What’s Dad worth?
Salary.com, Inc., the compensation expert, posted a dad version of its popular Mom’s Salary Wizard. Among its top-line findings:
* Dads don’t earn as much overtime as moms for their stay-at-home jobs.
* The typical working dad earned no overtime in his 39.6-hour dad’s work week, while working moms earned, on average, 27% of their “mom salary” in overtime.
* Although their hours differed, all parents had eight jobs in common: Day Care Center Teacher, Laundry Machine Operator, Computer Operator, CEO, Facilities Manager, Psychologist, Van Driver, and Cook.
* Dads had two jobs in their top 10 which moms did not have: General Maintenance Worker and Groundskeeper.
* Moms had two unique counterpart jobs: Janitor and Housekeeper.
* By working long hours in a high-wage area, stay-at-home dads near Silicon Valley in California, clocked in at an annual value greater than $149,000.
* Working fewer “dad hours” in a low wage area, working dads on the rural Texas-New Mexico border rated about $83,500 in dad pay.
What else did the survey discover…?
“We got a lot of feedback from dads, asking ‘What are we worth?’” said Kevin Cuddeback Director of New Product Development at Salary.com, “so we did additional research and calculated $71,160 for working dads and $125,340 for stay-at-home dads-for the ‘dad job’ portion of all their work.”
Salary.com consulted with stay-at-home and working dads, and used the survey results to rank the top 10 jobs that make up a dad’s job description. Next, all 10 titles were assigned a dollar value based on the number of hours the respondents spend on each job, and the annual salary figures were totaled.
Salary.com’s analysis indicates that when asked to define their at-home work, working dads most identify with the following job titles (in order of hours spent per week): Computer Operator, General Maintenance Worker, CEO, Day Care Center Teacher, Laundry Machine Operator, Facilities Manager, Psychologist, Van Driver, Cook and Groundskeeper.
For stay-at-home dads, Day Care Center Teacher moves up to the top spot and General Maintenance Worker remains the number two most time-consuming job. The rest of the top 10 ranking (in order of hours spent per week) is as follows: Cook, Computer Operator, Van Driver, Facilities Manager, CEO, Laundry Machine Operator, Groundskeeper and Psychologist.
Salary.com corroborated the exceptional rarity of stay-at-home dads-fewer than 6 dads in 1,000. “Given that the U.S. Census Bureau estimated only 143,000 dads stayed at home with their children while their spouse worked in 2005, out of 26.4 million married fathers with children living at home, it was difficult to calculate precise statistics on how stay-at-home dads spend their time,” said Cuddeback, “but based on the survey data collected, Salary.com was able to estimate that a stay-at-home dad’s work week totaled 81 hours-approximately ten hours shorter than the work week of a working dad, a working mom, or a stay-at-home mom.”
Dads and their families can visit http://www.salary.com/ and create their own “dad paycheck” with the Dad Salary Wizard®, the first interactive tool that allows anyone to price the “dad job,” based on location and dad’s personal hours worked in each of the 10 roles. Users can create a customized mock dad paycheck and dad pay stub, which can be printed and emailed to family and friends for Father’s Day.
“This analysis shows that dads play a significant role in the at-home duties that keep a family running, and the market value of the work dads perform is certainly worthy of recognition,” said Bill Coleman, Senior Vice President of Compensation at Salary.com. “It’s particularly noteworthy that more than half of dad’s total salary figure comes from contributions to the family outside of dad’s normal work day. Dads clearly play a crucial role in the raising of their children and the running of their households, which should not be overlooked.”
For more salary figures appropriate to a specific city for the stay-at-home and working dad compensation analysis, as well as the Dad Salary Wizard, log onto http://dad.salary.com.
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