Household Task Split Calculator

The split covers cooking, cleaning, laundry, food shopping, daytime childcare, night waking and bedtime, school runs, homework help, household admin (bills, appointments), DIY and maintenance, garden, pet care, social planning, emotional support for children, and emotional support for partner. Fifteen is the sweet spot: enough to surface the invisible categories (admin, social planning, emotional support) that often skew one way, but not so many that filling the form becomes a project. Each row takes hours per week per partner; total household time often lands between 60 and 100 hours combined.

Most households assume the split is closer to 50/50 than it actually is. The 2024 ONS Time Use Survey shows UK women still do 60 percent of household work and 71 percent of childcare on average. Putting real numbers in this tool, in front of the partner, reliably shifts the conversation from "I feel like I do more" to "the data says you do 71 percent." The framing message at the top of the tool is deliberate: this is for reflection and conversation, not blame.

Two cardinal rules. First, fill it in together at a calm time, not at 10pm on a Sunday after the third night of broken sleep. Second, the goal is not 50/50 on every row; it is balance overall plus ownership clarity on the rows that matter most to the lower-contributing partner. If one of you owns DIY end-to-end and the other owns school admin end-to-end, that is a fair split even if the hours are not equal, because both have full mental ownership of their domain. Hour balance plus role clarity beats raw equality on every line.

The colour bar at the top tells you what the system thinks. Within 30 percent of even is normal and healthy. Within 60 to 80 percent skewed flags as warning. Above 80 percent skewed flags as red, and almost certainly correlates with one partner heading for burnout within 12 months. The FTE (full-time equivalent) figure underneath translates the hours: 40 hours a week is 1.0 FTE, so a partner doing 60 hours a week of unpaid household work is doing 1.5 FTE, which is unsustainable indefinitely.

Three patterns show up most often. The Default Parent pattern: one partner takes 70 percent plus and feels invisible in the home; the fix is full ownership transfer of 2 or 3 specific roles (medical admin, social planning, food shopping) to the other partner, not vague "more help". The Dad-Does-Outdoor-Mum-Does-Indoor pattern: looks 50/50 in hours but the indoor work happens daily and the outdoor work weekly, so the cognitive load is uneven; the fix is to swap one weekly outdoor job for one daily indoor job. The New Baby Skew: temporary 80/20 in the first 6 months is normal; over 12 months unhealthy.

Edge case: divorced and co-parenting families. Run the tool for each household separately and compare; the partner who has the children Mon-Fri does not have a 50/50 split with the partner who has them weekend-only. The [emotional labour calculator](/emotional-labour-calculator) digs into the mental side of the load (10 specific cognitive roles); this tool sits alongside it and covers the physical work. The [stay at home mum calculator](/stay-at-home-mum-calculator) is the comparator for households where one parent stays home full-time.