Could you be ‘owed’ £20,000 in your unpaid labour? Calculator reveals what ALL these hours of vacuuming, ironing and cooking are actually price…

Daily household chores such as cooking dinner, driving your children to school and looking after your elderly relatives often go unnoticed and unrewarded.

But, inspired by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the Daily Mail has today built a calculator that tots up just how much your efforts are really worth. 

Powered by the Government’s most detailed earnings dataset, the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, the tool asks how many hours you spend every week on seven tasks: housework, childcare, cooking, laundry, transport, adult care and volunteering.

For example, you may be ‘owed’ almost £20,000 a year if you commit to 10 hours of housework weekly, look after your children for six and spend another nine cooking, ironing and driving family around.

Britain’s top statisticians at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have created an interactive tool to calculate just how much your housework efforts are really worth

From cooking Christmas dinner to doing the laundry, these invisible contributions add up fast, yet often go unrecognised in financial planning. 

All of the household tasks completed across the whole country are estimated to be worth a massive £1.4trillion a year – around 50% of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP). 

The ONS, in 2016, claimed women did an average of 60% more household chores compared to men.

On average, men carried out 16 hours of unpaid work per week, compared to the 26 hours women do.

The only area where men put in more unpaid work hours than women was in the provision of transport, which includes driving themselves and others around, as well as commuting to work. 

However, when looking at economic status, full-time students do the least amount of unpaid work, while mothers on maternity leave do the most. 

But the ONS found that there was no major difference between the rich and the poor. 

It calculated that rich modern families spend almost exactly the same amount of time on chores as poorer families.

One of the only differences was that higher-income households spend less time cooking and on childcare, but this was offset by spending more time transporting each other around. 

The calculator can be a useful tool to help parents assess whether their life insurance payout would be enough to replace their hidden contributions if the worst were to happen.

Separate research by Money Supermarket found that if a carer were to pass away, families could face a shortfall of more than £160,000 over ten years – and that’s before considering mortgages, bills or children’s savings.

The ONS initially published its findings in a 2017 report, the figures for which the Daily Mail has now updated to account for average wage growth.