Both Parents Now Work Full-Time in Most American Families Due to Affordability Crisis

Fifty-two percent. That is the share of American families with kids under 18 where both parents now work full-time jobs, according to a new Pew Research analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. It is the first time in American history that this arrangement has become the norm rather than the exception. 50 years ago, four in ten families lived on a single paycheck. The numbers behind this shift point to a country where fewer households can afford anything less.

The stay-at-home parent is fading fast. Pew found that just 23% of families now have a full-time working dad and a mom who is not employed, down sharply from 42% in 1975. Only 6% of moms work full-time while their male partner is unemployed or part-time, twice the rate of 50 years ago. Another 14% of working parents are unmarried or live without a partner. Behind every one of these numbers sits a single, unavoidable pressure.

Nearly a third of Americans now name high living costs as their top financial problem, up from just 3% in 2020, according to Pew. Half say they have just enough income to maintain their current standard of living, and almost a fifth say they are falling behind entirely. Homeownership, stable jobs, and even groceries have grown further out of reach as inflation and interest rates eat into paychecks. For millions of households, one salary stopped being a choice.

This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team for accuracy and clarity.

Raising a Child Now Costs $303,418, and Childcare Alone Is Reshaping Family Budgets

Raising a child from birth to age 18 now costs $303,418, according to a 2026 LendingTree analysis, up from $165,630 just 25 years ago. That works out to nearly $17,000 a year per child, more than many families keep in take-home pay after housing costs. For families with two children, the federal government considers childcare affordable only if the household earns more than $400,000 annually. Almost no two-income family comes close to that threshold.

Childcare costs alone have surged more than 50% in some states over just two years, driven by rising labor costs at daycare centers and shrinking government tax credits. The expanded Child Tax Credit that families relied on during the pandemic has since been scaled back, cutting its value by nearly half. Parents who might have once considered one parent staying home now calculate that the math simply does not work without two paychecks covering the gap.

Pew’s survey found real financial upside to the two-income model. 83% of families with both parents working full-time say the arrangement helps their finances, compared with just 19% of single-income households. But money is not the only cost parents are tracking. More than half of full-time working parents say balancing work and family responsibilities has become difficult, and the burden does not land equally on both parents.

Even When She Earns More, Mom Still Does Twice the Housework

The shift toward two full-time incomes is not equal across race or education. Six in ten partnered Black mothers work full-time, though that is down from 64% in 2000. Meanwhile, the share of white and Asian mothers working full-time has climbed to 52% and 54%, up from about 45% a quarter century ago. Hispanic families have held steady at 44% for 25 years, and a third of Hispanic mothers remain unemployed, the highest rate among any group Pew tracked.

Education draws an even sharper line. About seven in ten mothers with an advanced degree work full-time, compared with just over half of mothers with a bachelor’s degree and 43% of mothers with less education. The gap suggests that access to higher-paying, flexible careers determines who can realistically hold down a full-time job while raising children, and who cannot. For lower-income mothers, full-time work often is not a matter of choice at all.

Even when the paycheck arrives from both parents, the workload at home rarely splits evenly. Wharton School economist Corinne Low told Fortune that when a wife earns more than her husband, she still does almost twice as much cooking and cleaning. Pew’s own data echoed the finding: nearly two-thirds of all caregiving in dual-income households falls on mothers, regardless of how many hours she logs at her job outside the home.

Childcare and Housework Are Worth $683 Billion a Year, and No One Gets Paid For It

If American women were paid for the unpaid caregiving and household labor they perform, the bill would come to $683 billion a year, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. That figure captures cooking, cleaning, and childcare done on top of full-time jobs, work that shows up nowhere on a pay stub. It is the invisible half of the two-income household that made the 52% statistic possible in the first place.

Working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago, according to Low. Full-time hours at the office have not shrunk the hours parents give to their kids at home. Instead, working parents have folded parenting into every spare minute, checking homework during lunch breaks, taking calls while making dinner, and rearranging entire schedules around school pickups that no longer fit inside a single income’s flexibility.

The 52% milestone did not arrive because families wanted two full-time jobs. It arrived because the cost of raising children in America outpaced what one paycheck could cover, and because the caregiving both parents still owe their kids never went away. Two incomes bought the household more money and less time, and American families are the ones absorbing the difference every single day.