The household staff jobs that pay the most in the US are also some of the hardest to fill.
At the top you’ve got chief of staff, private chef, estate manager, and senior personal assistant, almost always for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families in New York, California, and Florida.
No other country pays private staff this well. Morgan & Mallet’s 2025/26 Household Staff Salaries Annual Report puts 60.7% of the world’s highest-paying household roles in the US, ahead of Switzerland at 28.6%.
But pay is only half the picture. The other thing that matters is how hard a role is to fill, because when a family can’t find anyone, as a candidate, you are able to set the conditions, to some degree.
Which household staff jobs pay the most in the US in 2026?
The biggest salaries go to the senior and specialist roles. Here are the 2026 yearly ranges from our salary data.
| Role | US Salary Range (USD) |
|---|---|
| Chief of Staff | $150,000 to $300,000 |
| Private Chef | $100,000 to $300,000 |
| Estate Manager | $150,000 to $250,000 |
| Executive Assistant | $120,000 to $250,000 |
| Personal Assistant | $80,000 to $250,000 |
| Domestic Couple | $100,000 to $250,000 |
| House Manager | $100,000 to $180,000 |
| Butler | $90,000 to $180,000 |
If the job has a confidentiality agreement, you can add 15 to 20% to the base pay, according to our report. The closer you work to the principal, the more that matters.
Which roles are hardest for US families to fill in 2026?
These are the roles where you, the candidate, have the upper hand. They take years to grow into, and if you have or are willing to get experience in these areas, you will be in demand.
1. Estate manager. An estate manager runs a private home, looking after the staff, the budget, the maintenance, often for more than one property.
Around 10% of our US requests are for estate managers, and good ones are very hard to find. Prove you’ve run a multi-property household and you are in a strong position on the job market in the US.
There’s usually a second job hidden in it too. The estate manager often builds the rest of the team.
Morgan Richez, co-founder of Morgan & Mallet, explains how that works:
“If I hire an estate manager to set up a new team, maybe we are going to work in a partnership to recruit the new people. [He] is going to be part of the recruitment as well.”
2. Domestic couple. A domestic couple is two people who run a home together. Very often, one does the housekeeping and cooking, the other takes the grounds, the maintenance, and the driving.
The pay is normally from $100,000 to $250,000, and most of the demand is for holiday homes that are empty for parts of the year. The hard part is finding people who actually do this work.
Most experienced couples are in their late forties or fifties, and the younger ones won’t always take a live-in role.
3. Chief of staff. The chief of staff is right at the top of the household, running the other staff, the budgets, the properties, and anything else the principal has going on.
It can pay up to $300,000, and many families want one senior person in charge of everything.
4. Specialist private chef. Plenty of people apply for chef jobs, so the lower end of the market has lots of candidates. The top end is quite different.
Here families want a chef who’ll travel with them, move between their homes, and cook exactly the way they like, and there aren’t many of those around.
The US accounts for 35% of our private chef requests across the world, and a lot of the top earners now work freelance.
“[Some people] would like to work, for example, in Florida or even in [the] South [of] France for the summer, and in the winter they would like to move [to] Aspen,” says Morgan Richez.
“As a freelance, you can charge the clients a lot, because there is a lot of requests and they ask for the best chef.”
5. Senior personal assistant with security experience. A PA who has worked alongside a security team is hard to come by. In Miami, 79% of the personal assistants we place have worked with a security team before.
In Los Angeles, 77% of the ones we place sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Which US states have the best household staff jobs?
In our job ads in the US since 2022, four states had the most openings. They were California (24.3%), Florida (21.9%), New York (14.4%) and Texas (7.5%). The mountain west has its own seasonal market.
New York: fast hiring, often through a family office
New York came third in our ads in the US. Most of the work is in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and a lot of those families also keep a place in the Hamptons.
Hiring moves faster than in Europe, and it usually runs through a family office before you ever meet the principal.
Jonathan de Vanderbilt, a recruiter in Morgan & Mallet’s New York office with over 40 years in staffing, says the process in the US is more structured:
“There’s a law for everything here in the US… You can’t discriminate someone by age, race, religion, gender… [It’s] more structured… because anything can turn into a lawsuit.”
Many New York families want live-out staff. Space in the apartments is tight, and they’d rather have a local who already knows the city.
“They would rather have someone that lives out, that knows the city, that can go back and forth like nine to five, nine to six, nine to seven,” says de Vanderbilt.
“[The] extra staff quarters, like the West Wing, so to speak, across the field and the guest house, that is not New York.”
California: top pay, strong worker protections
California had the most openings in our ads in the United States. Los Angeles made up 30.9% of them, and San Francisco and Palo Alto together another 18.5%.
The state also gives domestic workers proper legal protection, with overtime, meal breaks, and minimum wage enforced by the California Department of Industrial Relations.
The downside is a high state income tax, so a good amount of that salary goes straight back out.
Florida: the second-biggest market and the best take-home
Florida has no state income tax, so a salary in Miami or Palm Beach leaves more in your pocket than the same figure in New York or Los Angeles. Miami alone was 47.9% of our Florida ads.
A lot of the market here has what are called snowbirds, so the hiring season runs opposite to the northeast.
Texas: Dallas leads
Dallas was 48.0% of our Texas ads, followed by Austin. Like Florida, Texas charges no state income tax, so you keep more of what you earn.
The mountain west: seasonal and high-paying
Aspen, Jackson Hole, and Scottsdale are second-home markets where families need staff, often a domestic couple. Wyoming charges no state income tax, while Colorado and Arizona have a flat one.
How do you move up to a higher-paying household role?
Write down the work you already do, and stay somewhere long enough to prove it. Staff used to stay with one family for around 20 years. Now it’s more like 3.
Eric Rios, a recruiter in the New York office who used to recruit software engineering interns at Google, says:
“Clients usually want someone that they could see stayed at a job for five-plus years, because that shows that they could really mesh with a family and a household well.”
He says he checks location first, then your years of experience, then how long you stayed in each job.
There’s a second way up. De Vanderbilt sees more and more families asking for one person to do three jobs.
“Now they want a house assistant, a house manager, to do those three jobs,” says de Vanderbilt.
“They need to tidy the house; maybe they can do food prep… maybe they can drop them off on a play date… Instead of hiring three people, they want to hire one, maybe a little higher salary.”
If you can cover all that, you go up a level.
But more than experience, two habits get people shortlisted. One is planning a few steps ahead. The candidates who impress Rios walk him through what a client’s flight tomorrow means.
They book the car for the right pickup, check the boarding time, pack for the whole family, and get the kids down early so they sleep on the plane.
“You’re basically thinking of things that they would never think about,” he says, “but will make their lives a lot easier.”
The other habit is presentation, and candidates forget about it all the time.
Make sure to keep your resume clear and simple, clearly list all the families you worked for and what you did in the roles, and give the reason why you left each job.
Where the domestic staffing opportunity is in 2026
The best-paid roles in 2026 are the ones families can’t easily fill. California and Florida had the most openings in our ads in the US, then New York.
If you can run a household and lead a team, you’re in demand.
Looking for a position in private household staffing? Apply online, or call our US team on +1 (646) 965-2308.
Sources: our 2025/26 Household Staff Salaries Annual Report for the salary ranges and the request and placement figures (estate manager requests, private chef requests, the Miami and Los Angeles PA figures, how long staff stay); our US job ads for private households, May 2022 to June 2026, 333 jobs, English and French versions of the same job counted once (how we gather our figures).
