If we were paid for all the cleaning we do around the house, we'd earn over £1,000 a year

Most of us clean our own homes, despite the rise in popularity of outsourcing our most hated household chores. Many clean a fair bit on a weekly basis, but for some the amount of cleaning they do feels downright unfair, to the point where we wished we were being paid for the effort. 

A recent survey* supports this sentiment with hard data. Stay at home parents, unsurprisingly, feel the brunt of household chores especially strongly: just under a third (28 per cent) of the respondents fell into this category, with four in five of them claiming they don't feel appreciated for all the cleaning they do. For a substantial proportion of the stay at home respondents (19 per cent), being paid for the work would constitute a sufficient acknowledgment of their efforts.  

How much would a stay at home parent earn if they were paid for the work? Well, it depends hugely on on the amount of cleaning you do, and a little bit on where you live. A new online tool, developed by Thomas Sanderson, allows you to input your location and the number of hours per week you spend cleaning. It will then calculate your hypothetical earnings on the basis of the average cleaner's salary in that area. 

You would 'earn' the most if you live in London or Cambridge, where cleaners' salaries are around £10 an hour. If you clean around three hours per week, you'd be looking at over £1,000 added to your income a year. And if you are a stay at home parent with a young child, and the cleaning chores are seemingly endless, you'd probably stand to earn much, much more than that. 

Whether you clean for pleasure or only out of necessity, visit our cleaning hub pages for useful tips and tricks for making the cleaning more efficient. 

*A survey of 2,100 British homeowners conducted by Thomas Sanderson