Excerpts
When economists track inequality, they typically focus on income and spending.
But a significant share of the services that families actually consume – meals cooked at home, child care, housecleaning and lawn mowing – is produced by unpaid labor that never appears in these conventional measures.
As economists who study caregiving and inequality, we wanted to know whether accounting for unpaid work at home might change our understanding of inequality in American living standards – the gap between what richer and poorer Americans can actually afford to consume.
To find out, we conducted a study, published in the March 2026 issue of the Journal of Public Economics, in which we estimated the dollar value of unpaid housework and child care and added it to standard measures of income and spending for U.S. households from 1965 to 2018. Economists call these broader measures “extended income” and “extended consumption.”
We found that unpaid work used to significantly cushion inequality through the provision of many services. But we also determined that this cushion has been thinning for 50 years. Our findings indicate that the inequality in living standards has grown more than standard data suggest.
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Lowest-income families hit hardest
We studied these shifts by combining three national datasets: time diary surveys from the American Heritage Time Use Study, income data from the Current Population Survey and expenditure data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
To put a dollar figure on unpaid work, we valued each hour at what U.S. housekeepers typically earn in a particular year.
The decline in unpaid work hit low-income households hardest – not because they cut more hours, but because unpaid work made up a much larger share of their total income.
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What it means
The roughly 20-percentage-point increase in the share of women working outside the home over the past six decades was driven by expanded opportunity and economic necessity.
It has brought enormous economic benefits to those women and their families. But it has also meant that families – especially those with the least income – lost a cushion of services that women used to do in their own homes.
Our findings suggest that looking only at changes in income and spending can exaggerate improvements in living standards for the lowest-income Americans over the past five decades.
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