Hiring vs. DIY Cleaning: What's Your Free Time Worth?

They say time is money, but how much is your free time really worth to you?

For many Americans, between work, the hustle and bustle of everyday life and household chores, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all and still have time for the important things in life.

If you’re like most people, you’d rather be spending time with your family, friends or loved ones than taking on house cleaning tasks.

Hiring cleaning services not only saves you the hassle of household chores — it also frees up valuable time, which can be worth more than money.

Lisa Bowser-Hanas, owner of Dishwashing Divas Housekeeping in Wheaton, Illinois, launched her business in 2008 because she wanted to cater to people who needed a little extra help around the house.

“I needed help with dishes and laundry after having my second child,” Bowser-Hanas says. Since most housekeeping and maid services in her area didn’t offer a la carte cleaning services, Bowser-Hanas decided to start her own business.

“If you work a job and have kids — or even if you don’t have kids — you need us,” she says.

Between work and shuffling kids to and from sports and activities, not to mention cleaning house and cooking meals, “you need to be three people — it’s impossible,” Bowser-Hanas says.

“Something has to give, and something does give,” she says.

On an average day, 83 percent of women and 65 percent of men spend time doing household chores like cleaning, cooking or lawn care, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2014 American Time Use Survey.

On days they did household activities, women reported spending an average of 2.6 hours on chores, while men spent 2.1 hours. That’s on top of the 7.8 hours the average employed person spends at work most days, according to the survey.

For most people, time spent on house cleaning is not exactly considered quality time.

Meg Roberts, president of nationwide house cleaning company Molly Maid, said a 2014 company survey of 2,000 households revealed how homeowners really feel about housekeeping.

A whopping 93 percent of respondents said they would literally prefer to do anything else besides cleaning. To drive the point home, 30 percent of respondents said they’d rather ride in a car with their in-laws for six hours than clean, while 10 percent said they’d rather eat dog food.

The most despised chore was cleaning the bathroom, with 63 percent agreeing they hate cleaning the bathroom more than any other room.

Cleaning also eats up free time that could be spent enjoying a favorite activity or being with family.

Bowser-Hanas’s company requires a two-hour minimum cleaning, at a cost of $60. Depending on the size of the home, that could mean one person cleaning for two hours or two people cleaning for one hour, she says. After the first two hours, the cost is $30 per hour, per house cleaner after that.

So if a cleaning job were to take one professional house cleaner three hours to complete, it would cost a homeowner $90.

If that seems steep, consider that as of January 2016, the average hourly wage in the U.S. was $25.39, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From a dollars and cents perspective, that puts a value of $76.17 on three hours of the average American worker’s time.

Don’t forget, too, that experienced house cleaners with professional tools are going to get the job done a whole lot faster than a homeowner going the DIY route.

“We do know how to clean,” Bowser-Hanas says. “We start at the top and work our way back out.”

Molly Maid sends a team of two professional cleaners to each job, with the average house cleaning taking anywhere from an hour and 15 minutes to two and a half hours.

The same cleaning by a homeowner could take nearly two hours longer, Roberts says.

The first time they work with a new client, both Molly Maid and Dishwashing Divas start with an initial deep cleaning, which takes even longer than a typical biweekly cleaning.

“It takes sometimes twice as long to handle an initial cleaning,” Bowser-Hanas says.

Hiring house cleaning services can get you back your money’s worth in time, but you’ll also get something even more important.

“You actually get to spend weekends with your family,” Bowser-Hanas says. “You actually get to come home and cook a real meal.”

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For many people, that’s priceless.