Kelly Hubbell was working full-time in tech sales and raising two children when the strain became impossible to ignore. Her kids were already in daycare, so a nanny was not the answer—yet the household workload kept mounting, and she needed support. The standard options each cover a slice of household work—childcare services focus on the children, cleaning services on the chores—while the planning and coordination in between typically go without a hired owner.

So she wrote down every task required to keep her home running. The total came to 23 hours a week. Most of that time, she realized, was not spent on the chores themselves but on the mental effort of planning them.

"I just thought, wouldn't it be awesome if I could clone myself?" Hubbell said.

Her solution was to find what she calls a "house manager"—someone to take over the logistics and errands she had been cramming into her evenings and weekends. She hired one, and the effect was immediate.

"It completely changed my life," Hubbell 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 relief turned into a company. In 2023, during her third maternity leave, Hubbell founded Sage Haus, a white-glove service that helps parents hire a house manager and build the "home-management systems" that make handing off work possible. The timing is notable: women now hold more U.S. payroll jobs than men for only the third time in the nation's history, according to Fortune reporting, yet they still shoulder most of the planning that keeps a household running.

Solving the dual-income time problem

Sage Haus is not alone in the market. "House manager" listings now appear on Indeed and Care.com, and other agencies have emerged to place house managers with busy parents. The title's appearance on mainstream job boards, alongside dedicated placement agencies, points to a role assembling the infrastructure of a recognized occupation.

The line between a house manager and a babysitter comes down to ownership. A babysitter who noticed a child had outgrown their shoes, took the family credit card, and bought a new pair without asking would be overstepping. For a house manager, that initiative is the job.

Such help carries a premium. Families working with Sage Haus typically pay a house manager $25 to $45 an hour for 15 to 20 hours a week, according to the company—roughly $20,000 to $47,000 a year. Full-time house managers generally earn $50,000 to $120,000, depending on location and scope, and Sage Haus charges families a flat placement fee rather than a percentage of salary—a departure from the commission structures common in traditional staffing.

Those figures sit well above the broader market: house manager job postings on Indeed average about $23 an hour.

The service targets dual-income families who simply run out of hours in the day. Hubbell said many of the women she has worked with told her that, before hiring help, they feared they would have to leave careers they loved in order to take care of their homes.

That fear has data behind it. KPMG research found that mothers of young children cut their hours or left work at higher rates than fathers, pushed by return-to-office mandates and the scarcity and cost of childcare.

Putting a price on the mental load

In the U.S., mothers handle 71% of household mental-load tasks—the cognitive work of planning meals, arranging activities, and keeping family life on schedule—according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne. Fathers report handling 45%; the shares overlap because some tasks are shared.

In an era when an app can deliver your dinner or assemble your IKEA furniture, Sage Haus is working to break the taboo around hiring help 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," Hubbell 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."

In 2024, Hubbell quit her job to run Sage Haus full time. The company now has more than 60 employees and works with about 100 families a month across the U.S. and Canada, she said.

Sage Haus also draws on a network of more than 7,000 house managers and sells a $99 House Manager Certification course, which teaches them to anticipate needs, practice discretion, and become an integral part of a household.

Hubbell sees the role as a career path in both directions. She believes house managers could move into corporate administrative work, and she has watched executive assistants switch into house management.

"I do believe that it takes high executive functioning to be in this role," Hubbell said.

The value of work no one pays for

The work being handed off was never small. In 2020, Oxfam estimated that the unpaid care work done by women and girls worldwide is worth at least $10.8 trillion a year. In the U.S. alone, unpaid household labor is worth up to $6 trillion a year, or about a fifth of GDP, according to Fortune—and none of it appears in official growth figures.

Paying someone to make your grocery list may look like a late-stage-capitalist offering for families that have it all. But while hiring help has long been considered a luxury, companies like Sage Haus are asking a different question: why was work traditionally done by women ever free in the first place?

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.