An estimated 80 million people aged 15 and over worked as domestic workers worldwide in 2025, but 66.5 million of them were in informal employment. That is 83.1 per cent of the total, meaning more than four in five people doing this essential work were often without effective labour and social protection.
Domestic workers clean, cook and provide care for children, older people and people with disabilities in private households. The work helps families and communities function, yet it is frequently carried out beyond the formal arrangements that can make pay, working time, social security and other employment rights easier to enforce.
A workforce of 80 million
The worldwide total has risen from 75.6 million in 2019. Domestic work has nevertheless remained broadly steady as a share of the wider labour market, representing 2.2 per cent of all employment and 4.4 per cent of employees. The increase in the number of workers is concentrated in particular regions and largely reflects broader employment growth, rather than a global expansion of domestic work relative to other occupations.
Asia and the Pacific is home to 40.2 million domestic workers, around half of the global total. Africa recorded the largest increase between 2019 and 2025, adding 4.2 million workers. These regional changes help explain why the global informality rate rose even while progress was recorded in many individual countries.
Among 140 countries with comparable data for 2019 and 2025, the rate of informality fell or was stable in 91. Those countries account for nearly 70 per cent of domestic workers worldwide. The remaining 49 countries, representing about 30 per cent of the total, recorded a higher rate. The global picture should therefore not be read as evidence that conditions worsened everywhere. It reflects, in part, the growing concentration of workers in countries where informal employment remains very common.
Protection gaps vary sharply by region
Informality affected 93.3 per cent of domestic workers in Africa and was nearly universal in the Arab States. Europe and Central Asia had the lowest regional rate, but more than one in three domestic workers there were still in informal employment.
Informal employment does not automatically describe identical conditions for every worker, nor does it on its own establish whether an individual employer has broken the law. It does, however, point to a widespread gap between legal recognition and the effective protections that can come with a registered employment relationship, including access to social insurance and enforceable working conditions.
The 2025 figures arrive 15 years after the adoption of the Domestic Workers Convention, which set international standards for fair terms, social protection and safeguards for people employed in or for households. The continued scale of informal employment shows that legal standards, registration systems and enforcement do not always reach a sector where work can be isolated behind private doors and spread across several households.
Pay and working-time pressures
The assessment also points to persistent differences in earnings. Domestic workers earned an average of 53.3 per cent of the monthly wage of other employees. For workers in informal employment, the average was 48.7 per cent. The overall comparison was 56.4 per cent in 2019, so the relative wage gap has widened.
That comparison does not necessarily mean domestic workers’ cash pay fell in every country. In many places, wages rose, but more slowly than the pay of other employees. The global result is also shaped by the larger role of countries with extensive domestic-work sectors and wider wage gaps. It is a measure of relative monthly earnings, rather than a statement about a single worker’s pay or household circumstances.
Hours remain another concern. More than a third of domestic workers, 35.2 per cent, worked at least 49 hours each week, including 14.6 per cent who worked 60 hours or more. At the other end of the scale, domestic workers were more likely than other employees to work very short hours. That can reflect underemployment, or work divided between several homes, and can make a regular income harder to secure.
Women made up 77.2 per cent of the domestic-work workforce. They earned an average of 48 per cent of the monthly wages of other employees, compared with 65.8 per cent for male domestic workers. The figures underline how care and household work remain tied to broader inequalities in the labour market.
Moving from recognition to practice
The policy response set out alongside the new estimates focuses on accessible registration, social-protection coverage, effective minimum wages, working-time safeguards and stronger compliance. It also highlights investment in decent care jobs, recognition of skills, collective bargaining and social dialogue.
Those steps would not remove every challenge in a sector shaped by changing care needs, migration and work across private households. But the data make the central issue clear: domestic workers are indispensable to everyday life, while formal recognition and practical protection still reach too few of them.
