The United States has also included unpaid housework in GDP through estimation.
Executive summary
The United States does not count unpaid household work in the official GDP totals, but economists and statisticians have long produced alternative estimates that value that work and have shown it would substantially raise measured output; the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has developed a Household Production satellite account and prototype estimates using time‑use surveys [1] [2]. Estimates from BEA research and independent analysts find that adding nonmarket household production would have increased the level of measured U.S. GDP by roughly a quarter in recent decades — commonly reported as about 26% in 2010 — though that inclusion alters growth rates across time and raises complex methodological issues [3] [4] [5].
1. Why unpaid housework isn’t in the headline GDP number
GDP, by convention, measures market transactions — goods and services bought and sold — so unpaid work carried out inside households leaves no marketplace transactions for statisticians to record, which is the central reason the BEA and the System of National Accounts exclude it from main GDP aggregates [2] [1]. That exclusion reflects long‑standing international accounting choices going back to early SNA decisions; while some early economists argued for broader inclusion, the practical difficulty of consistent valuation and cross‑country comparability led statisticians to keep most household services outside the main national accounts [6] [7].
2. The BEA response: satellite accounting and prototype estimates
Rather than fold unpaid domestic services into headline GDP, the BEA has created a Household Production Satellite Account that uses American Time Use Survey data to estimate the market value of cooking, cleaning, childcare, shopping and related activities, producing a separate but complementary set of statistics [1]. BEA’s prototype work and papers outline methods to value hours of household production — typically by assigning replacement‑cost or low‑end market wages — and show how the additional series illuminates the volume and distribution of nonmarket work across time and population groups [1] [3].
3. What those alternative estimates say about scale and trends
Multiple BEA calculations and independent studies report large effects: incorporating nonmarket household production would have lifted the level of measured output by about 39% in 1965 and by roughly 26% in 2010 in some BEA analyses, with other summaries commonly quoting a ~26% uplift for 2010 [4] [3] [5]. Those sizeable additions also change the story about growth because the contribution of unpaid household work fell proportionally over the latter half of the twentieth century, so including it reduces measured average annual GDP growth over certain historical intervals [3].
4. Methodological flashpoints and political stakes
Valuing unpaid housework is feasible but contentious: researchers disagree about which activities to count, whether to use replacement cost or opportunity cost valuation, how to treat supervisory childcare, and which wage benchmark to apply — choices that materially affect the resulting dollar figures and cross‑time comparability [6] [8]. These methodological choices carry political implications because counting unpaid care would highlight gendered labor burdens and could reshape debates over social policy, caregiving compensation, and how “productive” work is recognized in national statistics [9] [7].
5. Where consensus exists and where it doesn’t
There is broad consensus among statisticians that unpaid household work is economically significant and that time‑use surveys can generate useful lower‑bound estimates; there is less consensus on whether these estimates should be merged into headline GDP or maintained as satellite accounts to preserve comparability and clarity in the market‑transaction‑based national accounts [6] [2] [1]. The BEA and international bodies have favored the satellite approach as a compromise: providing recognized, methodologically transparent estimates without altering the definitions that underpin international GDP comparisons [1] [6].
6. The practical takeaway
The United States has not “included” unpaid housework in official GDP totals, but it has formally measured and published alternative estimates — via BEA research and a Household Production satellite account — that quantify the large, previously hidden contribution of unpaid domestic labor and underline the policy relevance of counting care and household services [1] [3] [5].