On 11 June, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgement on a road accident appeal case that caused the death of a homemaker over two decades ago. The verdict placed a value of ₹30,000 per month on the unpaid domestic services provided by the homemaker, and created a separate head of compensation titled ‘loss of domestic care’ to cover the range of services provided by homemakers, including household management, maternal support for children, spousal and parental support.
Further, it directed that this notional minimum value would also apply to women with independent external incomes. The judgment referred to homemakers as nation builders, whose labour and management allow other members of the family unit to contribute productively to society.
The Supreme Court’s recognition of unpaid domestic labour highlights one of the biggest shortcomings of national accounting systems, namely their refusal to assign an economic value to services that are provided free of cost.
One could argue that domestic services performed by homemakers are beyond price because they are rooted in familial ties and love. But when women, especially homemakers, disproportionately bear the burden of household chores, it has significant economic and social consequences.
The immense time and energy needed to clean, cook, and care for children and elders leaves most women little time for learning or leisure, leave alone taking up paid work outside the home.
Time-use surveys by the government reveal the extent of time poverty faced by homemakers. The 2024 time-use survey shows that a married woman spends over five hours every day on domestic labour, and another hour in caregiving. Married men, by comparison, spend less than an hour on both activities combined. The load of domestic work for women shoots up after marriage; for men the change is marginal.
Unfortunately, the years when the burden of childcare and housework is the highest are also peak years for career building. Thus, household labour effectively limits the economic participation of women.
According to the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (2025), among women not in the labour force, 40% in rural areas and 52.5% in urban areas cite childcare and home commitments as the main reason for not seeking employment. The corresponding figure for men was 0.4% in rural areas and 0.6% in urban areas.
At the state-level, the connection between domestic work and women working outside the home is starkly visible: in states with low female labour force participation, a larger share of women say that domestic responsibilities are the main reason for being out of the labour force.
Since does not pay a market wage, the time and labour spent by women in household maintenance and care work is often invisible—it tends to be unrecognized and unacknowledged. Not being adequately valued can impact family dynamics. For instance, a homemaker may have lower ability to negotiate within a marriage or be more likely to pass on gender stereotypes to the next generation.
Data from the National Family Health Survey (2019-21) shows that women who work outside the home are more likely than homemakers to be actively involved in making decisions on matters such as major household purchases, healthcare, or visits to her family and relatives. Systematic undervaluation of unpaid domestic work makes women in general, and homemakers in particular, less empowered.
Recognize, reduce, redistribute
Economists have long realized the important role played by unpaid housework in ensuring the smooth functioning of families and societies. In 2009, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) laid down a 3R framework for unpaid domestic work (initially conceptualized by professor Diane Elson of Essex University). The framework proposed that policy should be oriented along three dimensions: recognition, reduction and redistribution.
Recognition is the first step, and it focuses on why and care work matters to households, society and the economy. The next step, reduction, identifies policy initiatives that can help to lessen the overall burden of unpaid work. The third step, redistribution, is to achieve a more equitable distribution of unpaid domestic work between men and women, as well as between private citizens and the state.
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling will go a long way towards recognizing the work rendered by homemakers. In that sense, it has pushed India closer towards the first milestone of the 3R framework. But in the process, it also raises two issues. One, are there other ways to estimate the economic value of unpaid domestic work? Two, why is it necessary to put a monetary value on the contribution of homemakers?
Many researchers have attempted to quantify unpaid domestic work. The basic idea is straightforward: measure the time spent on a domestic activity, identify the per hour wage for that activity, and multiply time spent with unit wages to arrive at the economic value. For example, if a homemaker spent three hours a day cooking for her family, and a cook’s wage was ₹200 per hour, then the would be valued at ₹600 per day.
Share of GDP
Indian studies rely on the Time Use Survey (NSO, Government of India) or the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CMIE) to measure the time spent on household chores. Identifying the appropriate unit wage for each domestic activity is much harder, given the complex and changing mix of tasks. An average homemaker multitasks constantly: she may be cooking, supervising a child’s homework, and doing laundry, all at the same time, making her eligible to be valued at the wages of a cook, maid and tutor. She also changes her working schedule at short notice, depending on the task that needs to be prioritized—for instance, care of a sick child may take priority over cleaning chores on some days. It is impossible to measure the exact time-wage combination that represents each day of domestic work for every homemaker in the country. To resolve this problem, economists work by simplifying assumptions.
