How much should I pay my child for chores?

Price the job rather than the child. Commonly published US ranges give a workable scale: $0.50–1.00 per job at ages 5–7, $1.00–2.50 at 8–10, $2.00–5.00 at 11–12, $5.00–10.00 at 13–15 and $8.00–15.00 for the standing responsibilities a 16- or 17-year-old can take on unsupervised. Keep the whole paid list adding up to roughly one week's regular allowance, not several.

What is a good chore chart by age?

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests ages 5–7 can make beds, set and clear the table, sort laundry, feed a pet and water plants; ages 8–10 add vacuuming, dog walking, putting away their own laundry and helping with dinner; ages 11–12 add cleaning the kitchen, changing sheets, scrubbing the bathroom, washing the car and cooking a simple meal with supervision. Teenagers take on standing responsibilities rather than individual tasks.

Should kids be paid for chores at all?

Partly. Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s meta-analysis of 128 experiments found that paying people for a task reduces their willingness to do it unpaid, with a stronger effect in children than adults. The workable compromise is two lists: jobs that follow from living in the house — their own room, plate and laundry — stay unpaid, while optional jobs you would otherwise pay someone else to do are priced properly and available whenever your child wants to earn.

How much should I pay a 10-year-old for chores?

About $1.00–2.50 per paid job, on top of a small unconditional allowance. At ten, most of the chore list should still be unpaid: vacuuming, walking the dog, putting their own laundry away and helping with dinner are all within reach and all count as ordinary household membership rather than work.

How much should a teenager be paid for chores?

Roughly $5–10 per job at 13–15, and $8–15 at 16–17, where the jobs become standing responsibilities — the weekly shop, the whole yard — rather than one-off tasks. For reference, US parents surveyed by Talker Research in September 2025 paid an average of $13 for babysitting a sibling and $11 for yard work, which is a fair anchor for work a teenager can do properly and unsupervised.

Which chores should never be paid?

Anything that exists because your child lives in the house: their own room, their own plate, their own laundry, their own mess. Paying for these teaches a child to ask what it pays before clearing their bowl. Enforce them the ordinary way — the job still gets done and other things wait until it is — and keep money out of it entirely.

At what age should kids start doing chores?

Around three or four, long before any money is involved. Marty Rossmann’s University of Minnesota analysis found participation in household tasks at three or four was the best predictor of success in the mid-twenties, and that children who did not start until fifteen or sixteen fared worse than those who never had chores at all. Starting early matters more than starting well.

Do chores actually help children?

The evidence is reasonably strong. White, DeBoer and Scharf tracked 9,971 US children and found those who rarely did chores in kindergarten had significantly higher odds of scoring in the bottom fifth for academic self-perception, peer relationships, prosocial behaviour and life satisfaction three years later, independent of income and parental education. Chores at any frequency were also linked to better third-grade maths scores.

Is it better to pay per chore or give a flat allowance?

Both, in layers. A flat allowance gives your child a predictable amount to budget with, which per-chore pay cannot do because the income moves every week. Per-chore pay gives them a way to earn more when they want something. Run the allowance as the baseline and keep the paid chore list as an optional top-up on the side.

What if my child refuses to do their chores?

It depends which list the chore is on. Unpaid household jobs are not a financial matter — the job still needs doing, and normal household consequences apply. Paid jobs are optional by design, so a refusal simply means no payment. What to avoid is docking their regular allowance for unrelated behaviour, which turns a budgeting tool into a disciplinary one and stops it teaching anything about money.

← Blog

10 August 2026 · 13 min read

How Much to Pay Kids for Chores: A Chore Chart by Age

There is now real data on what American parents pay their children for — and the most useful thing in it is not the prices. It is the order they come in.

In September 2025, Talker Research asked 2,000 US parents of school-aged children what they hand money over for. Babysitting a sibling came top, at an average of $13. Vacuuming came last of the eight most common items, at $8. And sitting comfortably in between were two things that are not chores at all: good grades at $12, and being polite to guests at $10.

That ordering is the most instructive thing published on this subject, though not for the reason it was collected. A household paying $10 for good manners and $8 for vacuuming has told its child something precise and entirely unintended: that being pleasant is worth more than being useful. What follows is a chore chart by age with dollar rates, built on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ own list of what children can actually manage — and, more important than any rate on it, the rule about which jobs should never carry a price at all.

The chore chart by age

The chores in the first three age bands come from the AAP’s published guidance on age-appropriate responsibilities; the older bands extend the same pattern. Read the middle column first. The pay only makes sense once you have decided what is being bought.

