Here is the housekeeper’s promise. Hire one person, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, preparing your meals, and completing that Amazon payment you’ve been meaning to make. They can rearrange the dish drawer, notice if your child is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be home to meet the plumber. If your child needs food for a class party, the housekeeper can make a plate and leave it; if the child also has a pet lizard, the housekeeper can buy crickets to feed it.
Housekeepers are not nannies or house cleaners. They are “the head of the household,” “Mom’s personal assistant,” and “my partner,” according to more than a dozen people I spoke to who either employ one or work as one. In fact, they are what was once called a housekeeper—someone who helps manage the basic functions of a family. Middle- and upper-class families more commonly used to employ this type of position (the term “housekeeper” dates back to at least the 1830s), but it’s rare enough that several people I spoke to thought they might have come up with the term.
Whatever you call the job, the ultra-wealthy have kept some version of this role in their homes for years, but more and more companies are popping up to serve Americans with wages in the bottom six—a group that’s nowhere close to owning a private jet but could already use a house cleaner or have a layperson.
Some will argue that shouldering the burden of housework is a necessary part of adulthood. But for many at the top end of the country’s wealth divide, time is rewarding enough that buying it back feels worth the money. Kelly Hubbell, who in 2023 founded Sage Haus, a company that helps people find house managers, told me that most of her clients are two-income households where the work piles up is more than two adults can handle; the house manager comes in as the third. Several women described their housekeeper to me as “my wife.” One company that provides that service is even called “Wife Rent—Oregon.” (Its founder, Brianna Ruelas Zuniga, knows what the name sounds like; she still loves it, she told me.)
Many home management businesses started around the country around the same time. In 2022, Amy Root was running a home organization business in central Connecticut—cleaning out people’s garages and adding shelves to their closets—but she realized that even if she put the right home systems in place, “the laundry still needed to be done,” she told me. People needed “help with their normal things to do but also a checklist of expectations,” like finally hanging a painting they bought a year ago, he said. In 2023, she volunteered to run a home management business, Mom’s Personal Assistant, and now leads a team of five (soon to be seven) part-time home managers.
The workers include retirees and empty nesters, as well as a woman in training to be a doula and an artist who needed extra entertainment. Rates for house managers are generally $25 to $50 an hour; some organizations take a cut. (Sage Haus charges clients a finder’s fee; house managers are paid directly.) Today’s gig economy is largely part of the gig economy, and like most gig workers, managers are responsible for their own health insurance. Some of the housekeepers I spoke to work full-time for one family, but many play part-time gigs with multiple families while also working as a nanny or cleaner.
When Root tells people what a housekeeper does, most of the time, their response is “Somebody’s going to do that for me?” That kind of time-saving shopping doesn’t happen for most people, Ashley Whillans, a Harvard Business School professor who studies such spending, told me. About a decade ago, he and his colleagues asked people what they would do with an extra $40, and most of them said they would use it to pay bills or have a good experience; only 2 percent they said they would use the money for a service that would save them time. In the past, Whillans said, Taskrabbit was the only task-sharing platform, but as these services have become mainstream, more and more people with money to spend seem to see it as a way to escape the worst parts of their day. “I’m buying back joy and time when I can right now,” Barbara Mighdoll, a mother of two and business owner who now has a house manager for 15 hours a week, told me. Every time his housekeeper does some work, he said, “that’s a tab that’s now closed in my brain.” When she’s with her family, she no longer has a ticker tape running through her head about what clothes she needs to keep. The housekeeper already took care of it.
Such shopping can buy happiness, according to Whillans’ research. He and his colleagues have found that when people outsource stressful tasks and reinvest that time in something they care about, they report being more satisfied with their lives. (Anyone who hates doing dishes won’t be surprised by this.) In one readhe and his co-authors found that couples who take that free time and spend it on each other say that it improves their relationship. So far, Whillans has yet to see the point where couples who pack their things to do stop find more happiness. Some experimental evidence, he said, suggests that when given money for time-saving purchases, low-income people report more benefits than their wealthier counterparts. But where someone in the so-called upper-middle class might consider $30 an hour for business, being able to buy time back is still a luxury.
If they can afford it, “people are now turning to the market for social assistance,” Whillans said. The gig economy has made this easier: Someone can now order soup on DoorDash when they’re sick instead of asking a loved one to make it for them, or take an Uber from the airport instead of getting a ride from a friend. Almost everyone I spoke to who has a housekeeper lives away from their family; many said that they did not have a “village.” Kara Smith Brown, mother of two and founder of a PR consultancy, told me that without “grandparents, or aunts and uncles stepping in” and becoming a village, “you have to build your own and pay for it.”
It’s not ideal, but people who have hired house managers feel that paying them is an improvement on their current situation. Eliza Jackson, mother of an eighteen-month-old son and chief operating officer of a direct-to-consumer meat delivery company called ButcherBox, used to wake up early before her son so she could do chores, cook breakfast, get him ready, drive an hour and a half in traffic to the office, work all day, come home, cook dinner at night, and then her husband did nothing but sleep. “I don’t think the day I’m describing is unusual,” he told me. “I thought you just suffered for it.”
In January, she and her husband hired Katie Eastlack, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, through Sage Haus. Eastlack was living with his parents in Virginia and struggling to find work in education after graduation, but found he was already doing something he enjoyed: helping someone, in this case his mother, run the house. She hoped to move to Boston and look for personal assistance and home management jobs there, until she found a Sage Haus listing to work in Jackson’s home. Finding the right family was important, Eastlack told me, because he is in their lives all the time. He has a family credit card for household expenses and is trusted to, say, pick the right guy to fix Jackson’s car. (He did not say this, but to work for badly (family, in a gig job without HR, can easily turn into a nightmare.) Eastlack loves that her job allows Jackson and her husband, who both work a lot, to spend more time with their son. And it meant that he had to move to Boston and now he has his own house.
He is still getting used to the feeling of coming home at night and realizing he has his homework to do. Kristen Milburn, who manages the house part-time for two doctors’ homes in Oklahoma City, told me something similar: The role “requires a lot of physical strength,” which she’s not sure she can sustain forever. And as much as she loves her job, doing someone else’s housework all day “makes it a little harder to want to come home and do the laundry and the dishes,” she said. “But it’s happening.” Running a household is a lot of work—let alone two.