The simplest getaround is to assign a flat wage rate for domestic work, an approach followed in a study conducted by the State Bank of India in 2023. By assigning uniform monthly wages of ₹5,000 in rural areas and ₹8,000 in urban areas, their model showed that unpaid domestic labour by women contributed to 7.5% of GDP in 2019 (SBI EcoWrap, March 2023).
Other studies value unpaid household labour at market rates of similar occupations (replacement cost method). This means that time spent on childcare is valued at market wages of a nanny, cleaning hours at the market rate for maids, and so on. An alternative method is to value household labour at opportunity costs, or in terms of wages foregone when homemakers opt for domestic labour over paid jobs. For example, the unpaid labour of a homemaker qualified to teach can be valued in terms of what she could have earned as a teacher.
The valuation of unpaid domestic work varies widely, depending on the methodology and input variables. A study published in the Economic and Political Weekly (Sahoo, Sarkar and Kumar, 2024) assessed that between 2019-20 to 2022-23, the value of unpaid household work by women was 14.2-15.3% of GDP using opportunity cost and 19.8-26.2% of GDP using the replacement cost method. The Supreme Court itself put the value of women’s unpaid work at 15-17% of GDP. Indeed, the wide range of estimations thrown up makes it difficult to pinpoint the precise value of unpaid household and care work provided by women. But there can be no doubt that it is significant and forms a sizable chunk of GDP.
India is not alone in this. In most countries, including developed ones, the value of unpaid domestic labour is a similarly large share of GDP. The economic value of unpaid household work in Canada was estimated at 25.2-37.2% of GDP (2019); 61% of GDP in the UK (2023); 20% in the US (2012); and 33% in France (2010). Closer home, the numbers range from 18.9% in Bangladesh (2021), 20% in Philippines (2015) to 20-23% of GDP in Malaysia (2022). A report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated the unpaid work of women around the world at $10 trillion, or 9% of global GDP (The Future of Women at Work–Transitions in the age of automation, MGI, June 2019).
Policy perspectives
Recognizing and quantifying unpaid work is useful for two reasons. One, policymaking relies on timely and reliable data. What gets measured gets managed. Thus, knowing the scale of unpaid domestic labour makes it possible to estimate the nature and amount of support needed to ease a homemaker’s work. Two, it gives an idea of how much GDP could be unlocked if even a fraction of homemakers went into paid work. The first reason lays the groundwork to put in place policies to reduce and redistribute unpaid domestic labour and care work; the second provides sound economic reasons for such policies.
The Supreme Court’s ruling effectively puts a floor value on the contribution of homemakers, and is likely to set a precedent. But does this immediately make homemakers better off, or enhance their social standing? Yes, because it draws attention to the invisible work of homemakers, and this could lead to favourable policy initiatives in the future. Also, no, because what homemakers value above all is the support of family and society, which cannot be mandated by any court of justice.
There are about 125 million women in India with secondary or higher education who are out of the labour force. A recent Axis Bank-Ipsos study of educated urban women with work experience showed that nearly half of the non-working women wanted to return to work. Survey responses show that supportive policies such as flexi and remote work, family support and reskilling programmes would ease their re-entry into the labour force (The Missing Half: Women and India’s Growth Challenge, Axis Bank, March 2026).
Recognition paves the way for reduction and redistribution of unpaid work. Policies to reduce the hours and energy spent on household labour are almost always growth positive for the economy. Improved roads and connectivity, clean cooking gas, piped water, access to sanitation, better transportation, access to time-saving household appliances all boost productivity, output and growth, while simultaneously reducing the drudgery of domestic chores.
Developing a professional care industry would ease the care burden on families and simultaneously create employment opportunities. A care ecosystem would redistribute caregiving between family and paid professionals. Subsidies for businesses with inhouse care facilities could be a win-win for the employees, the organization and the state. Finally, each home needs to value its homemaker. That will happen when domestic labour is not viewed as “women’s work”, but as a combined family effort to manage a household.
is a search engine for public data.
For more such articles, read