures the market value of goods and services exchanged for money. Because no paycheck changes hands for mopping floors, preparing meals or tending to children, those activities fall outside the national accounts. The GAO found that more than 87% of Americans age 15 and older performed some unpaid household work on a typical day, spending an average of 3.72 hours on those tasks.
Economists argue that excluding this output creates a distorted picture of how the economy is actually performing. Misty Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, told Fortune that without these activities, the formal economy could not function. If families stopped cooking and providing childcare themselves, much of that work would have to be purchased from the service sector, making survival more expensive and effectively reducing the value of wages earned in the formal labor market.
The omission also affects how economic growth is measured over time. When women's access to higher education and higher-paid jobs expanded in the 1960s, GDP recorded the gains of their entry into the workforce but did not account for the corresponding loss of household labor. According to economist Nancy Folbre, author of the book Making Care Work, this omission artificially boosted the economy's measured growth rate.
The GAO found evidence of that discrepancy in historical data. From 1965 through 2020, conventional GDP grew an average of 6.3% a year, while a separate measure from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that accounted for household labor showed average growth of 6.1%. The gap may appear small, but it compounds over decades and changes how well-off households appear on paper.
Folbre noted that a second paycheck technically raises total family income, but if working leaves less time for necessary tasks at home, families may spend some of that additional income replacing work they once did themselves. She said that looking at individual earnings or family income without accounting for unpaid work gives a misleading picture of relative living standards.
The burden of unpaid labor continues to fall disproportionately on women. The GAO found that 54% of people doing unpaid household work between 2021 and 2024 were women, and they spent more time than men caring for children. Despite more women out-earning male partners, they still perform twice the cooking and cleaning around the house compared with their lower-earning male partners.
Heggeness described the persistent imbalance as an invisible burden that requires women to multitask paid labor with meeting everyone's needs at home. She said the data often fail to capture this reality, which contributes to stress and burnout. Women who juggle breadwinning and home management face burnout at work at a rate of 48%, compared with 36% for their male colleagues.
Folbre cautioned that valuing unpaid labor in economic terms should not be read as encouraging women to return to the home. She said that however valuable unpaid work may be, it is disempowering when it is the only option, and that the goal should be to share the load more equitably.
The GAO report invites economists to rethink what efficiency means, according to Folbre. By counting activities such as cleaning and caregiving as part of workers' productivity, the concept broadens beyond job output alone. She said the productivity debate is heavily focused on what people do at the office, but the productivity of taking care of other people is also critically important.
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