Age	Chores they can genuinely own	Paid or unpaid	Rate per job if paid
5–7	Make the bed, set and clear the table, put dirty clothes in the hamper, feed a pet, water plants, sort laundry, bring in the post, empty wastebaskets	Almost all unpaid	$0.50–1.00 for a rare extra
8–10	Vacuum, walk the dog, put their own laundry away, help prepare dinner, put the shopping away, make their own snacks	Baseline unpaid, one or two paid	$1.00–2.50
11–12	Clean the kitchen, change bedsheets, unload the dishwasher, wash and fold laundry, scrub the bathroom, wash the car, cook a simple meal with supervision	Roughly half and half	$2.00–5.00
13–15	Everything above unsupervised, plus mowing, cooking a meal for the household, running a full laundry cycle start to finish	Mostly paid beyond the baseline	$5.00–10.00
16–17	Standing responsibilities rather than tasks — the weekly shop, the whole garden, a sibling pickup	Paid near a real rate	$8.00–15.00

A word on where those dollar figures come from. Nobody has published a measured price list for individual chores in the US — the Talker Research survey reports what parents pay for a whole category of behaviour, not a rate card — so the ranges above are the ones most consistently published by the allowance apps and family-finance desks, anchored to the American benchmark of roughly $1 to $1.50 per year of age per week in total allowance. Treat them as a sensible opening bid rather than an average.

What American parents actually pay for

This is the Talker Research data for Acorns Early, from 2,000 US parents surveyed between 22 and 29 September 2025. Read the right-hand column before the middle one.

What parents pay for	Average amount attached	Is it a chore?
Babysitting a sibling	$13	Yes — and a real job
Good grades	$12	No
Yard work	$11	Yes
Being polite to guests	$10	No
Helping clean the home	$10	Yes
Tidying their own room	$9	No — see below
Completing daily chores	$9	Yes
Vacuuming or sweeping	$8	Yes

Three of the eight things American families pay for are not work. Good grades are an outcome, not a job. Being polite to guests is a character expectation with a price tag stapled to it. Tidying their own room is the consequence of having a room. Together they take up more of the list than any category of actual household labour, which is the single clearest sign that most chore charts are not really chore charts at all — they are behaviour charts with money in them.

One genuine pattern does survive in the numbers, and it is worth building on. Harder, less pleasant, more skilled work pays more: babysitting and yard work sit at the top, sweeping at the bottom. The only large dataset anywhere that prices individual chores — a UK index drawn from more than half a million children — shows the same premium far more sharply, with mowing the lawn paying roughly twelve times what making a bed pays. A child who earns real money for mowing and pennies for straightening a duvet has learned something about pricing that will still be true when they are negotiating a salary. Nobody has to explain it. The rate sheet explains it.

For scale on the money moving through children’s hands: Greenlight’s in-app data put the average weekly allowance at $13.15 across ages 5 to 19 in 2025 — $6.18 at five, $8.53 at ten, $11.59 at thirteen and $21.47 at seventeen. Across more than 6.5 million US families, the company logged 73 million completed chores and $242 million in allowance earned in a single year. Chores are a meaningful slice of a child’s income, but only a slice.

Should children be paid for chores?

This is where most chore charts go wrong, and the research is genuinely uncomfortable for anyone who wants a simple answer.

Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 128 experiments on what happens when you pay people to do something they were already willing to do. Rewards contingent on simply doing a task reduced free-choice motivation to keep doing it, with an effect size of −0.40; rewards for completing a task, −0.36. The undermining effect was stronger in children than in college students. In plain terms: attach a price to helping, and helping without a price gets rarer.

That is the strongest argument against paying for chores, and it is a real one. But the opposite arrangement has its own cost. A child who is never paid for any work never discovers that effort converts into money, which is the one economic fact everything else is built on.

Most families end up in the middle, and so does the survey data. T. Rowe Price’s 2020 Parents, Kids & Money survey found 57% of US parents give an allowance their children have to earn, 32% give one with no requirements attached, and 11% give none. The useful move is not to pick a side but to split the chores in two, so that neither mechanism has to do a job it is bad at.

The two-list system

Write two lists and keep them physically separate. This single decision solves most of what goes wrong with chore charts.

List one: citizenship jobs, never paid

Anything that is the consequence of the child existing in the house. Their own plate, their own laundry, their own room, their own mess. These are not work; they are the cost of living somewhere with other people. Paying for them creates a child who asks what it pays before clearing their own bowl — which is exactly the outcome the Deci meta-analysis predicts.

School work belongs on this list too, for the same reason and with better evidence behind it — our look at whether to pay for good grades covers the randomised trials on that. The enforcement for this list is not financial either. It is the ordinary household kind: the job still gets done, and other things wait until it is.

List two: real jobs, genuinely paid

Anything you would plausibly pay an outsider to do, or that serves the whole household rather than the child. Mowing, washing the car, a full clean of a shared room, batch-cooking a meal, a garden clear-out. These should be optional, priced in advance, and available whenever the child wants more money. That last part is what makes the list valuable: a child who wants something can do something about it, which is a far better answer than a negotiation about raising their allowance.

