The Self-Care Time Gap
Women get 49 fewer minutes of leisure a day than men, or 299 hours a year, while doing 15 minutes more total work. Federal time-use data, updated annually.
Key findings
Each one links to the full figure and the source it came from.
- 49 minutes less leisure a day for women than men
- 299 hours of leisure a year that women lose, or 12.5 full days
- 15 minutes more total work a day for women, paid and unpaid combined
- 1 hr 14 min more unpaid housework and care a day for women
- 16 minutes of exercise a day for women, against 26 minutes for men
- 79% of days on which women do no exercise at all
Women get 49 fewer minutes to themselves
Every year the US Bureau of Labor Statistics asks a national sample of Americans to account for one full day, minute by minute. It is called the American Time Use Survey, and it is the only measurement of its kind: not how people feel about their time, but what they actually did with it yesterday.
In the 2025 figures, released in June 2026, American women spent 4.76 hours a day on leisure and sport. Men spent 5.58.
Forty-nine minutes on its own is a small amount of time. But it is 49 minutes every day, and a year of it adds up to something much larger.
Counted in waking hours rather than 24-hour days, it is closer to nineteen days a year.
It is not because women are working less
The obvious explanation would be that men do more paid work and earn the extra downtime. The first half of that is true. In 2025 men averaged 3.82 hours a day of paid work against women's 2.84.
But paid work is not the whole of work. Add the unpaid kind (housework, cooking, the shopping and the admin, looking after children and looking after everyone else) and the order reverses.
Women did 3.92 hours a day of unpaid domestic and care work against men's 2.69: 74 minutes more. That is more than enough to cancel out the paid-work difference.
So women are not trading leisure for an easier day. They are working 15 minutes a day longer than men and getting 49 minutes a day less to themselves.
How a day divides, by sex
Average hours per day, US civilian population aged 15 and over, 2025. Spread across everyone, including people who did none of that activity that day.
Leisure and sport 49 min less for women
Paid work 59 min less for women
Household activities 48 min more for women
Caring for household members 15 min more for women
Sport, exercise and recreation 10 min less for women
Watching television 23 min less for women
The first thing to go is exercise
Leisure is not one thing, and the gap is not spread evenly across it. Some of it is television, where men are ahead by about 23 minutes a day. Some of it runs the other way: women spend more time socialising and communicating than men do (0.65 hours against 0.52).
The category most health advice starts with is exercise.
16 minutes a day, against 26 for men: a gap of 10 minutes, which over a year is about 62 hours of exercise. That daily average is spread across everyone, including the people who did none at all. The participation figure shows how many that is.
On a given day only 21.1% of American women did any sport, exercise or recreation at all, against 25.7% of men. Four days in five, the answer is none. Most advice (get your steps in, take the class, make time for yourself) assumes the time is already there to be found.
Where the gap gets widest
These are averages across every adult, including everyone with no children at home. Narrow to households with small children and the difference gets much larger.
Across all households, women spent 0.48 hours a day caring for household children against men's 0.24, exactly double. The housework ratio is larger.
Why "personal care" is not self-care
One line in the table appears to contradict all of this. ATUS has a category called "personal care", and women's figure is higher than men's: 10.00 hours a day against 9.59. Read quickly, that says women get more time for themselves.
It doesn't. ATUS "personal care" is overwhelmingly sleeping, and women sleep about 12 minutes more (9.13 hours against 8.93). Take sleep out and what remains is washing, dressing, grooming and health-related self care: 0.87 hours for women and 0.66 for men, about 13 minutes apart, and most of it maintenance rather than rest.
This is the easiest mistake to make with this dataset. "Personal care" and "self-care" are not the same thing, and the survey never claimed they were.
The gap is not closing
In 2019 the BLS put men's leisure at 5.5 hours a day and women's at 4.9, a gap of 0.6. In 2025 it was 0.8. The 2019 figures were published rounded to one decimal place, so we would not read more into that than a widening of roughly a quarter of an hour, and ATUS estimates carry sampling error that we have not attempted to model. What can be said plainly is that six years later, the gap has not narrowed.
The full table
Everything above, and the categories we did not discuss. Free to download and reuse with credit.
| Activity | Men | Women | Difference (women − men) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leisure and sports | 5.58 | 4.76 | -0.82 |
| — Watching television | 2.81 | 2.42 | -0.39 |
| — Socializing and communicating | 0.52 | 0.65 | +0.13 |
| — Sport, exercise and recreation | 0.43 | 0.26 | -0.17 |
| Working and work-related | 3.82 | 2.84 | -0.98 |
| Household activities | 1.58 | 2.38 | +0.80 |
| — Housework | 0.30 | 0.81 | +0.51 |
| — Food preparation and cleanup | 0.51 | 0.91 | +0.40 |
| — Lawn and garden care | 0.26 | 0.13 | -0.13 |
| Purchasing goods and services | 0.61 | 0.77 | +0.16 |
| Caring for household members | 0.36 | 0.61 | +0.25 |
| — Caring for household children | 0.24 | 0.48 | +0.24 |
| Caring for nonhousehold members | 0.14 | 0.16 | +0.02 |
| Personal care | 9.59 | 10.00 | +0.41 |
| — Sleeping | 8.93 | 9.13 | +0.20 |
| Eating and drinking | 1.24 | 1.18 | -0.06 |
| Educational activities | 0.41 | 0.47 | +0.06 |
| Organizational, civic and religious | 0.25 | 0.31 | +0.06 |
| Telephone calls, mail and email | 0.13 | 0.25 | +0.12 |
| Other activities | 0.28 | 0.27 | -0.01 |
behind the numbers
How this was made, and what it can’t do
How each figure was worked out, what it can and cannot support, how to cite it, and every source we used.
