Somewhere around week three, every host family hits the dishwasher question. The au pair is standing in the kitchen at 4 PM, the kids are at school, the dishwasher is full — can you ask her to unload it? The regulation that governs the answer is 22 CFR § 62.31, and its standard is simple to state and easy to get wrong: an au pair may perform childcare and tasks directly related to your children. Nothing else.
That one sentence settles more household disputes than any house meeting. Kids' laundry: yes. Family laundry: no. The kids' mac and cheese: yes. Your dinner party: no. This guide gives you the full can/can't list, an honest answer to the cooking-and-cleaning question, the gray zones settled one by one, and a sample week that shows what the boundary looks like in practice. For how the program works end to end — visa, stipend, education requirement — start with our complete au pair program guide.
Under 22 CFR § 62.31, au pairs may do only childcare and chores directly related to the children: kids' meals, kids' laundry, tidying kids' rooms and play areas, school runs, and activities. They may not do family laundry, clean bathrooms, cook adult meals, run household errands, or provide pet or elder care. Work is capped at 45 hours per week and 10 per day (details on our schedule-rules page), and the test for any borderline task is one question: would this need doing if the children didn't exist? If yes, it's not the au pair's job.
The Rule That Governs Everything: "Directly Related to Childcare"
The au pair program is a State Department cultural exchange, not a domestic-staffing visa. The regulation limits au pairs to child care services, and State Department guidance has consistently interpreted permissible housework as light tasks directly related to the children — a standard sponsors restate in every host-family agreement. Treating an au pair as general household help is a program violation, and it is also the single most common source of duties-related friction that ends in rematch.
The working test coordinators teach: would this task exist if the children didn't? The third-grader's soccer uniform needs washing because the third-grader exists — au pair task. The master bathroom needs cleaning regardless — not her task, ever, at any stipend. You are paying at least $195.75 per week in 2026 for 45 available hours of childcare; you are not paying for housekeeping at any price, because the program does not sell it.
What an Au Pair Can Do: The Full List
Everything below is squarely inside the childcare-related boundary:
- Direct care: supervision, play, bathing, dressing, diapering, bedtime routines, comforting night wakings for children over 3 months (au pairs may not be the sole caregiver for infants under 3 months).
- Kids' meals: planning, preparing, and cleaning up breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner for the children — including packing school lunches.
- Kids' laundry: washing, folding, and putting away the children's clothes and bedding.
- Kids' spaces: tidying bedrooms, play areas, and the toy end of the living room; washing the children's dishes and bottles.
- Transportation: school drop-off and pickup, activities, playdates, pediatrician appointments — if driving was agreed in the match.
- School-adjacent support: homework supervision, reading together, helping pack backpacks, communicating pickup logistics with you.
- Activities and enrichment: park trips, crafts, sports practice, speaking her native language with the kids — the cultural-exchange part working as designed.
- Kid-related errands: picking up the birthday-party gift, the diaper run — errands that exist because of the children.
One more claim on her week that is neither duty nor free time: the education requirement. Every standard-program au pair must complete six semester hours of academic credit during her year, and the host family contributes up to $500 toward tuition. Her class schedule is not something you assign, but it is something your duties schedule has to accommodate — a Tuesday-evening course means Tuesday bedtime is yours. Build the duties list around the class calendar from week one, not after the first conflict.
Do Au Pairs Cook and Clean? The Honest Answer
Yes for the children, no for the household — and the families who get in trouble are the ones who round "yes for the children" up to "mostly yes." An au pair can cook the kids' dinner every night. She cannot cook the family's dinner, even if the kids eat it too and it "seems silly to make two meals." The practical line most sponsors bless: she cooks for the kids; if the adults happen to eat what the kids eat, fine — but the moment meal prep is scaled and scheduled around the adults, it has become adult cooking.
Cleaning follows the same shape. She cleans up after the children and after herself — kids' dishes, kids' rooms, the craft-glitter blast radius, her own bathroom and bedroom as a member of the household. She does not clean your bathrooms, vacuum the house, wash windows, or do the deep-clean before your in-laws visit. If your mental job description includes the word "housekeeping," the honest answer is that you want a nanny or house manager, not an au pair — a different role at a genuinely different price.
What You Can't Ask: The Off-Limits List
- Family laundry — yours, and ironing your work shirts.
