Survey Reveals What American Kids Earn in Allowance for Different Chores

Assigning chores to your kids is an easy decision — fewer things for you to do, more responsibility for them — but it can be difficult to know how much allowance to give them for those chores.

The Kids Allowance Report from RoosterMoney, an app that allows parents to digitally pay their kids allowance for doing chores, is providing some insight into what other parents are paying their kids. It’s based on a sample of 20,000 American families with kids aged 4 to 14, and it has some useful insights for parents trying to figure out the whole allowance thing.

The top three most lucrative chores involve some kind of outdoor labor. Number one is washing the car, which the kids in the report were paid an average of $5.76 to do, more than twice the $2.55 they earned for gardening. Number three on the list was cleaning windows at $2.42.

Vacuuming ($1.75) and walking the dog ($1.75) round out the top five more lucrative chores. A variety of cleaning tasks, from mopping floors to dusting to tidying the bedroom to cleaning the bathroom, and helping with dinner round out the top 10.

The top big-ticket items kids are saving for are a predictable mix of toys and tech. A phone, Lego sets, a Nintendo Switch, dolls and action figures, and books and magazines are the top five.

The RoosterMoney survey found that 73 percent of parents in their sample give a regular allowance, and 87 percent of them give it out on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Allowance also tends to go up by age, with the $3.28 per week going to 4-year-olds more than tripling to $11.37 for 14-year-olds capable of more lucrative chores.

Overall, kids earn an average of $8.24 a week and save 35 percent of it. You can check out more findings from the report here.