House manager services are emerging as a solution for dual-income families struggling with the planning, errands and organisation required to keep a home running. Sage Haus, founded by former tech sales worker Kelly Hubbell, helps parents hire professionals to take on that work.
Hubbell began looking for help after calculating that household management was taking up 23 hours of her week, despite both of her children attending daycare. She found that much of the burden came not from completing chores, but from anticipating and organising them.
“I just thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if I could clone myself?” she said.
Rather than hiring a nanny, Hubbell employed a house manager to take charge of the logistics and errands she had been fitting around her job and family life.
“It completely changed my life,” she said. “Overnight, I felt like I could be a present parent, and I had relief from the mental load, because I was able to fully hand off tasks.”
That experience led Hubbell to establish Sage Haus in 2023, during her third maternity leave. The company helps families recruit house managers and create systems that allow responsibilities to be transferred fully, rather than simply delegating individual chores.
What a house manager does
The role differs from that of a babysitter because it involves ownership of household tasks. A house manager might notice that a child needs new shoes, buy them and deal with the practical arrangements without waiting for instructions.
Sage Haus families typically pay between $25 and $45 an hour for 15 to 20 hours of support each week, according to the company. That works out at roughly $20,000 to $47,000 a year, while full-time house managers generally earn between $50,000 and $120,000, depending on their location and responsibilities.
The company charges a flat placement fee rather than taking a percentage of the manager’s salary. House manager job postings on Indeed average about $23 an hour.
Other agencies have also begun placing house managers with busy parents, with the role appearing on job listings sites including Indeed and Care.com.
Hubbell said many of the women she worked with feared they would have to leave careers they enjoyed in order to manage their homes. Research by KPMG found that mothers of young children reduced their hours or left work at higher rates than fathers, with return-to-office requirements and limited, expensive childcare among the pressures identified.
The cost of the household mental load
A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne found that mothers handled 71% of household mental-load tasks in the US. The work includes planning meals, arranging activities and keeping family life on schedule; fathers reported handling 45%, with the figures overlapping because some responsibilities were shared.
Hubbell said Sage Haus was intended to challenge the reluctance many people feel about paying for support at home.
“We are putting a value on what has historically been invisible labor on the backs of mostly women, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” she said. “Part of our mission is to normalize this, to take out the shame and the guilt around getting the kind of support that we need.”
Hubbell left her job in 2024 to run Sage Haus full time. She said the company now has more than 60 employees and works with about 100 families each month across the US and Canada.
Its network includes more than 7,000 house managers, while a $99 certification course teaches candidates to anticipate household needs, maintain discretion and become an integral part of family life.
Hubbell believes the work can provide a career route in both directions, with house managers potentially moving into corporate administrative roles and executive assistants switching into household management. “I do believe that it takes high executive functioning to be in this role,” she said.
The wider value of the work being delegated is substantial. Oxfam estimated in 2020 that unpaid care work carried out by women and girls worldwide was worth at least $10.8 trillion a year. In the US, unpaid household labour has been valued at up to $6 trillion annually, although it is not included in official growth figures.
