U.S. domestic workers provide vital services in an economy that has long devalued them

Millions of U.S. households and families rely on domestic workers, including nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides; personal and home care aides; and nursing assistants working in private homes. These are professionals who support the country’s elders and disabled family members, provide care and education for children, and help to maintain working families’ households. More than 2.3 million workers perform these essential roles in the United States. Not only is domestic care work vital for the quality of life of the people that they serve, such as older adults who may wish to stay in their home, but it also supports the broader economy by allowing adult workers responsible for young children, disabled family members, or older parents to work outside of the home. Yet despite the essential nature of domestic care work, these occupations are characterized by low pay and poor working conditions and are highly racialized and gendered, especially in the South. Domestic workers today and the conditions they face are deeply connected to the gendered and racist history of care work and the intersecting identities of the women and people of color performing these duties (Childers, Sawo, and Worker 2022).

Domestic care work has a longstanding association with women’s unpaid household labor and this has diminished its perceived value to society. Because domestic work has traditionally taken place outside the formal economy, it is “simultaneously priceless and worthless” (Glenn 2010). The work has been viewed as having no economic value, even while it has been essential to the functioning of the economy. Additionally, because care work is often seen as “dirty” or undignified, it has been used to divide women by race and class and assigned to women of marginalized racial and economic status—particularly Black women and immigrant women (Nadasen and Williams 2011).

Domestic workers in the South are numerous, overwhelmingly women, and majority women of color

More domestic workers are located in the South than any other region: nearly 699,000 of the 2.3 million (see Figure A). These estimates likely undercount the total number of domestic workers, since a significant portion are paid “under the table” and because immigrants, who are particularly concentrated in domestic work, are considered even more likely to be undercounted in national surveys (Banerjee et al. 2022). Most domestic workers in the South are home care aides (61%), of which the majority are agency-based (see Figure B).

Most domestic workers across the country are women (88.1%). In the South, domestic workers are even more likely to be women (90.9%), and the majority (61%) are women of color (see Figure C). Black women make up 9.5% of non-domestic workers in the South, but they compose 30.5% of domestic workers, the highest share of any region. The South also has the highest share of Black domestic workers (men and women) of any region (33.8%). Looking at individual states in the South, Black women’s concentration in domestic work is even more striking. In Louisiana and Mississippi, approximately six in 10 domestic workers are Black women. In Delaware, the District of Columbia, Georgia, and South Carolina, Black women are between 45–50% of the domestic care workforce (see Appendix Table 1).

Immigrants are also a key part of the domestic care workforce. Both nationwide and in the South, foreign-born workers are overrepresented in domestic work. In the South, a quarter of domestic workers are foreign-born (25.7%) while only 16% of non-domestic workers in the South are foreign-born (see Figure D).1

In four Southern states (Florida, Maryland, Texas, and Virginia), immigrant workers make up at least 30% of domestic workers and make up as much as 60% in the District of Columbia. In Georgia, a quarter (25%) of home health aides are immigrants, and in Virginia, 28% of child care workers are immigrants (IRI and EPI 2024). In five Southern states and the District of Columbia, immigrants comprise a fifth or more of the domestic workforce (see Figure E).

In the South, unlike any other region in the U.S., these immigrant domestic workers are more likely to be non-U.S. citizens than naturalized citizens. Unauthorized immigrants and temporary residents with nonimmigrant visas, two subgroups of non-U.S. citizens who make up roughly half of foreign-born noncitizens, are among the most exploited laborers in the U.S. workforce because they lack labor rights or fear employer retaliation for exercising them (Passel and Krogstad 2023; Costa 2019). For some immigrants, particularly immigrant women, work experience and credentials from their native countries are downplayed or disqualified, further constraining them to low-paying jobs such as care work (Nadasen and Williams 2011).

Anti-immigrant policies proposed by the Trump administration and aligned state lawmakers in many states—including the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and severe restrictions on immigrant visas—will exacerbate the economic precarity domestic workers face and destabilize the care economy. The deportation of undocumented immigrants, combined with restrictions on legal pathways to immigration and the overall culture of fear among immigrant workers, will worsen job quality for all immigrant domestic workers and, by extension, negatively impact their ability to provide and care to the families that depend on them.