Why we publish this
Meadow makes a habit app. It is for anyone, though a lot of the people who use it are women, so we have an interest here and you should know that before you decide what to do with these numbers. We publish them anyway, with the workings shown and the limits stated, because most advice aimed at women, ours included, treats time as a motivation problem. The federal data says it is a distribution problem.
That changes what a useful habit looks like. If the time available is minutes rather than hours, a habit has to be small enough to keep going through a bad week. That is the idea behind Meadow, and the reason this was the first thing we measured.
Cite this report
Free to use with credit. Please link back to this page so readers can check the sources and see any later corrections.
according to Meadow's The Self-Care Time Gap report (https://www.growyourmeadow.com/data/self-care-time-gap)
Meadow. (2026). The Self-Care Time Gap. Wildcard Wellness. https://www.growyourmeadow.com/data/self-care-time-gap
"The Self-Care Time Gap." Meadow, 10 Sept 2026, https://www.growyourmeadow.com/data/self-care-time-gap.
<a href="https://www.growyourmeadow.com/data/self-care-time-gap">The Self-Care Time Gap</a> by Meadow
The tables and figures compiled here are released under a CC BY 4.0 licence. The underlying survey data is published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is in the public domain.
How we did this
- Every figure comes from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), run by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. ATUS asks a nationally representative sample of Americans aged 15 and over to account for a single 24-hour day in detail, and publishes annual averages by sex.
- The figures used here are ATUS "all-persons" averages: time spread across everyone in the group, including people who did none of that activity on the day they were interviewed. ATUS also publishes a participants-only average, which is higher. The two are not interchangeable, and only the all-persons figures sum to 24 hours.
- Where a number is a difference, a sum or a per-year total, the arithmetic is stated on the stat itself. "Unpaid work" sums four ATUS categories: household activities, purchasing goods and services, caring for and helping household members, and caring for and helping nonhousehold members.
- Annual totals multiply the daily average by 365. Rounding to minutes happens once, at the end.
- Nothing here is modelled, weighted by us, or adjusted. It is federal survey data, transcribed and differenced.
Where each figure comes from
- 49 minutes - less leisure a day for women than men
- Difference between the men’s and women’s all-persons averages for "leisure and sports" in ATUS Table 1 (5.58 − 4.76 = 0.82 hours), converted to minutes.
- 299 hours - of leisure a year that women lose, or 12.5 full days
- The daily gap of 0.82 hours multiplied by 365 days, then divided by 24 for the day equivalent. Assumes the daily average holds across the year, which is what an annual average means.
- 15 minutes - more total work a day for women, paid and unpaid combined
- Paid work is the ATUS "working and work-related activities" category. Unpaid work sums four categories: household activities, purchasing goods and services, caring for and helping household members, and caring for and helping nonhousehold members. Men 3.82 + 2.69 = 6.51 hours; women 2.84 + 3.92 = 6.76 hours.
- 1 hr 14 min - more unpaid housework and care a day for women
- Sum of household activities, purchasing goods and services, caring for household members, and caring for nonhousehold members, differenced between sexes.
- 16 minutes - of exercise a day for women, against 26 minutes for men
- ATUS "participating in sports, exercise, and recreation", all-persons average: 0.26 hours for women, 0.43 for men.
- 79% - of days on which women do no exercise at all
- The complement of the ATUS participation rate for sport, exercise and recreation (100 − 21.1).
- 1.1 hours - more childcare a day for women, in homes with a child under 6
- Quoted directly from the BLS news release; this breakdown is not in Table 1.
- 2.7× - as much housework for women as for men
- ATUS "housework" is the cleaning and laundry sub-category of household activities, not the whole of it.
- 0.6 → 0.8 - hours a day: the leisure gap in 2019, then in 2025
- BLS published the 2019 figures rounded to one decimal place (men 5.5 hours, women 4.9), so the comparison is stated to the same precision. ATUS estimates carry sampling error and this report does not claim the change is statistically significant.
Limits of this data
- ATUS "personal care" is not self-care. It is mostly sleeping, plus grooming and health-related self care, and women’s figure is higher than men’s (10.00 hours against 9.59) almost entirely because women sleep about 12 minutes more. Reading that category as "women get more time for themselves" misreads what it counts.
- These are averages across all adults, not a portrait of any individual, and not specific to mothers. The under-6 childcare figure is the only breakdown here that isolates parents.
- ATUS measures a single day per respondent. It is excellent at describing a population and cannot say anything about how any one person’s week goes.
- The survey records men and women only. It offers no data on nonbinary or transgender respondents, so this report cannot speak to them.
- ATUS is a sample and every figure carries sampling error, published separately by BLS in the survey’s technical note. Year-on-year comparisons here are described as they appear; no claim of statistical significance is made.
- Time spent is not the same as time enjoyed. ATUS counts minutes, not whether they felt restorative, uninterrupted, or like your own.
Update log
Next update: June 2027, when the BLS publishes 2026 annual averages.
- First published, on 2025 annual averages (released 25 June 2026), with a 2019 comparison.
