Four in five domestic workers remain outside the reach of formal labor protections

On 27 October 2026, the International Labour Organization published new estimates placing the global Domestic worker workforce at 80 million in 2025, up from 75.6 million in 2019, of whom 66.5 million — roughly four in five — are in informal employment with no contract, no social security, and no legal recourse when things go wrong, according to the figures released alongside the ILO’s updated assessment of the sector. That is a 5.1 million increase in informally employed domestic workers over the six-year period, even as the total workforce also grew. The number is not a rounding artifact: 83.1 percent of the 80 million are outside the boundary of formal labor law, and the wage penalty for being on the wrong side of that line is stark. Domestic workers as a group earn 53.3 percent of the average wage in their economies; those in informal employment earn 48.7 percent.

The hours data is almost as telling. More than a third of domestic workers logged 49 or more hours per week in 2025, and 14.6 percent worked 60 or more. Those are not edge cases in a few outlier economies; they are the distribution across the sector as a whole, and the workers doing the longest shifts are disproportionately the women — 77.2 percent of all domestic workers — who are least likely to have a written agreement specifying their pay or their schedule in the first place.

The geographic picture the ILO lays out is more uneven than the global average suggests. In Africa, informal employment among domestic workers stands at 93.3 percent; in the Arab States it is close to universal. But the ILO’s country-by-country breakdown across the 140 economies with comparable data shows that 91 of them saw informality either decline or hold steady over the 2019-to-2025 period. The remaining 49 moved in the wrong direction. That split — a slow drift toward formality in most places, offset by genuine backsliding in a third — is what makes the headline number both discouraging and, in a narrow sense, not the worst case.

The instrument the ILO points to for closing the gap is Convention No. 189, the 2011 treaty that sets minimum standards for working hours, rest, pay, and protection from abuse for domestic workers. As of the October 2026 report, 40 countries have ratified it. That is a meaningful share of the 187 ILO member states, but it also means the large majority of the world’s domestic workers live in countries where the convention’s protections exist on paper in Geneva and not in their kitchen or bedroom. The ILO’s general director, Sahra Razavi, used two words that have stuck in the sector’s lexicon for a decade: domestic workers are “invisible, undervalued.” The 2026 data confirms she was not being figurative.

Patrick Belser, who heads the ILO’s Informal Work Branch, framed the update in terms that make the policy gap explicit: “With more than 66 million domestic workers still in informal employment and their wages falling further behind those of other employees, much more needs to be done.” The wage gap is the quiet part of that sentence. Domestic workers in informal employment are not merely lacking protections; they are earning a measurably smaller share of what their peers in other sectors earn, and the share is shrinking relative to the average. Informality, in this context, is not a temporary transition state. It is the steady state for the vast majority of the people who clean other people’s homes, care for their children and elderly parents, and do so without a single line in a labor code that says they are covered.

The ILO report’s own framing — “progress but informality remains widespread” — captures the tension accurately. The workforce is growing, which means the absolute number of people without protections is growing even where the rate is falling. A country that moves its domestic-worker informality rate from 80 percent to 75 percent has made real headway, but if its domestic workforce grew 10 percent in the same window, the number of workers without a contract, without paid leave, without a legal path to a grievance, is still going up. Four in five is the number that will define this report in the years ahead, and 40 ratifications of Convention No. 189 is the number that explains why it is still four in five.

Sources

• Four in five domestic workers lack formal job protections, UN finds — UN News (United Nations)
• Domestic workers see progress but informality remains widespread — International Labour Organization