The $6 Trillion Missing From America’s Economic Numbers

More than 87 percent of Americans aged 15 and older perform unpaid household work on a typical day, according to GAO data. They devote an average of 3.72 hours to childcare, eldercare, meal preparation, home maintenance, and other domestic responsibilities, even though no cash changes hands for this work.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that uncompensated domestic labor is worth up to $6 trillion annually. That amount equals roughly 20 percent—or one-fifth—of total U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but long-standing national accounting standards exclude domestic activities from primary GDP metrics because they occur outside the formal market.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is the primary statistical foundation for measuring non-market time allocation in the United States. Conducted annually since 2003, the survey tracks how residents divide their 24-hour days among paid employment, household chores, caregiving, and leisure.

Official economic measures also leave out the value of work that supports formal employment. Misty Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, said household labor is a necessary foundation for formal economic operations.

“Without those activities, we really wouldn’t have a functioning formal economy,” Heggeness told Fortune.

Between 2021 and 2024, women represented 54 percent of people engaged in unpaid household labor, the GAO report found. Women also spent more time on childcare than men, and women who earned higher incomes than their male partners still performed twice as much cooking and cleaning at home.

The imbalance accompanies significant workplace strain. Survey figures cited in the research show that 48 percent of employed women report experiencing burnout at work, compared with 36 percent of employed men.

“It is still predominantly the mother and women who are picking up the majority of this invisible burden of having to multitask their paid labor with making sure everybody’s needs in the household are met,” Heggeness said. “We’re not kept in the data, and then we wonder why are women today so stressed and frizzled.”

The historical debate over non-market labor began alongside modern macroeconomic accounting. When Nobel laureate economist Simon Kuznets developed the initial framework for U.S. national income accounting for the Department of Commerce in 1934, he explicitly cautioned Congress against treating GDP as a comprehensive measure of economic welfare. He cited its failure to account for unpaid domestic work and non-market production.

The United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) continues to instruct statistical agencies to exclude non-market home services from core GDP calculations, keeping those figures focused on monetary transactions. The UN SNA guidelines instead recommend “satellite accounts” that track unpaid labor alongside formal market statistics.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) uses those satellite accounts to model non-market domestic production without changing the headline GDP figures used for federal budgetary and monetary planning. Its alternative measurement framework produced a different picture of long-term growth.

From 1965 to 2020, official U.S. GDP expanded at an average annual rate of 6.3 percent. The BEA framework, which incorporates non-market household labor, calculated average annual growth of 6.1 percent over the same period. The 0.2 percentage-point annual gap reflects the structural economic shift that began in the 1960s.

Prime-age female labor force participation rose from under 40 percent in the post-World War II era to more than 77 percent at its peak in the late 1990s. Nancy Folbre, an economist and author of *Making Care Work*, said that as women moved time from non-market household tasks into compensated employment, conventional national accounting recorded the increase in market output without deducting the corresponding reduction in unpaid domestic work.

Folbre said this accounting asymmetry “artificially boosted” the nation’s reported economic growth rate across those decades. She also said that relying only on conventional income metrics creates a distorted view of household prosperity.

A second paycheck can increase total family earnings when someone enters the formal workforce, but households often spend part of that income on market substitutes for work previously performed at home. Those substitutes include commercial daycare, restaurant meals, and cleaning services.

“Just looking at individual earnings or family income without taking into account unpaid work just gives a very misleading picture of relative living standards,” Folbre said.

Heggeness said that if families stopped performing domestic labor internally, buying equivalent replacement services in the market would reduce real income across the economy.

“The value of the money that we make in our jobs would be reduced because it would be more expensive for us to survive,” she said, “because we would be looking at the formal labor market for those services.”

Folbre cautioned that assigning a monetary value to domestic labor should not be understood as an argument against female labor force participation.

“It kind of tempts people to think it would be really great if we returned to the good old days, and I think that is really wrong, because however valuable that unpaid work might be, it’s very disempowering,” Folbre said.

Instead, Folbre stated that the GAO findings highlight