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Disclaimer: Housekeeping capacity awards require functional and often economic expert evidence, and future losses must be discounted to present value. Educational estimate only — not legal advice.
Canadian personal injury law compensates not just lost wages and pain, but the lost ability to run your own household. Since the BC Court of Appeal's decision in Kroeker v. Jansen (1995) and Ontario's McIntyre v. Docherty (2009), courts have recognized loss of housekeeping capacity as an independent head of damages — payable even if no housekeeper was ever hired and even if family members absorbed the work unpaid. Despite this, it is one of the most commonly omitted claims, quietly forfeiting tens of thousands of dollars.
Courts and economists value the claim in four steps: establish pre-injury weekly hours by task (Statistics Canada time-use data shows Canadian adults average roughly 15–25 hours of household work weekly); apply an impairment percentage grounded in medical or occupational-therapy evidence; multiply by a commercial replacement rate — typically $20–$35 per hour; then separate the past loss (injury date to settlement) from the future loss (over the expected duration, discounted to present value by an economist).
Before the collision you spent 6 hours/week cleaning, 5 cooking, 3 on laundry, and 4 on yard and home maintenance — 18 hours weekly. Your occupational therapist assesses a 40% impairment. At a $28/hour replacement rate, the loss is 18 × 40% × $28 = $201.60/week, about $10,483/year. If 2.5 years have passed since the injury, the past loss is roughly $26,200; a further 10 years of expected impairment adds a future claim of about $104,800 before present-value discounting. That is a six-figure head of damages many claimants never advance.
If your injury has restricted your household work for more than a few months, ask a personal injury lawyer specifically whether a housekeeping capacity claim has been included in your case. It rarely appears in an insurer's first offer. Contingency retainers mean it costs nothing to ask.
Explore more free tools on our Personal Injury Calculators hub, walk through our interactive Personal Injury Wizards to understand your claim step by step, or contact LexScale.ai to build calculators like this for your own law firm website.
Enter your pre-injury weekly hours for each category of household work, the impairment percentage supported by your medical or occupational therapy evidence, and a market replacement rate. The tool computes the weekly and annual loss, then multiplies across the years since your injury (past loss) and your expected future years of impairment (future loss). Remember that a court awards future loss at present value — an economist applies a discount rate — so the future figure shown here is the undiscounted ceiling.
Be precise rather than generous with your hour estimates: an inflated claim that collapses under cross-examination damages your credibility on every other head of damages. A modest, well-corroborated housekeeping claim supported by a functional capacity evaluation almost always outperforms an ambitious unsupported one — and unlike wage loss, this claim exists whether you were employed, retired, or a full-time homemaker at the time of the injury.
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