- Housecleaning — bathrooms, floors, windows, kitchen deep-cleans, "just keeping the house presentable."
- Adult meals — cooking for you, your guests, or your freezer stash.
- Household errands — your dry cleaning, the family grocery run, waiting for the plumber.
- Pet care — walking, feeding, or vet runs. Pets are not children under the regulation, however the household feels about it.
- Elder or non-child care — help with a grandparent or any adult in the home.
- Work for anyone else — no babysitting for neighbors or paid side work of any kind; J-1 au pairs may not take outside employment.
None of this becomes allowed by paying extra, and that is the part families most often misunderstand. A bonus above the stipend is generous; a bonus in exchange for bathroom-cleaning is a program violation with an audit trail. Au pairs compare duties at cluster meetings the way you compare compensation with colleagues, and coordinators hear about scope creep fast.
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| Task | Allowed? | The reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Unloading the dishwasher | If it's mostly kids' dishes, yes; as a standing household chore, no | The test is whose mess it is, not where the dishes sit |
| Cooking one family dinner the kids share | Gray — kid-driven yes, adult-driven no | Cooking for the kids that adults share is fine; a meal service for the household is not |
| Grocery shopping | Kids' items yes; the family's weekly haul no | Kid-related errands are in scope; household errands are not |
| Walking the dog while the baby naps | No, if it's an assigned duty | Pet care is out of scope even in idle hours; volunteering because she loves the dog is her choice, not your schedule line |
| Tidying the living room | The toy half yes, the household half no | Kids' spaces are in scope; general tidiness is not |
| Driving you to the airport | No | Adult transportation is a household errand |
| Watching a visiting cousin | No, not as a duty | She is matched to care for your children only |
When a task is genuinely ambiguous, ask your local coordinator and take her answer — sponsors would far rather field the dishwasher question than mediate the resentment six weeks later.
Hours Are a Separate Rulebook
Duties define what an au pair does; a second set of rules defines how much. The caps: 45 hours per week, 10 hours per day, a minimum of 1.5 days off each week, one full weekend off per month, and two weeks of paid vacation per year. Those limits, what counts toward them, and how to build a schedule that survives 12 months are their own topic — covered in full in our au pair schedule and hours rules guide. For this article's purposes, one intersection matters: an in-scope duty performed during scheduled hours counts as work. Kids' laundry during the school day is work time, not a favor.
A Sample Week of Duties
Here is what an in-scope role actually looks like for a family with a kindergartner and a third-grader — duties only; see the schedule guide for the hour-by-hour math:
| Block | Typical duties |
|---|---|
| Morning (weekdays) | Wake-ups, breakfast for the kids, dressing, packing lunches and backpacks, school drop-off |
| Midday (school hours) | Kids' laundry, tidying kids' rooms, prepping afternoon snack and dinner components for the kids — then off the clock |
| Afternoon | School pickup, homework supervision, driving to soccer and piano, park time, native-language games |
| Evening | Kids' dinner, kids' dishes, baths, bedtime routine two nights a week |
| Weekend | One Saturday morning of coverage; one full weekend off per month guaranteed |
Notice what is absent: no household laundry block, no cleaning block, no errand block. A duties list that reads like the table above matches to strong candidates faster, because experienced au pairs screen family profiles for scope creep the same way you screen candidates for red flags.
Put It in Writing Before It's a Problem
Nearly every duties dispute traces to the same root: the job was never written down. Fix that at three moments. During matching, send a one-page duties list — the actual tasks, by block, like the table above — so candidates opt in with full information. At arrival, walk through it in week one alongside your house rules handbook, which covers the living-together side (car, guests, curfew, food) that the duties list doesn't. And at the 30-day mark, revisit both documents once reality has voted. Families who work with a coordination service like Beverly on the host-family side usually have these documents pressure-tested before matching starts, which is cheaper than learning the gaps live.
The Bottom Line: Generous Interpretation Backfires
Every host family is tempted to read "childcare-related" generously — it is your house, she lives there, the dishwasher is right there. Resist it, for a selfish reason: scope creep is the most preventable cause of a failed match. The au pair who spends school hours doing your laundry tells her cluster, then her coordinator, and then you are reading our rematch guide for real. The boundary is not a bureaucratic annoyance; it is the deal. Kept cleanly, you get 45 honest hours of childcare from someone whose only job is your kids — and a caregiver who stays the full year because the job she got is the job she signed up for.
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