Korean fathers nearly halved the home-work gap in a decade, yet mothers still get 37 fewer minutes of leisure

In 2024, married mothers aged 25 to 39 in South Korean two-income households spent four hours a day on housework and caregiving, against two hours and 17 minutes for fathers, the Ministry of Data and Statistics reported on October 19, 2026. The gap of one hour and 43 minutes is nearly half the one measured in 2014. Mothers also had 37 fewer minutes of leisure each day.

A ledger ten years apart

The report compares the 2014 and 2024 national time-use surveys for adults aged 25 to 39, sorted by marital status and by whether a child under 18 lives at home. For two-income couples with children, the gap in daily housework and caregiving stood at three hours and 16 minutes in 2014. Ten years later it is one hour and 43 minutes, according to the Korea Times and the Korea JoongAng Daily.

The narrowing came mostly from one side of the table. Fathers in two-income homes went from one hour and 14 minutes of housework and caregiving to two hours and 17 minutes, a gain of one hour and three minutes. Mothers went from four hours and 30 minutes to four hours, a drop of 30 minutes. Add the two moves and the gap closes by one hour and 33 minutes. Fathers' extra hour does most of the closing, and mothers' half hour does the rest.

Seoul Economic Daily splits the work in two. Fathers' housework doubled from 27 minutes to 54 minutes, while their time caring for children and other family members rose from 47 minutes to one hour and 22 minutes. Mothers' housework fell by 30 minutes, and their care time did not change at all.

So the part of the ledger that moved for mothers was the housework. The care stayed where it was.

Single-income households show the same direction at a larger scale. Mothers there spent seven hours and 28 minutes a day on housework and caregiving, five hours and 17 minutes more than fathers, who logged two hours and 11 minutes. A decade earlier the gap was six hours and 25 minutes, so it shrank by one hour and eight minutes.

The second shift, counted in minutes

Fathers in two-income homes spent five hours and 20 minutes a day on paid work, an hour more than mothers at four hours and 20 minutes. Paid work is where fathers lead. Add unpaid work and the order flips: mothers worked eight hours and 20 minutes in total, fathers seven hours and 37 minutes, a difference of 43 minutes.

Leisure follows the same arithmetic. Fathers had an average of three hours and 15 minutes a day, mothers two hours and 38 minutes. The 37 minutes between them is the sort of gap nobody can bill an employer for, and a household feels it late at night, when the last chore is done and the evening has already ended.

The Korea Times pairs the statistics with one household. A 33-year-old bank employee surnamed Jung, raising a 3-year-old son in Seoul's Yeongdeungpo District, uses a reduced working hours program for parents and leaves work an hour or two early. Her mother-in-law minds the child until she gets home. After that she feeds, bathes and plays with her son until her husband arrives, then showers, washes up and tidies while he plays with the boy. "Even though I leave work early, it feels like I work overtime every day," she told the paper. She credits her husband with doing "quite a lot of child care", yet says "a larger share of the housework naturally falls to me." The word "naturally" does a lot of work in that sentence, as it does in most explanations of who does what. One household is an illustration, not a sample.

A stopwatch also has a blind spot. Time-use diaries count the hours spent on a task, not who remembered that the task existed. An earlier brief covered the mothers' and fathers' shares of household mental tasks, the planning and remembering that never shows up as minutes.

What a child does to the account

The gap depends heavily on whether children are in the picture. Among two-income married couples with no child under 18 at home, women spent one hour and 39 minutes a day on housework and caregiving and men one hour and five minutes, a difference of 34 minutes. Seoul Economic Daily notes that this is about one-third of the gap among couples with children.

The report also compares married young adults with children and their unmarried peers. The first group spent four hours and 15 minutes a day on housework and caregiving, against 52 minutes for the second, a difference of three hours and 23 minutes. They spent 49 minutes less on paid work and one hour and 29 minutes less on leisure, with three hours and 13 minutes of leisure against four hours and 42 minutes.

Children, in other words, add hours to the account, and the report counts them in minutes. Whether the new hours are shared in proportion is the question the 43-minute and 37-minute gaps answer.

The ratio is the plainest way to read it. Mothers in two-income homes logged about 1.8 times the housework and caregiving of fathers, and married young adults with children logged 4.9 times what their unmarried peers did.

Fathers on leave, and the 2015 baseline

A second set of Korean figures bears on the same question. In July 2026, the Ministry of Employment and Labor reported that 103,983 people drew parental leave benefits in the first half of the year, up 9.5% from 94,993 a year earlier. Men accounted for 40,320 of them, or 38.8%.

The male share first passed 30% in 2024 and stood at 36.5% in 2025, according to Seoul Economic Daily. The government credits higher benefits, the "6+6 Parental Leave System for Both Parents" introduced in 2024 and larger subsidies for replacement workers. Spousal maternity leave rose from 10,328 recipients to 15,820 over the same comparison.

Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon said the results show "a work-family balance culture is taking root in our society", in the outlet's translation of his Korean remarks. Benefit counts measure who takes leave, not how many hours fathers then spend at home, and these reports do not give leave lengths. Another brief set that distinction out for Germany, where plans for months at home differed sharply between fathers and mothers.

The baseline is older and drawn from a different yardstick. In December 2015, the Korea Herald reported on a work-life balance index from Statistics Korea and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, built on OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) data for 29 countries from 1999 to 2011. Korean men spent 45 minutes a day on household chores, less than a third of the OECD average of 139 minutes. Korean women spent 227 minutes, below the OECD average of 274 minutes, and only women in Sweden and Norway spent less time on chores than Korean women.

The same report put the gender gap in unpaid work at seventh highest in the bloc, with Norway lowest at a difference of 31 minutes. Among Korean two-income households, husbands spent 40 minutes a day on housework in 2014 and working wives 194 minutes. Those figures cover all ages and housework alone, while the 2024 report covers parents aged 25 to 39 and adds caregiving, so the two cannot be subtracted from each other.

The 2015 article also recorded what leave cost at the time. Only 59.6 percent of people who took paid leave returned to their original workplace, and 21.8 percent of married women had quit a job because of marriage, pregnancy or raising a child, and women in their 30s accounted for the largest share of those career breaks, at 53.1 percent.

What comes next

We could not open the ministry's own report, so the figures here come from three Korean English-language outlets that match each other to the minute. The Korea JoongAng Daily quotes Data and Statistics Minister Ahn Hyung-jun saying the ministry will keep tracking time use through the survey and "provide essential data to help develop policies that support work-life balance". No date for the next survey is given.

Starting November 27, 2026, the paid period of fertility treatment leave is due to expand from two days to four days, the last item on a list of work-family measures the ministry has been rolling out through 2026.