Being a stay-at-home parent has never been easy. But more attention has thankfully been brought on the difficulty as more parents have been forced to stay at home with their little ones during the pandemic. After getting a real dose of that stay-at-home life, on top of many also working from home, most can agree it's no joke.
And if stay-at-home parents were paid for their work? Well, they'd been getting a pretty nice paycheck—especially now. While there has been data on how much a stay-at-home moms specifically would make before the pandemic, new data from Salary.com shows COVID-19 has increased those earnings. With a median of 106 working hours per week, stay-at-home moms would be making $184,820 at a fair market salary equivalent. Compare that to $178,201 in 2019 with 96.5 hours worked.
"We saw that mothers spent considerable time managing financial concerns and organizing the schooling of their family during the height of the pandemic," Lenna Turner, director of diversity, equity, and inclusion for Salary.com, said in a statement.
It's no secret moms have taken on more of the parenting load during the pandemic. Even in cases when both moms and dads were working from home, a Pew Research Center study found mothers were more likely than fathers to say they had "a lot of child care responsibilities." Advocates have even been calling for the government to pay moms for their unpaid labor.
Salary.com, which surveyed more than 19,000 moms since the pandemic started, found working moms spent 54 hours per week managing the home along with their regular employment hours. That comes out to 107 hours for work and home duties. And the roles that were most time-consuming at home were Chief Financial Officer (dealing with day-to-day finances and overall financial well-being) and Chief Operating Officer (making sure everyone else is following the plan). Those two roles accounted for 20-plus hours a week.
It's also important to note the data was not adjusted to reflect the increased intensity of work parents have had to do during the pandemic. In corporation terms, that would mean overtime, shift differentials, bonuses, or other pay premiums.
"The dramatic increase in average hours worked per week could have resulted in even higher pay, but some of that increased workload was dedicated to lower compensated roles," Salary.com CEO, Kent Plunkett, said in a statement. "We applaud the heroic efforts of mothers everywhere to guide their families through the pandemic. 'Thanks Mom!' might be the understatement of the year, but it's a good place to start."