Chefs, Nannies, and Household Help: The Labor Behind Affluent Life

The Million Dollar Question: Roughly how many people work in private homes in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Labor?

A) ~500,000 B) ~1.2 million C) ~2.2 million D) ~5 million

Read on for the answer.

The labor that holds up an affluent household — the chef who plans the menus, the nanny who runs the carpool, the housekeeper who keeps the wardrobe rotation, the estate manager who quietly runs what amounts to the building department of one family’s life — is one of the least-visible professional workforces in the United States. At the top, household work is a six-figure white-collar career with an agency-driven labor market and a salary curve that mirrors corporate executive comp. At the bottom, it is a workforce of about two million people that the modern American labor-law regime still treats as a partial exception. Both ends are real, and they live on the same continuum.

What it is

Private household employment is a worker hired directly by a family — or placed through a household-staffing agency — to perform services inside the home. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division defines “domestic service workers” broadly: companions, babysitters, cooks, maids, housekeepers, nannies, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, home health aides, personal care aides, and family chauffeurs all count, along with the more specialised job titles — estate manager, chief of staff, executive housekeeper, butler, houseman, personal assistant — that the household-staffing industry has built on top of those federal categories.

The function the worker performs is the same whether the employer is a two-income suburban household paying a nanny twenty-five dollars an hour and a multi-property family paying a head chef a quarter of a million dollars a year. What changes is the scale, the formality, and the regulatory posture.

The size of the universe is bigger than most people realise. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, in its March 2024 Domestic Workers in the United States fact sheet, reports that about 2.2 million people work in private homes in the country. The fact sheet notes — and the Economic Policy Institute’s Domestic Workers Chartbook corroborates — that the true figure is meaningfully higher, because the workforce is disproportionately immigrant and disproportionately paid off the books, both of which lead to undercounts in national surveys. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics puts the count of maids and housekeeping cleaners at roughly 860,670 nationwide, with childcare workers at about 178,760 — and those are only two of the categories that make up the larger domestic-worker total.

Who uses it

Wealth bands sort cleanly along the household-help spectrum, and the labor market is concentrated at the lower end despite the press attention paid to the top.

Families in the $1M–$5M band typically use occasional outside help — a weekly housekeeper, a part-time babysitter, a yard service, sometimes a personal trainer or a meal-prep service. Much of this work is paid in cash, organised through word-of-mouth referral, and sits well outside the formal employment system.

Families in the $5M–$30M band usually employ one or two full-time roles, most commonly a nanny and a housekeeper, sometimes a part-time house manager or personal assistant. At this band the household tips into being a real employer, with a payroll, a Schedule H, and a relationship with a household-payroll service.

Families in the $30M–$100M band run a small department. A typical complement is three to six full-time staff — an estate manager, a head housekeeper, a nanny or governess, a chef, and a driver — coordinated by the estate manager and reporting to one of the principals.

Families in the $100M+ band run a full household-operations department. Industry agencies describe chiefs of staff and estate managers in this band as “de facto COOs,” managing multi-million-dollar budgets and coordinating staff across multiple properties, often in coordination with the family office that serves as the legal employer of record.

The UHNW segment is small relative to the workforce as a whole. The great majority of America’s roughly 2.2 million domestic workers serve middle-class families and earn below-median wages; the six-figure-salary segment that gets agency press is a thin layer at the top.

Why they use it

Three drivers explain hiring at the UHNW level. The first is time. A household with two or more properties, school-age children, and a principal on a global travel schedule runs about eighteen hours a day; staff is what makes that workable.

The second is professionalisation. A top private chef sources ingredients, plans menus, manages the household kitchen budget, and adapts to the family’s dietary plan more efficiently than the principals could; a senior estate manager runs the household the way a corporate COO runs a company, including budgets, vendor contracts, and capital projects. Hiring at the top of the labor market is not a status purchase but an efficiency one, and the salary numbers reflect what that efficiency is worth.

The third is confidentiality. An employee bound by an employment contract and a non-disclosure agreement is more controllable than a vendor with twenty other clients. Sensitive material — schedules, security routines, prenups, health information, the names and ages of children — sits with people whose careers depend on the family.

At the middle-class level, the drivers are different. Dual-career households outsource childcare and cleaning to make weekday life functional. The choice is not between “serve myself” and “be served”; it is between paying for help and exiting one of the two careers. That is why the labor market is so much larger than the UHNW press suggests: the two million domestic workers in the United States are mostly serving families whose alternative was a parent leaving the workforce.

How it works

Hiring at the top runs through a small set of household-staffing agencies — Career Group Companies’ Estate & Private Service practice, Mahler Private Staffing, Morgan & Mallet, MyStaffHQ, Tiffanie’s, Heritage, and a long tail of regional shops. Agencies vet candidates, run reference checks, present three to five shortlisted candidates, place the worker, and charge the family a fee of typically 15–25% of first-year salary, sometimes more for a difficult international placement.

