$6 trillion a year in unpaid labor isn’t counted in GDP. Its absence from official stats distorts how we see growth, living standards and productivity

The workday doesn’t end for millions of American workers when they clock out and go home—there are floors to mop, meals to prepare, and kids to tend to. There’s no paycheck for those chores that keep a household running, but a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report estimated the labor is worth up to $6 trillion a year, or one-fifth of GDP.

All that output isn’t counted in GDP because no money changes hands. Yet, over 87% of Americans age 15 and older did some unpaid household work on a typical day, according to GAO’s September report, spending an average of 3.72 hours on those tasks. 

“Without those activities, we really wouldn’t have a functioning formal economy,” Misty Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, told Fortune. She said if families stopped cooking and providing childcare themselves, much of that work would have to be bought from the service economy instead. 

“The value of the money that we make in our jobs would be reduced because it would be more expensive for us to........

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