Relationships

Chore Fairness Planner

Household arguments about chores fail on the numbers. Somebody washes the dishes every day for a total of one and three quarter hours a week, somebody else takes the car to the recycling point on Friday, and the person doing the mental work of remembering the dentist appointment is not in the spreadsheet at all, so the spreadsheet says everything is fine. The Chore Fairness Planner puts all of it in one set of comparable hours. You enter the visible hours for each adult, the itemised tasks for a third household member, the care and driving hours, and a rating of the mental load you carry. The tool then weights each task for difficulty, converts the mental load into hours using a stated rate, splits the household load three ways, shows the gap in hours both before and after the invisible work is counted, and finishes with three moves that would change the numbers and a rotation to try for a week. It describes work and hours only. It does not judge anybody.

People in the household

people

Person A visible chores per week

The person filling in this form is Person A

Person B visible chores per week

Count every recurring job: cooking, cleaning, laundry, errands

Person C tasks, one per line

Format: task name : hours each time : times a week

Your invisible labour load

1 to 5

1 is almost none, 5 is constant mental load: planning, remembering, noticing

Care, driving and errands per week

School runs, appointments, shopping, driving the family around

Notes in your own words

Anything the hours do not capture

Result

How to use it

STEP 1

How to use this planner: enter the visible chore hours for each adult as a weekly total, counting every recurring job rather than only the big ones. A weekly total of 11 for Person B might be 3 hours of cooking, 2 of cleaning, 2 of laundry, 2 of errands and 2 of repairs, and the split does not matter as long as the total is honest.

STEP 2

List the third person tasks one per line in the format task name : hours each time : times a week. The frequency is what makes the tool useful, because a task done seven times at a quarter of an hour is 1.75 hours a week, and a task done once at 2 hours is 2 hours a week. Without the frequency column those two look identical on paper.

STEP 3

Rate the invisible labour on the 1 to 5 scale as the person who did the remembering that week: meal planning, birthdays, appointments, refills, whose turn it is. Rate the week you actually had, not the week you plan to have. The scale is converted at a stated rate so that the score becomes hours you can put in a row next to the dishes.

STEP 4

Read the two gaps rather than the three shares. The visible gap compares the two chore columns on their own, and the total gap compares them once care and mental load are counted. When the first is wide and the second is narrow, the story is different from the one the first number tells.

Three common mistakes

The most common mistake is counting only the jobs you would call chores. Cooking, cleaning, laundry and the shopping get counted, and the school run, the birthday card, the reminder about the boiler service and the pharmacy on a Saturday do not. Those last ones are hours too, and they are exactly the hours the care and driving box and the invisible labour score exist for.
Another common mistake is filling in the weeks you want rather than the weeks you had. People tend to under-report chores and under-rate mental load in the same direction, so the two errors cancel out and the tool reports a comfortable balance that does not exist. The fix is not more effort, it is one ordinary week: the one with the broken dishwasher and the school inset day.
Watch out for treating the percentages as a verdict on a person. The shares describe how the hours fell in one household in one week, and every number on the page is entered by one person from one side. There is no column here that says someone is doing enough, because hours cannot say that. If a number feels like an accusation, the fix is to talk about the task, not the share.
Do not read the invisible labour conversion as a measurement. Half an hour a week plus an hour per point is an agreed convention, not a researched figure, and its whole purpose is to make the number arguable. If you and your partner disagree about the score, argue about the score and rerun the page; that disagreement is the useful part.

How the hours are turned into comparable shares

Three different kinds of work end up in the same row, and each one needs a rule before it can be compared with the others. The rules are printed on the page so that nobody has to guess how a number was produced.

Visible chores are used as entered. Person A and Person B give a weekly total, and the tool does not weight it, because weighting needs task detail that only the itemised list has. The asymmetry is real and it is stated on the page rather than hidden.
Each itemised task is weighted for difficulty. Hours each time multiplied by times a week gives the weekly hours, and then a factor is applied: 1.25 for hard work such as bathrooms, floors, repairs and bikes, 0.9 for routine work such as dishes, laundry, bins, watering and sweeping, and 1.0 for everything else. On the default list the eight tasks take 7.25 hours of actual time and 7.2 hours of weighted time.
Care and driving are a shared pool. The hours you enter are split evenly between the two adults, because an even split is the assumption that does not tilt the result in either direction. The two sensitivity lines show what happens if the pool sits with one person instead.
Mental load is converted, not measured. Half an hour a week as a baseline, then one hour for every point above the lowest score: 1 gives 0.5 hours, 3 gives 2.5 and 5 gives 4.5. The score is a self rating, so it is recorded against whoever filled the form.

Add the three and you have a total for each person, and the shares are simply each total divided by the household total. On the default input that is 12.5 hours, 13.0 hours and 7.2 hours, which is 38.2 percent, 39.7 percent and 22.0 percent of a 32.7 hour week.

The gap is not the same thing as the imbalance

Two numbers on the page look similar and mean different things. The visible gap compares the chore columns before anything else is added: on the default input, 11.0 against 6.0 is a 5.0 hour gap, which lands in the between three and six hours band. The total gap adds the care split and the converted mental load, and it is 0.5 hours, which lands in the within one hour band.

