Personal chef cost

What It Means

Personal chef cost is what you pay someone to plan and cook meals for your household, often in your own kitchen. The bill usually has two parts, the cook's time and the groceries, and some chefs fold both into one price per meal or per week. In Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, the closest group is private household cooks, who had a median wage of $23.05 an hour in May 2025.

How People Say It at Work

• "Our chef comes Sunday and cooks for the week."
• "We buy the groceries and she does the rest."
• "Per meal it's closer to takeout than I thought."

The Breakdown

The dated figure. BLS put the median wage for private household cooks at $23.05 an hour in May 2025, against $17.62 for cooks overall. BLS also notes that its wage survey doesn't collect pay from private households or the self-employed, so use the figure as context rather than as a price.

Worked example. A chef charges an example $35 an hour for 5 hours a week and buys an example $150 of groceries to make 20 servings:

What moves the number (Buhata's own list)

• How many meals and servings you want each week
• Special diets, which can mean more planning and pricier ingredients
• Whether the chef shops, cooks in your kitchen and cleans up, or brings meals made elsewhere
• Whether you buy the groceries or the chef bills for them
• A one-time dinner party or a standing weekly booking

Good to Know

The tax rules depend on who controls the work. IRS Publication 926 (2026) lists cooks among household workers, and a worker is your household employeeHousehold employeeA worker you hire to do household work, such as a nanny or housekeeper, when you control both what work they do and how they do it. See more when you control what work they do and how they do it. A chef who runs their own business, decides how the job is done and offers services to the public generally isn't your employee. If the chef is your employee, Publication 926 says social security and Medicare taxes apply once you pay that person $3,000 or more in cash wages in 2026, and federal unemploymentUnemployment benefitsWeekly payments from a state's unemployment insurance program to eligible workers who lose a job through no fault of their own, with rules set by each state. See more tax applies once you pay $1,000 or more in cash wages to household employees in any calendar quarter. Read the current Publication 926 or ask a tax professional.

Related Terms and Categories

• Household employee

  A worker you hire to do household work, such as a nanny or housekeeper, when you control both what work they do and how they do it.

• Nanny tax

  The federal employment taxes a family owes when it pays a nanny or other household employee enough cash wages in a year, reported on Schedule H.

Pay, rates and costs