A study on the labor market impacts of immigration enforcement found that increased enforcement led to a reduction in hours worked by undocumented workers in household services (like housekeeping and child care), and that this chilling effect negatively impacted the labor supply of U.S.-born college-educated women with young children (East and Velasquez 2024). Studies from the health care industry have found that working conditions not only impact direct care workers, but also the care they provide and their patients’ outcomes (Zarska, Avgar, and Sterling 2023; Ruffini 2020). And multiple studies have found that better working conditions for child care workers led to better-quality care and better educational outcomes for children (Kashen, Potter, and Stettner 2016). Trump’s anti-immigrant policies may also impact immigrant domestic workers’ ability to find and retain jobs, exacerbating already significant shortages of child care and direct care workers (NWLC 2024; PHI 2024).

Following President Trump’s reelection and vow to enact mass deportations and limit legal immigration, Republican state lawmakers have proposed—and, in some cases, enacted—harsh anti-immigrant laws in states that are particularly dependent on immigrant workers. In a special session Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called to “prepare to lead on the Trump Administration’s deportation program,” (DeSantis 2025) the legislature approved two far-reaching proposals that require public and private agencies cooperate with federal immigration authorities and enhance criminal penalties against undocumented people, including mandatory (and likely unconstitutional) death penalty sentences for certain serious crimes (CBS News Miami 2025). Tennessee lawmakers enacted a bill—also likely to face legal challenges—to impose a prison sentence of up to six years for any public official who votes in favor of sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants (Wadhwani 2025). Similar bills have been filed in Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Virginia.2

The concentration of Black women in domestic care work in the South is intimately tied to the legacy of slavery and racist occupational segregation

The current demographic makeup of the home health care workforce in the South is not an accident but instead reflects our cultural devaluation of care work, which is inextricable from the legacy of slavery and the institutionalized segregation that followed.

During slavery, Black women were forced to provide care work for the white families that enslaved them. Many enslaved women were assigned to both the labor-intensive, difficult work of cleaning, laundering, and cooking, as well as the nurturing work of caring for children and sick or disabled family members. Notably, while their ability to bear children was valued, their health and love for their own children was not. Instead, while they were forced to care for their enslavers’ children and family, their own children were forced into hard labor from an early age (Glenn 2010).

After Emancipation, Southern lawmakers found new ways to disenfranchise Black people, including through black codes, which restricted Black workers’ options for employment to farming or domestic work. Even five decades later, during World War I, the Greenville, SC, City Council proposed an ordinance to require Black women to carry proof of employment under threat of imprisonment in response to “complaints” that Black women receiving federal assistance as soldiers’ wives were able to decline employment as domestic workers in white homes (Floyd and Wikle 2024).

Until the 1970s—over a century since the abolition of slavery—Black women faced extremely limited economic opportunities because employers would hire them overwhelmingly for low-wage agriculture and domestic service work and excluded them from better paying, higher-status jobs in other industries (Banks 2019). The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the federal minimum wage and overtime pay and outlawed oppressive child labor, intentionally excluded workers in agriculture and domestic service work—the same industries in which Black people were forced to work during slavery and in which they were still overwhelmingly employed after its abolition—as a proxy to deny workers of color basic worker protections (King 1992; Dixon 2021).

Domestic workers receive shockingly low wages and experience high rates of poverty

One consequence of the domestic care workforce being primarily comprised of people of color and immigrant women is the low pay and poor working conditions of domestic care work. Nationwide, the typical domestic worker was paid only $20,926 per year in 2023, less than half as much (44%) as non-domestic workers ($47,270). In the South, median domestic worker wages are the lowest of any region—only $18,252 annually (see Figure F). In comparison, the median earnings for all other workers in the South is almost 2.5 times as much—$44,232.

