Chore chart for 10 year olds

Handing each job over

• 🧺One load of laundry, wash to drawer

  The first genuinely end-to-end job on any chart here — sort, load, start, dry, put away, with nobody handing it back halfway. Safety: an adult pre-measures the detergent or it is dispensed from a bottle. Never hand over a pod; concentrated detergent capsules cause chemical burns to the eyes and irritate the airway, and they are the reason cleaning products send very large numbers of small children to emergency departments each year. Hands washed after loading, and the bottle stored where a younger sibling cannot reach it.

• 🛏️Strip and remake my own bed

  Changing bed linen sits at ten to eleven in paediatric guidance. It is a genuine force-and-coordination job — wrestling a fitted sheet is harder than it looks — which is exactly why it was not on the charts for younger children.

• 🍝Cook one meal a week

  A ten-year-old can plan and follow a recipe. Keep an adult in the kitchen whenever the hob is on or a sharp knife is out: the supervision is about heat and blades, not competence. More than nine in ten burns and scalds happen in the kitchen, and children’s skin burns more severely and at lower temperatures than adults’.

• 🧹Vacuum the main rooms

  Appropriate from about seven in paediatric guidance, and by ten it is a whole-room job rather than a supervised one. Check cord routing before they start, and treat stairs as a separate conversation.

• 🚿Clean the bathroom

  With the mild spray you keep for it, a window open, and the rule that no two products are ever mixed — mixing is what turns a cleaning job into a chemical one. Never bleach. If your usual bathroom product carries a hazard symbol, buy a child-safe one for this job rather than supervising the dangerous one.

• 🍂Rake, weed or clear the walk

  The outdoor job — with an adult, which is how our own age-by-age guide lists it. Deliberately NOT mowing (see below). If it is snow: small loads, push rather than lift, warm layers, a break before they want one, and not while ploughs are still running. An adult clears any stretch of walk that meets the road.

Why ten is where sticker charts stop working

Two things change at around this age, and both of them make a tick-box grid the wrong tool.

The first is memory. Prospective memory — remembering to do something later, with nobody prompting you — improves sharply between about eight and ten, and nine- and ten-year-olds clearly outperform six- and seven-year-olds at it. Below about eight, the chart IS the child’s memory, and nagging is a developmental mismatch rather than a discipline problem. By ten, the reminder is no longer the useful part.

The second is judgement. Somewhere around seven a child becomes able to hold a job and its quality standard in mind at the same time — which is what makes “done means the counter is dry” a teachable instruction rather than an argument. By ten they can apply that standard to themselves, which is the thing a sticker box cannot ask for and a contract can.

So the sheet drops the reminder and keeps the two things still being learned: working backwards from a deadline, and deciding for yourself when something is finished.

What the allowance surveys actually measure

This is the age at which parents start looking up averages, so it is worth being straight about what the published numbers are. All the large surveys are American and report US dollars; the ranges on this site are Canadian.

A 2025 Wells Fargo study of 1,587 US parents, fielded by Ipsos, reported an average of US$37 a week — but that is a mean across ages 5 to 17, with no median published and no age breakdown. It is not a figure for a ten-year-old, and a mean across a twelve-year age span pulled upward by teenagers is not much use to anyone.

A 2026 Wealth Enhancement survey of 1,000 US adults found people say US$21 a week is a fair allowance — which measures an opinion about fairness, not money anybody handed over. A 2019 AICPA survey put it near US$30 a week, counting “allowance and/or spending money that does not have to be paid back”, which is a much wider net than a scheduled allowance.

They disagree because they are measuring different things, not because one is wrong. In Canada the more useful finding is a different one: only 47% of Canadian parents give an allowance at all, the average starting age runs from 8.5 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba to 10.8 in British Columbia, and 83% still pay in cash (Ipsos for Mydoh, 2024, 700 parents of 6–17s).

For what to actually pay at ten, our age-by-age guide gives a band and the reasoning behind it — that is the page to read, not this one.

Questions parents ask

Can a 10 year old mow the lawn?

We have left mowing off this sheet. Paediatric guidance is at least twelve for a walk-behind mower and at least sixteen for a ride-on, in both cases only after training and with an adult supervising — and no child of any age in the yard while it is being cut. Plenty of chore lists put mowing at ten to twelve; this one follows the safety guidance instead. Raking, weeding, watering and bagging are the outdoor jobs that belong at ten.

Should a 10 year old babysit a younger sibling?

Not unsupervised. Paediatric chore guidance puts sibling supervision at ten to twelve as something done with an adult present in the home, and babysitting certification courses generally start at eleven. Twenty minutes while you are in the garden is a different thing from an evening. Provincial rules on leaving a child unsupervised vary and most set no legal minimum age at all, so check your own province rather than relying on a number you read somewhere.

What is the average allowance for a 10 year old?

There is no trustworthy single figure, and the published averages disagree because they measure different things — one is a mean spread across ages 5 to 17, another is an opinion about what would be fair, another counts any spending money at all. The section above sets out what each one actually asked. If you want a number to start from rather than a survey to argue with, use our age-by-age guide.