Hiring at the middle-class level is mostly informal — Care.com, Sittercity, local mothers’ networks, word-of-mouth — with the household-payroll companies (HomePay, GTM, HomeWork Solutions) handling the back-office paperwork once the family decides to put the worker on the books.

The career ladder runs in two main tracks. On the household-management side: nanny → household manager → estate manager → chief of staff. On the kitchen side: line cook → chef de partie → sous chef → private chef → executive private chef. A separate cluster — butler, houseman, executive housekeeper — runs alongside both. Career estate managers typically have fifteen-plus years of private-service experience before they reach the top of the ladder.

Common roles and the work they do:

• Nanny. Childcare, school routines, homework, light meal prep, scheduling. Travelling nannies follow the family across properties.
• Housekeeper. Cleaning, laundry, wardrobe care, linen rotation. The executive housekeeper at a large household supervises a team and reports to the estate manager.
• Private chef. Menu planning, sourcing, cooking, sometimes school lunches and travel catering. At the top, the chef runs the kitchen budget and supervises a sous chef and a kitchen assistant.
• Estate manager. Vendor management, payroll, property maintenance, capital projects, security coordination, household budget. The estate manager is the household’s general manager.
• Driver. Transport, sometimes light security. Often a separate role from the personal protection detail covered in Personal Security: Protection, Privacy, and Risk.
• Butler. Front-of-house service: greeting guests, serving meals, managing wardrobe presentation, coordinating events. Largely an East-Coast and international tradition; rarer in West Coast households.
• Houseman. Heavy household work — moving, polishing, gardening overflow, transport.
• Personal assistant. Calendar, correspondence, errands, gift-buying, travel logistics. Often distinct from the executive assistant who handles the principal’s business calendar.
• Gardener, groundskeeper, pool technician. Often outside vendors, sometimes payroll employees at larger properties.

Non-disclosure agreements are universal at the top of this market. Industry guidance describes the household NDA as a standard condition of employment that covers the family’s schedule, properties, security routines, health, finances, and the identities of guests. NDAs cannot, however, bar workers from reporting illegal activity to authorities, pursuing wage or discrimination claims, or testifying when subpoenaed; recent state-level reforms have further narrowed what an NDA can cover.

At the top of the org chart sits the chief of staff, who coordinates the household departments and reports either to the principal or to the family office. Career Group Companies describes the chief-of-staff role as “the strategic right hand to the principal,” responsible for cross-property staff, vendor relationships, and overall household operations.

What it costs

Household-staff compensation is one of the most opaque pieces of the UHNW economy, with most negotiations done privately through agencies. But the published 2025–2026 salary surveys from the household-staffing agencies converge on a recognisable picture.

Morgan & Mallet’s 2025 household-staff salary guide, Talent Gurus’ 2026 guide, and MyStaffHQ’s 2025 trends report anchor the following ranges for the U.S. market:

• Nannies. $80,000–$130,000 base for an experienced full-time professional nanny in a major metro, climbing to $150,000–$240,000+ for travelling nannies and high-demand UHNW placements. Live-in nannies at top households frequently clear $150K–$200K including housing and benefits.
• Housekeepers. $50,000–$100,000 for an experienced full-time housekeeper. Executive housekeepers at large UHNW households earn $96,000–$128,000+, and senior executive housekeepers with seven-plus years of experience in NYC, California, and South Florida can earn $160,000+.
• Private chefs. Industry agency surveys and city-by-city pay guides put a working private chef at $120,000–$300,000 per year in 2026, with executive private chefs at $100M+ families running $200,000–$350,000+. New York entry-level $85,000–$110,000, mid-level $110,000–$160,000, senior $160,000–$200,000+. Live-in chefs typically $110,000–$230,000.
• Estate managers and chiefs of staff. $150,000–$235,000 typical, $250,000–$300,000+ at the top of the U.S. market, with chief-of-staff packages at billionaire households reaching $300,000+.
• Drivers, butlers, personal assistants. $80,000–$180,000 depending on role, household, and metro.

A family running five full-time staff in the $30M–$100M band — estate manager, nanny, housekeeper, chef, driver — therefore carries a base-pay line of roughly $500K–$1.2M a year, and a household running twelve staff across two properties at $100M+ runs $2M–$4M on payroll alone.

Add roughly 25–35% on top of base for the family’s share of employment taxes, benefits, payroll-service fees, recruiting and replacement, and (where applicable) housing and a vehicle. Agency placement fees of 15–25% of first-year salary are paid up front each time a role turns over. A working private chef placed through an agency at $200,000 a year therefore costs the family approximately $260,000–$300,000 in the first year, including the placement fee, before any travel, kitchen budget, or housing.

Hidden costs and tradeoffs

Five real costs come with the structure, and none of them appear on the salary line.