Among domestic workers, earnings vary across different occupations. Both in the U.S. as a whole and in the South, non-agency-based home care aides earn slightly more than domestic workers overall, while house cleaners and child care workers earn less than domestic workers overall. In the South, the earnings gap is particularly extreme for home-based child care providers, in which the median worker earns just $14,967 annually—18% less than other domestic workers in the South (see Figure G). While non-agency-based home care aides in the South have the highest median wage—$20,800 annually, or about 13% more than other domestic workers—they still earn less than half of non-domestic workers in the region, who make $44,232 per year at the median. For agency-based home care aides, who make up the majority of domestic workers in the South, the typical worker earns just $18,255 annually.

The low wages of caregiving domestic workers in the South are emblematic of the broad devaluing of care work throughout the U.S. economy and the devaluing of work performed by women, immigrants, and workers of color. Among domestic workers, Black, Hispanic, women, and foreign-born non-U.S. citizen workers are typically paid less than their white, male, and U.S.-born and naturalized counterparts (Banerjee et al. 2022). Research also shows that care workers, including domestic workers like child care workers and home health aides, experience a significant “care work pay penalty.” This means that even controlling for characteristics such as education, demographic characteristics, geography, and credentials, domestic care workers are still paid less than similar workers in other industries (Banerjee, Gould, and Sawo 2021).

Low wages for domestic care workers are compounded by insufficient hours. Domestic workers are more likely to work part time than non-domestic workers, but they are also more than twice as likely as other workers to desire full-time work. Domestic workers are also less likely to receive employer-provided benefits such as health care and retirement. As a result of low pay, inadequate hours, and lack of benefits, domestic workers experience poverty at more than three times the rate of other workers (Banerjee et al. 2022).

Hidden from public view and excluded from worker protections, domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation

Domestic workers have been left out of many of the protections afforded other workers. Federal anti-discrimination laws including the Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act generally cover employers with multiple employees, effectively excluding many domestic workers. Domestic workers were excluded from Social Security until 1950, and only earned the right to a minimum wage and overtime pay in 1974 (Nadasen and Williams 2011).4 Domestic workers are also excluded from the National Labor Relations Act (Banerjee et al. 2022). As a result, they often have no pathway to unionization and the wage and safety benefits unions can provide.

Domestic workers employed directly by households are also excluded from protections under the Occupational Safety and Health Act if they are employed directly by households (OSHA 1975). Because of this exclusion, domestic workers have no protection from the many workplace hazardous they face, including toxic chemicals that irritate their skin and give them breathing complications, as well as strenuous physical tasks like lifting their clients without assistance, leading to high rates of on-the-job injuries. Indeed, 38% of nannies and caregivers and 47% of housecleaners reported suffering from job-related wrist, shoulder, elbow, or hip pain in the past 12 months, and 29% of housecleaners reported suffering from skin irritation over the same period (Theodore, Gutelius, and Burnham 2018).   

Domestic workers are more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation than other workers. This vulnerability stems in part from the unique employment arrangement of domestic work. Because they work in private homes, domestic workers are outside of public view and isolated from other workers, making it more difficult for these workers to build solidarity or use traditional levers of pressure to increase their pay or working conditions. Not only are domestic workers underpaid, subject to fewer worker protections, and exposed to serious safety hazards, but they often also face verbal, psychological, and physical abuse, sexual assault, and harassment—in some cases, they even fall victim to de facto imprisonment and forced servitude (Andolan et al. 2019).  

Unless they work for an agency or larger firm, domestic workers have few pathways for raising complaints or reporting issues with their employer. For undocumented immigrant domestic workers, this isolation is compounded by fear of reprisals from employers that could lead to exposure to immigration law enforcement. The Trump administration’s extreme anti-immigrant agenda will only exacerbate the fear and precarity that undocumented immigrant domestic workers face in the workplace.  

The origins and evolution of domestic work in the U.S. illustrate the Southern economic development model at work. Southern lawmakers sought to maintain the subjugation of Black women by confining them to low-paid, precarious jobs, with limited rights and few avenues to organize for better working conditions (Childers 2023). While these policies have succeeded in maintaining racial hierarchies and benefiting Southern business interests, they have failed to produce a system of affordable, high-quality care for families and family-sustaining jobs for the workers who provide that care.  

