Fifty years ago, a household where both parents worked full time was the exception. Now it’s closer to the default, and a new Pew Research Center analysis lays out just how much ground has shifted underneath American families, along with how differently that shift has landed depending on your race and your degree.
The Headline Number
According to Pew Research Center’s report, published June 16, 2026, 52% of different-sex couples raising children under 18 now have both parents working full time, up from 31% in 1975. The mirror image of that trend has shrunk just as sharply: households where the dad works full time and the mom isn’t employed dropped from 42% of families in 1975 to 23% today. Pew built the analysis from a survey of 2,242 working parents fielded through its American Trends Panel in early March 2026, layered onto decades of U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey data going back to 1975.
Pew’s researchers note the climb wasn’t steady the whole way. The steepest gains came after 2005, well after the initial wave of women entering the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s had already leveled off, according to reporting on the study by Axios. That later acceleration tracks with two forces Pew and outside analysts point to: more mothers holding college degrees, and rising cost-of-living pressure that makes a single paycheck harder to stretch across a household.
The Gap by Race Is Wide, and Not New
Break the 52% figure down by race and the range is substantial. Black mothers report the highest rate of full-time dual-income arrangements at 60%, though Pew’s data shows that’s actually down slightly from 64% in 2000, reflecting a workforce pattern among Black women that was already high well before the broader national trend caught up. White mothers sit at 54% and Asian mothers at 52%, both close to the national average. Hispanic mothers report the lowest rate at 44%, and Hispanic families also have the highest share, 32%, of households where the mother isn’t employed while her partner works full time.
None of those gaps map neatly onto a single explanation. Cultural expectations around caregiving, access to affordable child care, and the industries different communities are concentrated in all factor into who ends up in a dual-income household and who doesn’t, and Pew’s data captures the outcome without fully sorting out which force is doing the most work in any one group.
Education Predicts the Pattern More Than Almost Anything Else
If race shows a moderate spread, education level shows a stark one. Among mothers with a postgraduate degree, 69% are in a household where both parents work full time. That falls to 56% for mothers with a bachelor’s degree, and drops further to 43% among mothers with some college education or less, a group where 30% live in single full-time-earner households instead.
That gradient lines up with a job market where advanced degrees increasingly lead to flexible, higher-paying, career-track roles that make two full-time incomes more attainable and arguably more expected, while less credentialed work is more likely to come with unpredictable hours, no paid leave, and lower pay that makes a second full-time job harder to sustain around child care logistics.
How Families Feel About the Arrangement They’re In
Pew’s survey also captured how parents feel about their own setup, and the answers don’t split cleanly along ideological lines. More than 80% of parents in dual-income households say the arrangement helps their family financially. At the same time, parents in households where the mother isn’t working say by large margins that the setup is good for their children’s wellbeing. Both groups are largely satisfied with the choice they’ve made or had made for them by circumstance, even though those choices point in opposite directions.
What the data makes clear is that the “typical” American family Pew described in 1975, with one full-time earner and one parent at home, now describes a minority of households, and the families who most closely resemble that old default are disproportionately those with less education and lower household income, not more. The economics that once made a single income workable for a broad swath of the country have narrowed to a smaller and more specific group.