The first is compliance. Domestic employment is governed by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, plus the IRS’s household-employment regime under Schedule H of Form 1040, plus state-level domestic-workers’ bills of rights in California (AB 241, in force 2014) and New York (in force 2010), plus parallel laws in Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, Hawaii, Nevada, Connecticut, New Mexico, New Jersey, Virginia, and several other states. Schedule H requires withholding and remitting FICA at 15.3% combined (7.65% from the employer, 7.65% from the employee) on cash wages once an employee crosses the $2,700-per-year threshold for 2024. Families who pay staff off the books risk back taxes, penalties, and — at high net worth — political and reputational risk; the canonical “nanny problem” that derailed multiple federal nominees through the 1990s and 2000s lives in this category.

The second is turnover. Household-staff turnover is high relative to corporate roles. An estate-manager search typically runs three to nine months. Agencies charge the placement fee again on each turn. A family that has gone through three estate managers in five years has paid the agency the equivalent of nearly a full year of one manager’s salary just in placement fees.

The third is compensation pressure. The top end of the household-staff market is now in a multi-year salary boom, with agency reports citing UHNW principals offering above-market pay to attract and keep top talent. The result is that a family with an estate manager hired five years ago at $180K is, on current-market terms, paying meaningfully below replacement cost.

The fourth is privacy exposure. Household staff see everything — finances, marriages, addictions, health, security routines, friendships, sometimes the prenup terms. NDAs reduce the leakage risk; they do not eliminate it. Tabloid-grade revelations about UHNW households often trace back to former staff, sometimes through legitimate testimony in lawsuits and sometimes through more direct sale.

The fifth is wage-and-hour risk. The FLSA’s overtime requirement does not apply to live-in domestic service workers — they must be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked, but the time-and-a-half rule for over forty hours a week is waived per 29 CFR § 552.102 and the DOL’s Fact Sheet #79B. But the state-level domestic-workers’ bills of rights typically reinstate overtime for live-in workers (California requires overtime after nine hours a day or forty-five hours a week), and several states cap the number of consecutive hours a worker can be required to work without a break. A family that runs a live-in nanny on a federal mental model in California is — without realising it — exposed to a wage-and-hour claim.

What people get wrong

Five corrections do most of the work.

Domestic workers are workers, not staff in the British country-house sense. The popular Downton Abbey mental model — quasi-feudal, multi-generational, structured around a single family seat — badly underdescribes the modern American version. Today’s household staff have employment contracts, W-2s or 1099s, household-payroll services, formal performance reviews, and standard career mobility across agencies. They are an industry, not an aesthetic.

The market is not mostly UHNW. The great majority of America’s domestic workers serve middle-class households and earn below-median wages. The EPI Chartbook shows that domestic workers earn lower wages and are far more likely to live in poverty than the typical American worker, and that they are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant women. The agency-press version of the labor market — six-figure travelling nannies, chefs hired by billionaires — describes the top, not the middle.

Paying in cash is not legal informality; it is wage-tax evasion. The IRS’s Schedule H exists precisely so household employment can be brought into the formal payroll system, and household-payroll providers like HomePay, GTM, and HomeWork Solutions exist to take the bookkeeping off the family’s plate at a few hundred dollars a year. The “cash under the table” arrangement that many middle-class households still use is a federal tax problem, not an administrative convenience.

Live-in is not a perk that justifies low pay. Live-in workers must still be paid the federal minimum wage for all hours worked, including standby hours where the worker is required to be available. The federal carve-out applies only to overtime, and even that carve-out does not survive in California, New York, and several other states. Treating a live-in arrangement as a flat-rate “all-in” stipend is one of the most common compliance mistakes in the industry.

Hiring through an agency is not the most expensive option; it is the cheapest version of the legal risk. The 15–25% placement fee a reputable household-staffing agency charges buys the family a vetted candidate, a reference-checked employment history, a contract template that has been audited for state-law compliance, and (typically) a replacement guarantee. The cheaper-looking alternative — a friend-of-a-friend hire paid in cash — exposes the family to the full set of compliance, performance, and confidentiality risks that the agency model is designed to absorb.

Bottom line

The Million Dollar Question: the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau puts the count of people working in private homes in the United States at about 2.2 million — the answer is C, with the real figure likely higher because of the workforce’s heavy immigrant share and off-the-books pay.

The deeper story is that “household help” is two different things at the same time. At the top of the wealth distribution, it is a six-figure white-collar profession with an agency-driven labor market, an executive-style career ladder, and a salary curve that mirrors corporate comp. At the bottom, it is a two-million-person workforce that the federal labor-law regime still treats as a partial exception, where the prevailing wages are below median and the typical worker is a Black, Hispanic, or immigrant woman serving a middle-class family. The bridge between the two ends is a single career path through the same household-staffing agencies — and a single regulatory regime that, more than eighty years after the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, still treats domestic work as a category of its own.

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Related reading: Staff: Outsourcing Daily Life · Family Office: How the Very Rich Organize Their Lives and Money · Personal Security: Protection, Privacy, and Risk · HENRY: $500K and Still Paycheck-to-Paycheck · Wealth Levels: Life at $1M, $10M, $100M, and $1B