Underneath both lists sits a small unconditional baseline — the regular allowance appropriate to their age. That money exists so there is always something predictable to budget with. Budgeting cannot be practised on an income that swings with how much lawn there was this week.

Why the chores matter more than the money

The strongest research here is not about payment at all. It is about whether the chores happen.

White, DeBoer and Scharf followed 9,971 American children through the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Parents reported how often their child did chores in kindergarten; three years later the children rated their own academic ability, peer relationships, prosocial behaviour and life satisfaction. Children who rarely did chores had markedly higher odds of landing in the bottom fifth on every one of those measures, independent of sex, family income and parental education. Doing chores at any frequency was also associated with better third-grade maths scores.

Marty Rossmann’s analysis at the University of Minnesota looked further out, tracking 84 children from preschool into their mid-twenties. The best predictor of success at twenty-five was participation in household tasks at three or four. The finding with the sharper edge is what happened at the other end: children who did not start until fifteen or sixteen did worse than those who never had chores at all. It is a small sample and one study, but the direction is worth taking seriously — chores introduced late read as a punishment, not a role.

Meanwhile the practice is quietly disappearing. A YouGov survey of 1,065 US parents for Whirlpool in March 2020 found 70% said their children regularly do chores, down from 79% in 1997, and 15% said it was not important to them at all. Braun Research found the gap even more starkly: 82% of American adults had regular chores growing up, but only 28% required them of their own children.

So the question “how much should I pay?” is downstream of a bigger one. A child doing three jobs a week for nothing is further ahead than a child doing none for $5.

Setting the rate without regretting it

Four rules keep a paid list from becoming expensive or absurd.

Price the job, not the child. Mowing the lawn is worth the same whether the nine-year-old or the fifteen-year-old does it. If a job is beyond a younger child, take it off their list rather than discounting it — a discounted rate teaches that their work is worth less, which is not the lesson.
Keep the whole paid list under the baseline. If every job on list two is completed in a week, the total should come to roughly what their regular allowance is, not several times it. Otherwise the allowance stops mattering and the household turns into a piece-rate employer.
Agree the price before the work. A rate negotiated afterwards is a negotiation about mood. A rate posted in advance is a contract, and a child who accepts it has agreed to something.
Round to money that exists. $1, $2, $5 — amounts a child can hold and count. Precision that only works on a screen removes the part where the money feels real.

Five ways chore charts fall apart

Too many jobs on the chart. A wall of fourteen tasks is abandoned by the second week. Three chores done every week beat eleven done once.
The parent keeps the record. If you are the one ticking boxes, the chart is your admin. The child should be the one marking the job done and the one saying what they are owed.
Paying late, or in a lump. Payment three weeks after the work severs the link the whole system exists to build. Pay on the same rhythm every time.
Moving jobs from list one to list two under protest. The moment tidying their own room becomes payable because they refused to do it free, every unpaid job on the chart is now open for renegotiation.
Docking the baseline as a punishment. Taking away allowance for an unrelated misbehaviour converts a budgeting tool into a disciplinary one. Unpaid work not done is a household matter; paid work not done simply is not paid.

When the money is earned, then what?

Being straight about this: CapKin does not do chore charts. There is no task list, no tick boxes, no per-job rates inside the app. If the chore-tracking loop is what you need, a paper chart on the fridge does it well and a dedicated chore app does it better.

What CapKin covers is the part that happens after the money has been handed over — which, going by the research above, is where the actual financial learning sits. A child keeps their own ledger of the money they receive, logs what they spend from it, and sets savings goals a parent can lock. Every entry a child makes is saved as pending until the household owner approves it, so nothing counts toward the family totals unreviewed, and the review itself turns into the weekly money conversation. There are no payment cards, no bank connections, no ads, and no push notifications or emails sent to children.

Alongside the pocket money tracking there is real teaching. Children aged 6–8 read Beaver Trails, a hand-written illustrated story course with read-aloud narration and gentle quizzes — two of six planned chapters are published. Ages 8–12 get one money discovery a day and a weekly three-question quiz drawn from what they were shown. The CapKin for kids page walks through it age by age, and older teenagers can move up to running a real monthly budget of their own.

If you are still deciding when any of this should start, our age-by-age guide to teaching kids about money covers the research on why the early primary years carry more weight than most parents expect — the same years Rossmann’s data points at. And once the money is in their hands, teaching them to save it is a separate skill with its own evidence base.

