One mom tallied 23 hours a week of household work. Then she built a company to turn ‘invisible labor’ into a paid profession
Sage Haus families typically pay a house manager $25 to $45 an hour for 15 to 20 hours a week, according to the company, or roughly $20,000 to $47,000 a year.
Key points
- KPMG research found that mothers of young children cut hours or left work at higher rates than fathers, pushed by return-to-office mandates and scarce, expensive childcare.
- “We are putting a value on what has historically been invisible labor on the backs of mostly women, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” Hubbell said.
- In 2023, during her third maternity leave, Hubbell founded Sage Haus, a white-glove service that helps parents hire a house manager and set up the “home-management systems” that make handing off work possible.
Putting a price on the mental load In the U.S., mothers handle 71% of household mental-load tasks, the cognitive work of planning meals, arranging activities, and keeping family life on schedule, according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne.
Additional details
- Sage Haus also draws on a network of more than 7,000 house managers and sells a $99 House Manager Certification course, which teaches them to anticipate needs, practice discretion, and become an integral part of a household.
- She thinks house managers could move into corporate administrative work, and she has watched executive assistants switch into house management.
- Hubbell said many of the women she has worked with told her that before they hired help, they feared they would have to leave careers they loved to take care of their homes.
- Instead, she went looking for what she called a “house manager,” someone who could take over the logistics and errands she had been cramming into her evenings and weekends.
- payroll jobs than men for only the third time in the country’s history, while still shouldering most of the planning that keeps a household running.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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