Both numbers are true. The visible gap is about tasks on a list, and the total gap is about tasks plus care plus the remembering that makes the household function. Neither one is the whole picture, and the interesting part is the difference between them.
The bands describe distance, not fault. Within one hour, between one and three, between three and six, more than six. No band says who is right, because the arithmetic cannot say that, and a five hour difference in a list of chores can be a matter of who does the cooking rather than a matter of effort.
The sensitivity lines protect against a wrong assumption. If the care hours all sit with Person B, the totals become 10.5 and 15.0 hours and the gap moves to 4.5 hours the other way. If the invisible labour belongs to Person B instead, it becomes 8.0 against 17.5. Because the form is filled from one side, these two lines matter more than the headline.

This is a self observation tool, not a professional assessment, and it deliberately contains no score for a relationship and no judgement about a person. It gives you hours, and hours are the part of the argument that two people can actually check.

Moving one thing, and a week to try it

Rebalancing rarely works by moving everything at once. It works by moving one line, seeing what the number does, and keeping it if the week goes better. The three moves on the page are chosen from your own entries rather than from a generic list of household advice.

The mental load handover is the biggest lever and the hardest. Moving two jobs worth about 2.0 hours changes your column from 12.5 to 10.5 hours and your partner from 13.0 to 15.0. It does not reduce the total work in the house, it only makes the invisible half visible, and that is exactly why it is worth doing explicitly.
The biggest line in the list is where a move pays. The dishes, at a quarter of an hour seven times a week, is 1.75 hours a week from a quarter of an hour of attention each evening. Moving one recurring task is easier to agree to than moving a whole category of work.
Care runs are named, not averaged. The even split is a placeholder. Listing the actual runs, and moving one of them, changes the numbers more than any amount of goodwill about sharing.
The rotation table is a test, not a plan. Each task moves through all three people across the week so that no task belongs to one person forever. Run the planner again after the week and compare the same three numbers: Person A total, Person B total, and the gap. If the rotation made things worse, the numbers will say so, and you can put it back.

And if the conversation about the numbers keeps ending badly, that is a sign to bring in someone neutral, not a sign to sharpen the numbers.

FAQ

What if the hours I enter are wrong?

Then the page is wrong too, and the fix is to change the inputs rather than to argue with the output. Hours are estimates, and most people under-report them for their own column and over-report for the other, which pushes the tool toward saying things are more even than they are. The most reliable method is a single ordinary week: write down what got done each evening as it happens, rather than reconstructing a month from memory. The rotation table on the page gives you a second week of data for free, and comparing the two is more informative than any adjustment made to the first.

Is the invisible labour score objective?

No, and it is built to be arguable. The score is your own rating of how much mental work you carried that week: planning meals, remembering appointments, tracking who needs what, and noticing the thing that has to be done before it becomes urgent. The conversion to hours is a stated convention, half an hour plus an hour per point, which makes the number comparable across weeks rather than accurate. If your partner rates the same week a 3 and you rate it a 4, the disagreement is usually the most valuable part of the exercise, and the honest response is to compare the two lists of jobs behind each number.

How do I use this without it turning into an accusation?

Run it on one side and share the numbers rather than the verdict, which is why the page describes hours and refuses to score anything. Open with the task, not the total: the dishes take one and three quarter hours a week, here is who has done them. Keep the sensitive lines for a later conversation, because they are the part most likely to hurt when they land as a surprise. And if one of you uses the output as a weapon, the page has been used wrongly: a spreadsheet about chores is not evidence about a person, and it was never built to be.

What about the person who does the invisible work without being asked?

They are the reason the invisible labour box exists, and the reason it is recorded against whoever fills in the form. Without it, a household where one person plans everything and the other does the visible work looks perfectly even on paper. The conversion does not settle the argument about whose work is harder, because that is not a question hours can answer, but it does put the planning on the same sheet as the laundry. If the person carrying it is not the one filling in the form, run it from their side, because the score and the notes both belong to them.

How often should we rerun this?

Monthly is enough, and weekly is too often to mean anything. The numbers move with the season: a term of school runs, a stretch of renovation, a period of illness or a new job all change the totals without anybody trying to. Once a month, on a fixed day, with the same three numbers in view, the trend is what tells you whether the rotation you tried is holding. If you rerun it after a difficult week, the numbers will describe that week, so give it a few weeks before you draw any conclusion from it.

Limits of this tool

This is a self observation tool, not a professional assessment. It converts hours you entered and describes the result, and it never rates a relationship or a person.
Limits: the form is filled from one side, the care pool is split by assumption rather than by evidence, and the difficulty factors and the mental load rate are conventions you can change.
Not for: settling arguments, proving who contributes more, or any kind of diagnosis. A spreadsheet about chores is not evidence about a relationship, and it is not built to be used that way.
Nothing here is stored or uploaded. Keep the notes field as private as the rest of the page, and bring in a third party if the numbers start a fight that the numbers cannot finish.