Track what your child earns and spendsFree during beta · No card · No bank connection

Sources

Talker Research for Acorns Early. Survey of 2,000 US parents of school-aged children, 22–29 September 2025.
Greenlight. Average allowance by age, 2025 in-app data; Greenlight Glimmers annual family trends report, December 2025 (6.5 million+ US families).
NatWest Rooster Money. Pocket Money Index 2026 (10th annual edition, data 1 March 2025 – 28 February 2026, 500,000+ Rooster Card users), published 30 June 2026 — cited here only for the relative pay gap between chores, not for US rates.
White, E. M., DeBoer, M. D., & Scharf, R. J. (2019). Associations Between Household Chores and Childhood Self-Competency. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 40(3), 176–182. Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten 2011 cohort, 9,971 children.
Rossmann, M. (2002). Involving Children in Household Tasks: Is It Worth the Effort? University of Minnesota, analysis of a longitudinal study of 84 children from preschool to their mid-twenties.
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668.
YouGov for Whirlpool. Survey of 1,065 US parents of children aged 2–18, fielded 24–27 March 2020, margin of error ±3.1%. 1997 comparison from Hofferth, International Journal of Time Use Research, 2009.
Braun Research (2014). Survey of 1,001 US adults on childhood and current household chores.
T. Rowe Price. 12th Annual Parents, Kids & Money Survey, 2020.
American Academy of Pediatrics. Age-Appropriate Chores for Children, HealthyChildren.org.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I pay my child for chores?: Price the job rather than the child. Commonly published US ranges give a workable scale: $0.50–1.00 per job at ages 5–7, $1.00–2.50 at 8–10, $2.00–5.00 at 11–12, $5.00–10.00 at 13–15 and $8.00–15.00 for the standing responsibilities a 16- or 17-year-old can take on unsupervised. Keep the whole paid list adding up to roughly one week's regular allowance, not several.
What is a good chore chart by age?: The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests ages 5–7 can make beds, set and clear the table, sort laundry, feed a pet and water plants; ages 8–10 add vacuuming, dog walking, putting away their own laundry and helping with dinner; ages 11–12 add cleaning the kitchen, changing sheets, scrubbing the bathroom, washing the car and cooking a simple meal with supervision. Teenagers take on standing responsibilities rather than individual tasks.
Should kids be paid for chores at all?: Partly. Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s meta-analysis of 128 experiments found that paying people for a task reduces their willingness to do it unpaid, with a stronger effect in children than adults. The workable compromise is two lists: jobs that follow from living in the house — their own room, plate and laundry — stay unpaid, while optional jobs you would otherwise pay someone else to do are priced properly and available whenever your child wants to earn.
How much should I pay a 10-year-old for chores?: About $1.00–2.50 per paid job, on top of a small unconditional allowance. At ten, most of the chore list should still be unpaid: vacuuming, walking the dog, putting their own laundry away and helping with dinner are all within reach and all count as ordinary household membership rather than work.
How much should a teenager be paid for chores?: Roughly $5–10 per job at 13–15, and $8–15 at 16–17, where the jobs become standing responsibilities — the weekly shop, the whole yard — rather than one-off tasks. For reference, US parents surveyed by Talker Research in September 2025 paid an average of $13 for babysitting a sibling and $11 for yard work, which is a fair anchor for work a teenager can do properly and unsupervised.
Which chores should never be paid?: Anything that exists because your child lives in the house: their own room, their own plate, their own laundry, their own mess. Paying for these teaches a child to ask what it pays before clearing their bowl. Enforce them the ordinary way — the job still gets done and other things wait until it is — and keep money out of it entirely.
At what age should kids start doing chores?: Around three or four, long before any money is involved. Marty Rossmann’s University of Minnesota analysis found participation in household tasks at three or four was the best predictor of success in the mid-twenties, and that children who did not start until fifteen or sixteen fared worse than those who never had chores at all. Starting early matters more than starting well.
Do chores actually help children?: The evidence is reasonably strong. White, DeBoer and Scharf tracked 9,971 US children and found those who rarely did chores in kindergarten had significantly higher odds of scoring in the bottom fifth for academic self-perception, peer relationships, prosocial behaviour and life satisfaction three years later, independent of income and parental education. Chores at any frequency were also linked to better third-grade maths scores.
Is it better to pay per chore or give a flat allowance?: Both, in layers. A flat allowance gives your child a predictable amount to budget with, which per-chore pay cannot do because the income moves every week. Per-chore pay gives them a way to earn more when they want something. Run the allowance as the baseline and keep the paid chore list as an optional top-up on the side.
What if my child refuses to do their chores?: It depends which list the chore is on. Unpaid household jobs are not a financial matter — the job still needs doing, and normal household consequences apply. Paid jobs are optional by design, so a refusal simply means no payment. What to avoid is docking their regular allowance for unrelated behaviour, which turns a budgeting tool into a disciplinary one and stops it teaching anything about money.