Recommendations: State lawmakers must extend workplace protections to domestic workers

One pathway for extending protections to domestic workers is the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (DWBR). DWBR legislation at the federal, state, and local level extends rights and protections to domestic workers including overtime pay, health and safety standards, workplace protections against discrimination and abuse, and paid days off (Nadasen and Williams 2011). Twelve states and Washington, D.C., have passed DWBR legislation, but only one of these states (Virginia) is in the South (NDWA 2024).

State lawmakers can also amend their state laws to allow certain domestic workers to form unions. For example, in 2013 Minnesota amended state labor law to allow domestic workers who are paid through Medicaid or other public funds to bargain collectively with a state agency. Last year Minnesota’s unionized home care workers won a 31% wage increase over the next two years (Nesterak 2024).

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allocated $12.7 billion for states to strengthen and expand access to home and community-based services (HCBS), which allow older adults, people with disabilities, and others to receive long-term care at home and in their communities. In addition to using the funds to expand eligibility and access to HCBS, states could use the funds to increase the pay and benefits of direct care workers. Many states in the South—including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia—committed to using federal funds to invest in HCBS (Childers, Sawo, and Worker 2022). Yet ahead of the 2024 year-end deadline to obligate State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, three Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky) had obligated less than two-thirds of their funds, and four states (Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee) had spent less than 20% of their funds (Kamper and Cohn 2024).

At the most basic level, Southern state lawmakers should eliminate harmful state preemption of local labor ordinances and allow cities and counties to set higher minimum wages, guarantee paid sick days, and establish other worker protections. To the extent that domestic workers are eligible for stronger labor standards set by localities, the state should not stand in their way (Blair et al. 2020).

---

Appendix

Notes

1. “Foreign-born” includes both naturalized U.S. citizens (people who were not born U.S. citizens but later became U.S. citizens) and non-citizen workers who were born outside the United States. “Non-citizens” include green card holders who hold similar rights as U.S. citizens, as well as unauthorized immigrants and temporary residents.

2. GA SB 21, KY HB 213, MS SB 1484, OK SB 868, and VA SB 1268, SB 1141, and SB 772.

3. In 1974, Congress extended the FLSA to domestic workers but excluded those providing “companionship services”. In 2015, the Department of Labor extended FLSA protection to domestic workers providing companionship services (Pandey, Parreñas, and Sabio 2021).

References

Andolan (Organizing South Asian Workers), CASA of Maryland, Domestic Workers United, Global Rights, University of North Carolina School of Law Human Rights Policy Clinic, Stefani Bonato, McKenna Coll, and Eric Tars. 2019. Domestic Workers’ Rights in the United States: A Report Prepared for the U.N. Human Rights Committee. University of North Carolina, 2019.

Banerjee, Asha, Katherine DeCourcy, Kyle Moore, and Julia Wolfe. 2022. Domestic Workers Chartbook 2022. Economic Policy Institute, November 2022.

Banerjee, Asha, Elise Gould, and Marokey Sawo. 2021. Setting Higher Wages for Child Care and Home Health Care Workers is Long Overdue. Economic Policy Institute, November 2021.

Banks, Nina. 2019. “Black Women’s Labor Market History Reveals Deep-Seated Race and Gender Discrimination.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), February 2019.

Blair, Hunter, David Cooper, Julia Wolfe, and Jaimie Worker. 2020. Preempting Progress: State Interference in Local Policymaking Prevents People of Color, Women, and Low-Income Workers from Making Ends Meet in the South. Economic Policy Institute, September 2020.

Burnham, Linda, Lisa Moore, and Emilee Ohia. 2018. Living in the Shadows: Latina Domestic Workers in the Texas-Mexico Border Region. National Domestic Workers Alliance, June 2018.

CBS News Miami. 2025. “Florida Gov. DeSantis Signs Sweeping Immigration Bills.” CBS News, February 13, 2025.

Childers, Chandra, Marokey Sawo, and Jaimie Worker. 2022. “State Policy Solutions for Good Home Health Care Jobs—Nearly Half Held by Black Women in the South—Should Address the Legacy of Racism, Sexism, and Xenophobia in the Workforce.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), August 15, 2022.

