Household fairness calculator
How many hours a week does each of you actually have left, once sleep, paid work, commuting, housework, childcare and planning are out, and is the money even? Move the sliders. Nothing is stored and there is no account.
Move the numbers. Watch the week change.
The same calculation the app runs, for one complete week with nothing carried over from earlier weeks. Each partner's time and the shared costs, separately.
Logged childcare counts as your time and replaces your own share of the estimate, never your partner's.
Planning areas: who keeps track?
Each area carries the app's estimated hours a week. The answers match the app's survey: "Mostly" counts 75% to one of you, "We pay someone" 10% each.
What it is calculating
This is the formula the EvenUS app uses, run in your browser. A week has 168 hours. Take out 8 hours of sleep a night and 2 hours a day for eating, washing and getting dressed, and 98 are left. Out of those come paid work, the commute, the housework each of you logged, the hands-on care your children need, and the planning areas each of you keeps track of. What remains is free time: the hours that are genuinely yours.
Fairness in time means both of you end up with a similar number of them. The time balance is 100 when the two figures are equal and falls by twice the gap as a share of your combined free hours, so 25 and 25 is 100, 30 and 20 is 60, and 40 and 10 is 0. That is why this works for the case a chore list cannot handle: one partner working fifty hours who does little at home and one working twenty who does most of it can come out even, or not, and only the hours tell you which.
The overall score counts time at 60% and money at 40%. When time leans towards one of you and money towards the other, the two gaps partly cancel, and a trade like that can score at most 90, or less when the same week with the money paid exactly as agreed would score lower. The calculator shows the real ceiling for your figures. The app also carries over anything still open from earlier weeks and waits while too little is logged; this calculator shows one complete week with nothing carried over.
Why 98 hours?
The 98 is 168 minus 70: ten hours a day for sleep and personal care. National time-use surveys put the average a little higher. In the American Time Use Survey for 2024 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics), people aged 15 and over averaged 9.04 hours a day sleeping, 9.80 hours on personal care including sleep, and 1.24 hours eating and drinking. In the ONS Time Use Survey for 23 September to 1 October 2023, UK adults averaged 9 hours 3 minutes sleeping and resting, 1 hour 7 minutes eating, and 53 minutes washing, dressing and grooming.
Both come to about 11 hours a day. They are averages over everyone, weekends included, and the sleep figures include time spent resting in bed. The app's default of 10 hours sits slightly under them, so it leaves a little more time to share out rather than less. In the app each of you can set your own sleep and personal time; this calculator uses the defaults for both of you.
Where does mental load come into it?
As hours, under planning areas. In the app each of you says privately who keeps track of areas such as meal planning, money admin and school forms. Each area carries an estimated number of hours a week (meal planning 2.5, money admin 1.5, school admin 3, for example), and once you have both answered, those hours count as time, the same as any other hours. Nothing is multiplied or weighted up. The estimates are reasoned figures, not research findings. Here you answer once for both of you; in the app, where the two of you see an area differently, your answers are averaged.
If you want the fuller version, what the mental load is explains what gets counted and why it stays invisible, and the mental load quiz for couples lets each of you answer who keeps track of what, then compare.
And the money?
Separately, always. Each shared cost is split by the method you choose: proportional to income by default, meaning each person covers the share that matches their share of what comes in. The money balance then looks at what is still to even up at the end of the week, measured against the larger of a quarter of your combined monthly income, twice what the week's shared costs moved between you, and $100. Nothing outstanding is 100. Hours are never priced, because putting an hourly rate on domestic work is a claim this does not make.
There are four methods and the differences are real. Splitting bills when you earn different amounts runs the same numbers through all of them.
What a result does not mean
A gap is not a verdict about either of you. Two people can be several hours apart for a month because one of them had a bad month at work, and the arrangement is fine. It is a reason to look, not a finding.
And a small gap is not automatically good. Two people with four free hours each are perfectly balanced and both drowning, which is a worse position than an uneven week with slack in it. How the fairness score works covers the guardrails that catch that.
Want this worked out from your real week?
The calculator takes your guesses. The EvenUS app uses what the two of you actually log, keeps the money even as you go, and suggests one thing to try each week. It is in closed testing now.