Stay-at-Home Mum Salary Calculator

Add up the going rate for what a stay-at-home mum does in a typical week (childcare at nanny rates, cooking at chef rates, cleaning, tutoring, driving, household management, night care, emotional support and the rest) and the annual figure usually lands between £55,000 and £85,000 in the UK, depending on how many children, how young they are, and where you live. London nannies command £14 to £18 per hour gross. Outside London the going rate is closer to £11 to £14. Most stay-at-home mums work 80 to 100 hours a week across these roles.

These numbers are not designed to win an argument with your partner. They exist because the work is invisible in GDP statistics and on tax returns, and seeing it priced makes the trade-off concrete. If you went back to work and paid for the same hours, this is what it would cost. The figure is also a useful gut-check when a partner asks 'what do you actually do all day' and you have not had the energy to count.

Statutory Maternity Pay in the UK runs for 39 weeks: 90% of average earnings for the first 6 weeks, then £187.18 per week (or 90% of earnings if lower) for the remaining 33 weeks, with the final 13 weeks of leave unpaid. Maternity Allowance covers self-employed mothers at the same flat rate. By month 9 most mothers are deciding whether to return at full hours, return part time, or stop work entirely.

The 30 hours of free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds (extended to younger ages from September 2024 for working parents earning between £9,518 and £100,000 each) makes a significant difference, but only for term time and only if the parent meets the work requirement. Tax-Free Childcare adds £2 for every £8 you put in, capped at £2,000 per child per year. The arithmetic of returning to work full time often comes down to whether your post-tax salary clears the cost of full-time nursery, which in London routinely costs £1,800 to £2,400 per month per child.

It misses the pension you are not building (a year out of work in your 30s typically costs £15,000 to £30,000 of compounded retirement income by age 67), the National Insurance contributions you would otherwise be paying, and the career compounding effect where every year out lowers your re-entry salary. Specified Adult Childcare Credits help if grandparents are caring for under-12s while you work, but there is no equivalent credit for the parent at home.

It also misses the upside that no spreadsheet captures: being there for the school run, knowing your child's friends' parents, catching the developmental wobble that a nursery key worker would not have spotted. None of that is monetised, and that is fine; the point of this tool is to make visible what was invisible, not to argue that childcare is purely transactional. The [emotional labour calculator](/emotional-labour-calculator) and [household task split](/household-task-split) tools cover the parts of the load that look smaller individually but compound over years.