You can pay for some chores and not others, as long as the line between them is clear. Anything your child is cleaning up after themselves is owed to the household and stays unpaid. Work that serves everyone and goes past what you would ask of them at their age can carry a price, kept separate from the allowance.
Sunday evening, the table needs clearing, and your nine-year-old asks how much it pays before he stands up. You have been paying per chore for six months. It worked for a while, and now everything in the house has a price on it.
Whether to pay for chores at all is a question you settled six months ago, and you have no appetite for scrapping the whole thing and starting over. You need a way to deal with the list you already have instead, the one on the fridge with a price written next to every job.
Split the list you already have
Take the chores your child does today and sort them into two groups. On one side, what they owe the household because they live in it, unpaid. On the other, what you keep paying for, with the price attached.
One question settles most of the list in a single sitting: is your child cleaning up their own mess? Their plate, their things in the hallway, their room. If so, it stays unpaid at every age. The rest can move to the paid side when the job serves the whole household and goes past what you would normally ask at their age, like washing the car, folding everyone's laundry or mowing the lawn.
| Chore | Which side | Why it lands there |
|---|---|---|
| Clearing their own plate | Owed to the household | Their own mess |
| Tidying their bedroom | Owed to the household | Their own things |
| Feeding the cat | Owed to the household | A short daily job that comes with living here |
| Taking the bins out | Owed to the household | Household basics, two minutes |
| Vacuuming the living room | Can be paid | Serves everyone, and it takes real effort |
| Folding the whole family's laundry | Can be paid | Most of it is not theirs, and it takes a while |
| Washing the car | Can be paid | Physical, and nobody's routine |
| Mowing the lawn | Can be paid | Occasional, supervised, well past a routine chore |
This particular split is not the only defensible one, and yours will depend on what your child already does. If your twelve-year-old has been vacuuming for two years without anyone making a thing of it, that chore already sits on the unpaid side in your house.
The chores to watch while you sort are the ones your child does without being asked. A review of experiments on rewards (Deci, Koestner and Ryan, 2001) found that paying someone for something they were already doing willingly tends to reduce how often they do it once the payment stops. So if your son feeds the cat most evenings and nobody has ever asked him to, that is the one chore you should leave well alone.
Do the sorting on your own, once, before you mention it to anyone.
Tell a child who is already being paid
A child who has been earning per chore will hear any version of this as a pay cut, so the order you say things in matters as much as what the two lists contain.
- Pick a moment with nothing in progress, not while they are refusing to clear the table and not five minutes before bed. A Saturday morning works.
- Put both lists on paper and show them, one sheet and two columns, because a list explained out loud gets reopened out loud the next day.
- Say the fixed amount before you say what stops being paid. Whatever number they hear first is the one that sticks, and if they start with the losses they will stop listening before you reach it.
- Say straight away what is open and what is not: the contents of the paid list and the day you pay, yes; what they owe the household, no.
- Give it a week before you answer any complaint. Write them down as they come and take them all together the following weekend.
If your child argues about the price of a paid chore, let them, because that is the part you just said was open.
Which number to build the fixed amount on
Start from what your child actually took home in a good month under the old system. A figure found online knows nothing about what they were earning until now, and the gap between the two will show up on the first payday.
Use their better weeks rather than their average, because that is the number they carry in their head, and they will do the subtraction before you do. Whatever stays on the paid list keeps its own price, paid separately and on top of the fixed amount. Once the new number has been running a while, you can compare it against what is usual for the age and adjust at the next birthday: our guide to allowance amounts by age covers the ranges.
Make it hold with several children of different ages
With two or three children, one rule keeps the daily comparison away: the same sorting for everyone, and an amount that varies by age. Do it the other way round, with one amount for all of them but different rules per child, and the comparison comes back every payday.
The awkward moment is the younger one watching the older one get paid for something they cannot do yet. Tell them plainly that this chore comes with age and will be theirs too, then give them a paid chore of their own that they can finish without help, at a smaller price.
Avoid inventing an exception for the younger one, paying them to tidy their own room because their brother is earning, because the same chore then ends up on both sides and the rule stops meaning anything. If you are unsure what is within reach at each age, our chore list by age sets it out.
The three moments where this gives out, and what to say
Three or four weeks in, nobody asks for the paid chores any more. The instinct is to add more of them at better prices, when cutting back works better: keep the two or three your child chose most often, at the price they already know, and drop the rest.
Your child refuses an unpaid chore on the grounds that it is unpaid. A refusal is the wrong moment to reopen the sorting. The chore still gets done that evening, and you offer to look at it together on Sunday, when a chore can perfectly well change sides if the argument holds up. A list on the wall helps a great deal here, because it stays in front of everyone instead of depending on what each of you remembers agreeing to: that is what our responsibility chart covers.
You forget to pay. This kills the system faster than anything your child does, because they never forget. Fix a payday and keep it, even after a week when nothing got done on the unpaid side: the two lists do not cancel each other out, and a missed chore gets made up the next day without touching the money.
What this split does not fix
A child who does nothing at all will not fit into this, and money will not shift them in either direction.
The sorting also does not replace doing the chore alongside them once, slowly, showing them where things go. At eight or nine, a refusal sometimes just means they do not know how. And it will not make the chore pleasant for anyone, so expect the sighing to continue.
This split also asks you to hold two lists and a payday in your head every week. With one child, the sheet on the fridge is plenty. From two upwards, with different prices and two fixed amounts, you will stop keeping it up to date within the month.
Key takeaways
- A chore that cleans up your child's own mess stays unpaid at every age: their plate, their things, their room. That one question settles most of the list.
- Leave on the unpaid side whatever your child was already doing unasked, because paying for it and then stopping can take the willingness away with it.
- Say the fixed amount before you say what stops being paid, and show both lists written down instead of describing them.
- Build the fixed amount from your child's better weeks of earnings: use the average and they will feel short-changed, and they will be right.
- Pay on the same day every week, even after a bad one. A missed payday damages the system faster than a missed chore.
Harmonia keeps the two lists apart on the phone, holds the price of each paid chore and remembers the payday, which is the part that gets hard on paper once there are two children on two different amounts: have a look at Harmonia+. The app works without a mandatory subscription.
Frequently asked questions
Should you give an allowance for chores?
You can do both, as long as the two stay separate. Keep a fixed allowance that arrives on the same day whatever happened during the week, and put a price only on chores that go beyond what you would expect at your child's age. Paying per chore for everything is what turns the household list into a negotiation at the table.
What is the difference between an allowance and a paid chore?
An allowance arrives on a set day because your child is part of the household, and you do not withhold it after a bad week. A paid chore is extra work with a price agreed in advance, taken on by choice. The first gives your child something to manage, the second something to earn.
Should you take allowance away when a chore is not done?
Deducting turns the allowance into a weekly score, and the conversation shifts to what is left rather than to what still needs doing. Keep the allowance intact and treat the undone chore as a chore: it still gets done, that evening or the next day. If you want a consequence involving money, it belongs on the paid list, where a chore only pays if it happens.
At what age can you start linking allowance to chores?
Once your child can count coins and sees that spending makes the money disappear, which usually falls somewhere in the early school years. Before that, a price on a chore stays abstract. Start with one or two paid chores and a small fixed amount, then revisit both at each birthday rather than in the middle of the year.
What do you do when one child earns far more than a sibling?
Look at how much of the gap comes from age and how much from effort. A gap is fine while it follows from what each child can already do, and you can say so out loud; it turns into an argument as soon as the two of them are living under different rules. Add one paid chore the younger one can finish alone. In Harmonia, each child has their own list and their own amount, which saves keeping two sheets.
