How the EvenUS Fairness Score Works
What goes into the EvenUS fairness score: free hours first, planning counted as time, money on its own axis, and the guardrails that can override it.
The score starts from discretionary time: the hours in a week that are genuinely your own once sleep, paid work, commuting and household work are out. Fairness in time means both of you end up with a similar number of them. Money is measured separately and never converted into hours. The planning and remembering each of you carries, the mental load, is counted as hours inside the time figure, not as a multiplier.
Here is what the number is built from, and, more importantly, what it refuses to do.
Step one: discretionary hours
A week has 168 hours. Subtract sleep and the personal time nobody has a choice about, and you are left with a budget. Out of that comes paid work, the commute, household work and childcare, and the planning and remembering each of you holds.
What remains is yours. That is the number the score compares.
Using hours rather than task counts is what lets the model handle the case that breaks every chore app: one partner works fifty hours and does little at home, the other works twenty and does most of it. A task count says the second person is carrying the household. An hours model asks what each of them has left at the end of the week, which is the question people actually feel.
Why hours and not a task count?
Because ten five minute jobs and one job that has to be planned around everything else are not the same week, and a count cannot tell them apart.
Taking the bins out is five minutes and no thinking. Organising a child's birthday is two hours of doing and three weeks of low-level attention. Counted as tasks they are one each. Measured properly they are not close.
This is also why only time you actually log counts. Logging a chore records when you started and finished, or you can run a timer, and the weekly catch-up confirms a week of recurring chores at once, with your own set to how long they really took. The chore list's usual minutes only tell the app how much logging to expect; when too little has been logged, the time figure waits rather than guessing. How to track mental load covers the planning side.
Where does mental load come in?
Separately from the chores. Each of you answers a few private questions about who keeps track of areas such as meals, groceries, money admin, the social calendar and school admin. Each area carries an estimated number of hours a week, from half an hour to three hours, shared out according to your answers. Once both of you have finished, those planning hours are added to each person's week, the same as paid work or housework. That is what separates cooking a meal someone else planned from being the person who plans meals.
It is deliberately counted as hours, not as a multiplier on other work. An earlier version of the app gave planning-heavy chores extra weight; that has been retired. Planning now counts once, as the hours of holding an area, and a logged task counts the minutes it took. The hours per area are estimates rather than research findings, and the app says so. A household does not need a second number to argue about. What it needs is for the planning to count when the hours are added up.
There is more on the distinction in what the mental load is and cognitive labour versus physical chores.
How is money handled?
On a parallel axis, and never converted into hours.
Assigning an hourly rate to housework is a claim this app does not make. It requires agreeing a price for your partner's time, it turns every task into a transaction, and it says that unpaid work matters because of what it would cost to replace, which is not why it matters.
So money is asked questions of its own. Did each of you pay close to the share of shared spending that your chosen split says. Does each person have personal money left. And are the two of you trading, one with less free time and the other paying more, which is a real arrangement: when the two gaps point at different people, they partly cancel instead of stacking.
The overall number combines the time balance and the money balance, with time counting for 60% and money for 40% by default. You can change that balance for your household.
There are four splitting methods and you choose which applies. Splitting bills when you earn different amounts works through all four, and income aware splits shows the calculation.
The guardrails, which matter more than the score
Several conditions override the number, because a score that reads as success while a household is drowning is worse than no score.
Both overloaded. Two people with four discretionary hours each are perfectly balanced and in trouble. The app says so rather than awarding a high number for symmetry.
Thin data. A week with almost nothing logged produces a confident-looking score built on nothing. It is flagged instead, and early in a week a gap counts for less, because a day of logging cannot show a pattern.
Stale logging. This one is the most important and the least obvious. The partner doing more work is the one least likely to have time to record it, so under-logging biases the score against exactly the person it exists to help. When entries stop, the app treats that as missing information rather than as an absence of work.
Planning waits for both answers. The planning hours are added only once both of you have finished the questions about who keeps track of what, so the two phones never show different numbers. Until then, the screen says the planning is not in the score yet.
What the score will not do
Some of these get asked for. They are refusals rather than gaps.
- It never shows one partner a score for the other person. The output is about the household arrangement, not about either of you.
- It never uses failure language. No "behind", no "owes", no red for a low number. A colour that reads as pass or fail reads as winner and loser, in an app about two people who live together.
- It takes no side on a perception gap. When one of you says a domain is shared and the other says it is theirs, neither is lying, and picking a winner turns the app into a weapon.
- There is no streak, badge or leaderboard. A streak punishes whoever had a hard week.
What you actually see each week
A number, the direction it moved, and one suggestion.
The direction matters more than the number, and the app is built to say so. A household at 60 and improving is in a better position than one at 75 and sliding, and the screen reflects that.
The suggestion is the product. It names one thing to swap, says who, and says why now, because "you have a free Saturday morning" is actionable and "there is an imbalance" is not. Reading your weekly report covers which parts are worth reacting to.
What it costs you to run
Roughly three minutes of setup, then a minute or so each per week. There is a catch-up screen for logging a whole week in one sitting, because the realistic alternative is not diligent daily logging, it is nothing.
Setting up with your partner is the whole process, and your first thirty days is what the first month usually looks like.
When it should go quiet
If the picture stays bad for a couple of months with no movement, the app stops suggesting swaps, says the honest thing once, points toward someone qualified, and goes quiet for a while.
That behaviour is in the design on purpose. Almost everything here makes an imbalance more visible, and a couple who can now see the gap precisely with no path to changing it is arguably worse off than before. A tool that keeps chirping at that stage has stopped helping.
You can try the calculation without an account. The calculator on the homepage runs the same discretionary-hours maths on whatever numbers you give it.