Should you pay children for chores? The short answer
No for everyday chores, and yes, possibly, for one-off jobs. Laying the table, tidying a bedroom, taking the bins out: these are contributions to a household the child belongs to, and paying for them turns a shared duty into a small commercial contract. Repainting the garage over a whole Sunday or clearing out the cellar, on the other hand, is well outside the ordinary and can fairly be paid.
This answer is not a matter of principle. It rests on two solid sets of data: what children already do without being paid, measured in France by Ined, the French national institute for demographic studies, and what happens to their willingness to help once money is added, measured by fifty years of research in psychology. The rest of this article gives the figures, the amounts parents actually hand over age by age, and the dividing line that really holds up in daily use.
What French parents give, age by age
Before deciding whether pocket money should depend on chores, it helps to know what sums we are talking about. According to figures from the Teenage Lab run by Pixpay, published in 2026, the amounts French parents pay out regularly follow a fairly steady progression:
- 8 to 10 years old: around €20 a month.
- 11 to 13 years old: the amount climbs gradually, usually staying below €30.
- 14 to 15 years old: most households go past the €30 mark.
- 16 to 17 years old: €41 to €42 a month in scheduled pocket money.
The barometer published by the same source in September 2025 put the average across all ages at €26 a month, with €20 for 10 to 12 year olds and €34 for 16 to 18 year olds. These orders of magnitude are useful as a benchmark, but they say nothing about the question that really matters: what is that money attached to?
Three models coexist in French families. The unconditional payment, where the child receives a fixed amount whatever happens, and the learning is about managing a budget. The conditional payment, where pocket money is withheld or reduced if the chores are not done. And payment per chore, where every job carries a price. The three do not have remotely the same effects.
FairChore puts this idea to work every day: every task is worth points, and the household total always stays at zero. Free, ad-free, nothing to install.
Create my household for freeNine children in ten already help, and nobody pays them
The discussion usually starts from a false premise. Many parents consider paying because they believe that, without something in return, their child will do nothing. The figures say the opposite.
In Population & Sociétés no. 628 (December 2024), Anne Solaz and Ariane Pailhé drew on a French survey of 7,400 ten-year-olds born in 2011. The main finding fits into one sentence: nine children in ten report taking part in at least one household chore. In detail:
- Laying and clearing the table: 97% of girls and 96% of boys do it at least from time to time, close to 4 in 10 every day.
- Tidying their bedroom: 91% of girls, 87% of boys.
- Helping with the cleaning: 75% of girls, 74% of boys.
- Helping with the cooking: 82% of girls, 69% of boys.
- Folding and hanging out the laundry: 66% of girls, 55% of boys.
- Taking out the bins: 43% of girls, 56% of boys.
In other words, children already take part, on a massive scale, at an age where almost none of them get money for it. What most households lack is not a payment scheme: it is regularity and recognition. Daily participation rates are far lower than occasional ones, and that is exactly where the battle is won or lost.
What happens when you put a price on helping out
The research on this is old, plentiful and remarkably consistent. It even has a name: the overjustification effect. When you materially reward a behaviour someone already wanted to adopt, you replace their inner motivation with an outside one, and the behaviour stops as soon as the reward does.
Two studies deserve to be known by parents.
Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello (2008). Twenty-month-old children, well before any reasoning about money, spontaneously help an adult who has dropped an object. The researchers rewarded some of them with a toy, others with praise, and a third group with nothing at all. In the phase that followed, the children who had received the material reward helped noticeably less than the other two groups. Paying for helpfulness had damaged it, at an age where it is entirely freely given.
Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan (1999). Their meta-analysis brought together 128 experiments on the effects of rewards. The conclusion: expected material rewards significantly reduce intrinsic motivation, and the effect is stronger in children than in adults. One result points the other way, and it is a valuable one: positive feedback, meaning spoken recognition, raises motivation instead of destroying it.
Translated into a kitchen on a Tuesday evening: “thank you, that really helped me” works better than “here, two euros”. And above all, it still works the following month.
There is a side effect that every parent who has tried it knows: negotiation. As soon as a chore has a price, it becomes debatable. “I am not doing it this week, I do not need the money” is a perfectly logical answer in a marketplace, and perfectly unliveable in a family.
The awkward figure: girls do more and receive less
There is one more reason, rarely raised, not to index pocket money on chores. Put two French sources side by side and an uncomfortable result appears.
