Cost of a mum is £32,800 a year
The cost of a working Mum is now £32,000 a year, according to insurers Legal & General. That sounds an amazingly high figure, but it’s based on working out how much it would cost to get other people to do the work that a full-time working mother does in the home, namely household chores and childcare. The research says it comes to a total of 74 hours a week, which makes £32,000 a year sound a lot more reasonable.
As you’d expect, even when both parents are working, Mums put in a lot more hours than Dads - for example, 33 hours a week of childcare for Mums as against 21.5 hours for Dads.
L&G say that when they last did the research back in 2005, the cost of a Mum was £24,440 a year, so the cost has risen by 31% in four years. A lot of that, though, is down to assuming you’d need to pay a higher hourly rate to cleaners, carers and so forth - and chances are those figures are in fact quite a bit lower now than L&G assumes.
Still, the point L&G is making remains valid - many families have life assurance for Dad but not for Mum, when in fact she’s the more valuable of the two. The annual value of a Dad’s home-work is £23,300 or 28% less than hers.
Just over half of Mums have life insurance cover and just over a quarter have critical illness cover. That means a lot of families would face financial problems if Mum were to suffer a horrible illness or die.
Using a low-cost policy like Family Income Benefit, where you get a tax-free monthly payment for a fixed term of years, is the easiest way to provide family security at affordable cost, which for many young parents will come in at under £20 per month.
