Most rows about pocket money for chores are not really about the amount. They are about what the money is for: a wage, an allowance or a bribe with better branding. Settle that first and the amount, and the list of jobs, mostly follow.
It sits alongside our guides to rewards, charts and the research behind them.
Three ways to do it
- Pocket money with no strings. A fixed amount every week, and chores handled separately. Simple, and it keeps money out of family life. It also does nothing to get the bins out.
- Pay per job. Every chore has a price. Jobs get done, and every request for help now comes with a reply: how much?
- Basics unpaid, extras paid. Everyday jobs are part of living here and earn nothing. Bigger jobs earn money. A common middle ground, and the one we would start with.
Whichever you pick, write it down, because most of the arguing happens where the rules are vague. If screen time is the currency in your house, the same rules apply, with extra traps.
What the reward research says
A meta-analysis of 128 experiments found that rewards people expected to get, for doing or finishing a task, reduced how much they chose to do it afterwards when nobody was paying. Tangible rewards tended to be more detrimental for children than for university students. Positive feedback did the opposite and increased interest. Every study we cite, and where it is thin, is listed on the home page.
Two details from the full paper matter for chores. The undermining was found with tasks people already found interesting. In the 13 experiments that compared an interesting task with a boring one, rewards did not significantly reduce interest in the boring one. And in nine experiments, rewards that arrived as a surprise, after the task, made no measurable difference.
So paying for the dishwasher is unlikely to kill a love of the dishwasher, because there isn't one. The jobs to be careful with are the ones your child already enjoys: baking, the garden, feeding the dog. Pay for those and you risk turning a pleasure into a shift.
A later meta-analysis of 183 studies and more than 212,000 people, across school, work and sport, found incentives better predicted how much people did, and their own motivation better predicted how well. Pay for jobs and expect more jobs done, not better ones.
None of these studies was about pocket money or household chores. They are the nearest evidence there is, so treat them as a guide to set-up, not a verdict on your family.
How much pocket money? A method, not a number
We are not going to quote an average. The national figures come from banks and pocket money apps, and we cannot check how they were collected. Here is a method instead.
- Start with what it has to cover. Sweets and a comic is one number. Saving up for a game is another. Bus fares and lunches, later on, are a different conversation.
- Scale it by age. A convention some families use is 50p or £1 a week for every year of age. It is a convention, not a finding, but it builds in a review every birthday.
- Pick a base you can pay every single week. A smaller amount that always arrives teaches more than a bigger one you forget on Fridays.
- Price the extras separately. A flat rate per job, the same for whichever child does it, heads off a lot of fairness arguments.
- Write it down. Which jobs are paid, what each one is worth and what has been earned this week. That is all a pocket money chart needs to be.
A pocket money chores list, by age
Rough bands, not rules. Unpaid means family basics. Paid means an extra with a clear finish. For a fuller breakdown, see what children can usually manage at each age.
- Ages 4 to 6. Unpaid: toys back in the box, dirty clothes in the basket. Paid: pairing socks from the clean pile, sorting the recycling.
- Ages 7 to 9. Unpaid: make the bed, set and clear the table, put clean clothes away. Paid: hoover one room, weed one patch, help wash the car.
- Ages 10 to 12. Unpaid: empty the dishwasher, take the bins out, pack their own bag. Paid: clean the bathroom sink and loo, hoover the stairs, wash up after a big meal.
- Ages 13 and up. Unpaid: their own room and their own washing. Paid: cook a family meal, mow the lawn, clear out the shed.
Pay straight away or on pocket money day?
For a seven year old, Saturday is a long way off. In a 1994 lab study, children, young adults and older adults chose between hypothetical sums of money now and a larger sum later. Every group marked the later money down, and children marked it down the most.
You do not need cash on the spot to use that. Split the payout in two. The tick and the thank you happen the moment the job is done, and the money arrives on a fixed day that never moves. The feedback finding above says the thank you is doing real work, not just being polite.
An occasional unannounced bonus for a job done well costs little, too. Surprise rewards left interest untouched in the experiments above.
What will not work
- Docking the base for the basics. Once the weekly amount can be cut for an unmade bed, the bed has become a paid job, which is the model you were trying to avoid.
- Moving the price mid-job. If the rate goes up when they complain, they will learn to complain.
- Paying for what they already love. See above. Leave the baking alone.
- A chart that only works if you update it every night. Reward charts tend to fade for exactly this reason.
Where Boomph fits
Boomph is the app we make, so weigh this accordingly. You photograph the mess and it comes back as one small mission at a time, with a timer your child can see and instant boosts during the job. The reward is whatever you type in, pocket money included, and you mark it handed over once you have paid. Boomph does not hold or move money. Boomph itself has not been trialled, and everything above works with a jam jar and a pen.