The Household Mental Load Index

How much of your household's mental load are you carrying?

Most households run on invisible work — anticipating, planning, remembering, coordinating. That work falls disproportionately on one person. Take five minutes to find out where it sits in your house, and how it compares to the research benchmarks.

Get your score · reserve your founding spot →

5 minutes · 30 questions · No login · Free · Founding Charter list opens at the end

1 of 250 founding spots reserved.

What you'll get

Your composite score

0–100, anchored to the 71% benchmark from Catalano Weeks (2025). Where your household sits versus the median.

A heatmap

Where it lives

Across 7 validated domains: scheduling, childcare, social, cleaning, food, finances, maintenance. The cells that light up tell you where to start.

A real number

The dollar cost

Translation of your score to an annualized USD value, using BLS American Time Use Survey methodology and the 2024 Mother's Day Index.

The science

What this is built on

The HMLI combines two of the strongest peer-reviewed instruments in the mental-load literature with one foundational qualitative framework:

Wayne et al. (2023) — Invisible Family Load Scale (IFLS-9). Nine items across managerial, cognitive, and emotional subscales. Won the 2024 Kanter Award. Source.
Catalano Weeks (2025) — the 71% study. Twenty-one items across seven validated domains, N=3,000 US parents, Cronbach α=0.92. The source of the famous 71% mother / 29% father split. Source.
Daminger (2019) — four-stage cognitive labor framework. The phrasing of every HMLI question maps to one of Daminger's stages: anticipate, identify, decide, monitor. Source.

Full methodology and citations: /hmli/methodology.

Privacy

First-party only.

· Your responses never leave Aule infrastructure.
· No third-party tracking pixels on this assessment.
· Email at the result page is optional. The assessment works without it.
· Aggregated benchmarks may inform our annual State of Household Intelligence report. Individual responses, never.
· One-click delete-my-data link on the result page and every follow-up email.

From Brennan & Haley — we read every result personally.