Emotional Labour Calculator

The calculator covers 10 specific roles: remembering everything, planning and scheduling, anticipating needs, decision fatigue, worry and risk assessment, social coordination, household project management, family relationship management, research, and the default-parent tax. Each gets a professional-equivalent hourly rate (admin work £16.50, household management £17.50, emotional support £50.00 in the UK) and a default of 8 hours a week per role. With all 10 roles ticked, that is 80 hours a week of mental load at an average rate of around £24, which is roughly £100,000 a year of work value. Most users adjust the hours down and land between £35,000 and £80,000.

This is not the value of being a parent; it is the value of the unseen, unpaid management work that mostly sits with one person in heterosexual households. The 2019 Allianz Care of the Family report found UK women carry 71 percent of the mental load even when they earn equally. The number is shocking because it should be; if your household genuinely splits this 50/50, the calculator will respect that and the partner-percentage slider lets you show it.

Decision fatigue ("what's for dinner?" times 365), worry and risk assessment (the 2am panic about whether they're breathing), and the default-parent tax (being the one the school always calls) consistently show up as the heaviest in the breakdown. Decision fatigue alone, at 8 hours a week and a £50 emotional-support rate, is £20,800 a year. That is a real number; it is also why mothers are 4 times more likely than fathers to report mental exhaustion in UK ONS surveys, and why "taking the mental load off" is genuinely meaningful when a partner remembers without being asked.

Edge case: single parents. The Single setting on the calculator removes the partner-percentage tab but does not change the role list, because the work is the same; it is just all on you. For separated and co-parenting families, run two separate calculations to see how the load actually splits in week-on-week-off arrangements; it usually surprises both parents.

Two ground rules. First, do the calculator together once, not as a gotcha. Sit down, talk through each of the 10 roles, agree the hours per week for each role honestly. Second, the goal is not 50/50 on every single role; it is ownership transfer on a few specific high-cost roles. "Will you fully own the family medical admin from now on - GP appointments, vaccinations, medicine cabinet?" is achievable. "Will you do exactly half of every emotional-labour task for the rest of our lives?" is not.

The calculator outputs a copy-to-clipboard summary you can text or post; most partners react more usefully to a number than to a feeling. Pair this with the [household task split](/household-task-split) tool which captures the physical work (cooking, cleaning, school runs) that sits alongside the mental load. The [stay at home mum calculator](/stay-at-home-mum-calculator) bundles both for parents who left paid work to do this full-time.