On one side, the Ined survey shows that at ten years old girls take part more in indoor chores: thirteen points more than boys in the kitchen, eleven points more on the laundry. On the other, the 2026 Pixpay barometer shows that teenage girls receive less money: a gap of €9 a month on average, against €6.70 the year before. Among 16 and 17 year olds, pocket money and top-ups combined, the figure reaches €141.10 for boys against €122 for girls, which adds up to €229 over a year.
The same barometer adds a telling detail: 59% of requests for paid jobs come from girls. They work more to top up an amount that was already smaller to begin with.
A household that ties money to chores believes it is putting a meritocracy in place. In practice, it risks formalising an imbalance that was already there and giving it the appearance of a fair price. The gendered division of domestic work starts at ten, and it repeats itself in adulthood. A transparent counting system, by contrast, makes it visible and therefore open to discussion.
The dividing line that holds: contribution or job
The most robust rule, the one recommended by financial education bodies and early years specialists alike, comes down to one simple distinction.
Contribution chores are not paid. These are the ones that follow from living there: putting away what you took out, putting dirty clothes where they belong, clearing your own plate, taking part in the shared cleaning. They are not negotiable, not because they are imposed, but because nobody in the household is paid to do them. A parent who cooks does not invoice the meal.
Exceptional jobs can be paid. These are the tasks outside the normal running of the house, the ones the household could have handed to an outsider: giving the car a full wash, weeding the whole garden, repainting a room, sorting out the loft, looking after younger cousins for a whole afternoon. Here, payment destroys nothing, because it replaces no family duty.
Two safeguards make that boundary workable day to day:
- The list of contribution chores is written down and known to everyone, otherwise every job becomes a chance to test whether it pays.
- Pocket money is paid whatever happens. Withholding it to punish a lapse restores exactly the link you were trying to avoid, and turns an untidy bedroom into a question of money rather than a question of respect.
Pocket money has a mission of its own, and it is already a big one: learning to choose, to wait, to save, to get it wrong on small amounts while mistakes are still cheap. It is a training ground for budgeting, not a wage.
Giving chores value without giving money
That leaves the real problem, the one that pushes so many parents towards their wallet: not all chores are equal, and everyone’s effort is invisible. Whoever empties the dishwasher every morning feels they are carrying the house; whoever cleaned the bathroom once thinks they did the hard part. With no measure, everyone is right, and the discussion turns into a trial.
What money brought was not motivation. It was a unit of account. You can keep the unit of account and take out the money.
- Give each chore a value, decided together. Cleaning the toilet is not worth the same as watering the plants, and children are often the first to admit it. The discussion about value is itself a lesson in fairness.
- Make the running total visible. What a classic chore chart lacks is memory. A month later, nobody can say who really carried what.
- Raise the value when nobody wants a chore. If a job stays at the bottom of the list week after week, its value is underrated. Raising it works better than repeating the instruction.
- Choose who each chore concerns. A six-year-old has no business being counted in meal preparation; a thirteen-year-old can be counted in clearing the table. Who is included does more for the sense of fairness than the amount.
- Praise precisely. It is the only lever the research endorses without reservation, and it is free.
One last point of method: involve children in designing the system, not only in running it. A child who helped set the values defends the system; a child who has it imposed on them puts up with it, exactly as they put up with the chart on the fridge.
A system where every chore counts, without going through money
That is exactly the problem FairChore solves: giving chores a value, keeping track of who did what, and leaving money out of the house.
- Every chore is worth points, set by the household. They are neither euros nor rewards to be cashed in: they are a unit for measuring effort, which you adjust when the balance drifts.
- The household total always stays at zero. When someone does a chore, they earn points and the members concerned lose a few. The imbalance becomes a figure everyone can see, not an accusation thrown across the table on a Sunday evening.
- Who a chore concerns is chosen chore by chore. The youngest are only counted in what really involves them, and the app remembers those choices for next time.
- Children without a phone have their own profile. Supervised accounts let a parent keep a child’s profile without creating an account or an email address for them.
- The planner handles the recurring chores. Laundry on Saturday, bins on Tuesday: due dates come round on their own, with a reminder, and nobody has to play foreman.
- The history settles the arguments. After a month, the question “who does the most?” has an answer in figures, and the conversation about fairness can finally take place on facts.
The point is not to turn the home into a company. It is to make visible a kind of work that never is, so that the split can be discussed instead of endured. A child who sees that their contribution counts does not need to be paid to do it again the following week.
Start simply: list your chores, agree on the points as a family, and let pocket money do what it does best, teaching how to manage a budget.
