The Brief
- The International Labour Organisation estimates that 66.5 million domestic workers worldwide were in informal employment in 2025.
- Women made up more than three-quarters of the domestic workforce.
- Behind those figures is a question for anyone who employs someone at home: Which parts of the job can the worker actually count on?
Domestic Workers Formal Job Protections
Imagine 2 people waking up with the same fever. One messages her manager, switches off her alarm and takes a paid sick day. The other starts calling the three households she cleans for. One asks her to come tomorrow instead. One says it will pay her anyway. The third has never discussed sick pay with her. Before she can go back to bed, she has to work out how much being ill will cost.
That difference helps explain a finding in the International Labour Organisation’s latest statistical brief, released on 27 October 2026. Of an estimated 80 million domestic workers worldwide in 2025, 66.5 million, or 83.1%, were in informal employment. Women accounted for 77.2% of all domestic workers. The first figure describes how the jobs are organised. And the second tells us who is most likely to be doing them.
What a household calls help, a worker calls a job
A home is an unusual workplace. The person paying the wages may also be the person who makes lunch for the worker or remembers her child’s birthday. There can be real affection on both sides. It can also be surprisingly hard, in that kitchen, to ask what an extra hour pays.
Think of a carer who agrees to stay until an older person’s daughter gets home at 6. 6 becomes half past, then 7. The carer cannot simply walk out and leave someone alone. Who records that extra hour? Who pays for it? If the arrangement depends on her raising the subject each evening, the household has effectively made her negotiate the same hour over and over.
That is where domestic workers’ formal job protections matter. Informal employment means labour and social protections do not effectively cover the job. It does not mean every worker has precisely the same rights missing, or that no law applies inside a home. A worker may be entitled to a benefit on paper and still lack the registration or wage records to claim it. Another may receive paid time off because the household agrees to it, with no assurance the next employer will do the same.
Why does the cost fall so heavily on women?
Making a meal, noticing that an older person has eaten very little, getting 2 children safely out of the door: people recognise the skill in these tasks most readily when the person who does them is absent. When women are expected to do this work for their own families without pay, that expectation can follow them into someone else’s home. Knowing how to do the job gets mistaken for needing no training. Caring about the person becomes a reason to stay late.
The ILO finds that women in domestic work are especially concentrated in cleaning and direct care. It also finds that their average monthly earnings were just 48% of the average monthly wage of other employees. That comparison is with employees outside domestic work; it is neither an hourly rate nor a comparison between women and men doing identical jobs.
Hours vary enormously: 35.2% of domestic workers worked at least 49 hours a week, while others had only short stretches of paid work spread across households. Source: ILO global findings.
There is an uncomfortable question here for employers who care about women’s careers. When a meeting runs late, who gets the call to stay with the children? A professional woman’s ability to say yes to her manager can depend on another woman’s inability to say no to hers. The answer cannot be to send either woman home from paid work. It is to give both a say over their time.
That is why investment in the care economy belongs in a conversation about equality at work.
What would change the answer to that sick-day call?
A household can start by sitting down with the worker on paid time. Agree on duties, hours, pay dates, rest, leave, cancellations and extra time. Put the terms in a language the worker reads and give both sides a copy. In the carer’s case, decide in advance who takes over at six, whom she calls if that person is late, and how she will be paid for staying. Then keep the agreement the first evening it proves inconvenient.
Even a careful agreement cannot create a pension system or give one cleaner the bargaining power of a workforce. Where several homes each buy a few hours of someone’s week, registration and contributions should be simple enough for each household to do its share.
Workers need a way to check the contributions and challenge missing pay without having to confront an employer alone. Domestic workers’ organisations should help design those systems: their members know what happens when a form assumes everyone has one employer.
The ILO’s recommendations include easier registration, enforceable pay and working-time protections, and collective bargaining.
There is evidence that change is possible. Between 2019 and 2025, informality fell or held steady in 91 of the 140 countries with comparable data. The global figure rose largely because more domestic workers were concentrated in places where informality was already high. That distinction matters: the headline describes the scale of the problem, not a failure everywhere.
A household knows the value of a domestic worker the morning she cannot come in. A fairer measure is what she knows that morning: whether she can afford to stay home, what will be in her pay packet, and whether her job will be there when she gets well.
Source note
The 2026 release reports estimates for 2025. The 77.2% denominator is all domestic workers, not just those in informal employment. The opening and evening handover are illustrative scenarios, not reported interviews. Statistical brief · UN Geneva press briefing.