Childers, Chandra. 2023. Rooted in Racism and Economic Exploitation: The Failed Southern Economic Development Model. Economic Policy Institute, October 2023.

Costa, Daniel. 2019. Employers Increase their Profits and Put Downward Pressure on Wages and Labor Standards by Exploiting Migrant Workers. Economic Policy Institute, August 2019.

DeSantis, Ron. 2025. “Today, I called for a special session of the Florida legislature the week of January 27 to prepare Florida to lead on the Trump Administration’s deportation program.” X, @GovRonDeSantis, January 13, 2025, 10:42 a.m.

Dixon, Rebecca. 2021. From Excluded to Essential: Tracing the Racist Exclusion of Farmworkers, Domestic Workers, and Tipped Workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act. Testimony by National Employment Law Project before the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee, Workforce Protections Subcommittee, May 2021.

East, Chloe N., and Andrea Velásquez. 2024. Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement: Household Services and High-Educated Mothers’ Work. September 2024.

Floyd, Ife Finch, and Suzanne Wikle. 2024. Work Requirements are Rooted in the History of Slavery. Nonprofit Quarterly, February 29, 2024.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2010. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Immigration Research Institute and Economic Policy Institute (IRI and EPI). 2024. Immigrants Are a Vital Part of America’s Future. October 2024.

Kamper, Dave, and Emma Cohn. 2024. “Time is Running Out for State and Local Governments to Obligate American Rescue Plan Funds.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), October 17, 2024.

Kashen, Julie, Halley Potter, and Andrew Stettner. 2016. Quality Jobs, Quality Child Care: The Case for a Well-Paid, Diverse Early Education Workforce. The Century Foundation, June 2016.

King, Mary C. 1992. “Occupational Segregation by Race and Sex, 1940-88.” Monthly Labor Review 115, no. 4: 30–37.

Nadasen, Premilla, and Tiffany Williams. 2011. Valuing Domestic Work. Barnard Center for Research on Women, January 2011.

National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). 2024. “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” (web page). Updated 2024.

National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). 2024. “NWLC: Updated Labor Statistics Show Alarming Decline in Child Care Workers as Funding Cliff Approaches” (press release). September 9, 2024.

Nesterak, Max. 2024. “Gov. Tim Walz Highlights 31% Pay Increase for Unionized Home Care Workers.” Minnesota Reformer, January 24, 2024.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). 1975. “Policy as to Domestic Household Employment Activities in Private Residences.” Standard Number 1975.6.

Pandey, Kritika, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, and Gianne Sheena Sabio. 2021. “Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Behavioral Scientist 65, no. 10 (March 2021): 1287–1301.

Passel, Jeffrey S., and Jens Manuel Krogstad. 2023. What We Know About Unauthorized Immigrants Living in the U.S. Pew Research Center, November 2023.

PHI. 2024. Direct Care Workers in the United States: Key Facts 2024. September 2024.

Ruffini, Krista. 2020. “Worker Earnings, Service Quality, and Firm Profitability: Evidence from Nursing Homes and Minimum Wage Reforms.” Washington Center for Equitable Growth Working Paper, June 2020.

Theodore, Nik, Beth Gutelius, and Linda Burnham. 2018. “Workplace Health and Safety Hazards Faced by Informally Employed Domestic Workers in the United States.” Workplace Health & Safety 67, no. 1: 9–17.

Wadhwani, Anita. 2025. “Tennessee House Passes Immigration Enforcement Bill; ACLU Plans Legal Challenge.” Tennessee Lookout, January 30, 2025.

Wolfe, Julia, Jori Kandra, Lora Engdahl, and Heidi Shierholz. 2020. Domestic Workers Chartbook. Economic Policy Institute, May 2020.

Zarska, Aleksandra, Ariel C. Avgar, and Madeline R. Sterling. 2021. “Relationship between Working Conditions, Worker Outcomes, and Patient Care: A Theoretical Model for Frontline Health Care Workers.” American Journal of Medical Quality 36, no. 6: 429–440.