Free family chore chart you can fill in and print

Type who lives in your house and what needs doing. The chart below updates as you type, with a box for every day of the week. Print it, stick it on the fridge, and let people tick their own boxes.

How to make a family chore chart that lasts past week two

Most chore charts fail for the same three reasons: too many chores, jobs nobody can see being done, and a chart that lives somewhere nobody looks. Fix those and almost any layout works.

• Start with four to six chores per person. You can add more once the first ones are habits. A chart with fifteen rows is a chart nobody finishes.
• Name a finished state, not an activity. "Bedroom floor clear" is checkable; "tidy up" is an argument.
• Put it where the chore happens. The fridge works for kitchen jobs. For bedrooms, a copy on the inside of the door works better.
• Let people tick their own box. The tick is the reward for younger kids. Checking up on someone else's box turns the chart into a scoreboard for the parent.
• Rotate the jobs nobody wants. If the same person always takes out the trash, it stops being a family chore and becomes their job. Our chore rotation generator spreads those out week by week.

Chore ideas by age

Every child is different, so treat these as starting points rather than rules.

• Ages 3 to 5: put toys in a bin, put dirty clothes in the hamper, feed a pet with help, match socks, wipe up small spills.
• Ages 6 to 8: make the bed, set and clear the table, empty the silverware from the dishwasher, water plants, sort recycling.
• Ages 9 to 12: empty the whole dishwasher, vacuum a room, fold and put away their own laundry, take out trash and recycling, pack their own school bag.
• Teens: cook one simple dinner a week, do a full load of laundry, clean a bathroom, mow the lawn, help plan the week's meals and groceries.

Should chores be paid?

Families split on this, and both approaches can work. A common middle ground is to keep everyday chores unpaid, because everyone who lives in a house helps run it, and to pay for extra jobs beyond the chart, like washing the car. Whatever you pick, decide it before the chart goes up, so the first week is not spent negotiating.

Paper or app?

A paper chart is visible and costs nothing, which is why it is a good place to start. It gets harder when chores rotate, when kids move between two homes, or when you want to see how the week actually went. That is where an app helps: rotations switch themselves, and points and streaks carry over from week to week.