Swiss housework · Federal Statistical Office 2024
Full time mothers report 17 weekly hours of cooking, cleaning and laundry. Fathers report 11.
Swiss federal group averages for parents working 90 to 100%, with a youngest child under 15. Helpore analysis of 2024 data, published by the Federal Statistical Office on 4 June 2025.
The difference, task by task
Select a task to compare the reported averages. Every bar uses the same scale, from 0 to 20 hours.
Cooking, cleaning and laundry
Average reported hours a week, 2024
Cooking, cleaning and laundry. Difference: 6.1 h
These are averages for separate groups of mothers and fathers, not partners in one household.
Method and sourceMothers report more time on each task
The difference does not come from one task alone. Among parents working 90 to 100%, mothers report more time a week than fathers for cooking, for cleaning and for laundry. This holds in the published averages.
“The debate about work and family cannot stop at childcare. Cooking, cleaning and laundry take hours every week, and these figures show the gap even among parents working full time. That work deserves to be visible.”
The three tasks
| Task | Mothers | Fathers | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooking | 9.2 | 6.6 | 2.6 |
| Cleaning | 4.8 | 2.7 | 2.1 |
| Laundry | 3.1 | 1.6 | 1.5 |
| All three | 17.1 | 11.0 | 6.1 |
Totals and differences were calculated before rounding to one decimal, so the rows may not add up exactly to the total.
Childcare, dishwashing, shopping, administration and other household and family work are not included.
How Helpore calculated the totals
The population is women and men with children whose youngest child is under 15. Everyone in both groups works 90 to 100%.
The figures come from the unpaid work module of the Swiss Labour Force Survey (SLFS). The survey data are from 2024. The survey asks each person how long they spent on each task on one reference day. The Federal Statistical Office publishes the results as average hours a week. It published this dataset on 4 June 2025. This is Helpore's analysis of published data, not a new survey.
Helpore added up the published averages for meal preparation, cleaning and tidying, and laundry and ironing, for mothers and for fathers.
The survey questionnaire does not show whether time spent on two tasks at once is counted once or twice. So the hours are reported time, not measured clock time.
The source publishes averages without a margin of error. So this analysis cannot say whether a difference is statistically significant. It does not explain why the difference exists. It covers Switzerland as a whole, not cantons. It puts no money value on the work, and it does not show what paid help at home would change.