Chores for a 9 or 10 year old

Nine and ten sit together because the capability question is answered. A ten-year-old can do essentially any household job that does not involve a knife, a ladder or a hot oven unsupervised.

What is left is everything else: fairness, negotiation, siblings, and the fact that a child this age has started to notice how the adults in the house divide the work.

What to hand over before secondary school

Year 6 is a natural deadline. Secondary school brings a commute, more homework, and a child who is out of the house longer. The jobs worth transferring before that:

• Their own washing, end to end. Basket to machine to airer to drawer. It is the single most useful thing to hand over and it takes about three months of it being done badly.
• Cooking one meal a week. Pasta, a jacket potato, beans on toast. The meal matters less than the fact that it is theirs and the family eats it.
• Managing their own morning. Alarm, bag, uniform, out.
• A shared job with a sibling, which is where the fairness argument lives.

The fairness argument, which you will not win on logic

A nine-year-old keeps score. They know exactly what their sibling does and does not do, and they will tell you, at length, and they will usually be right.

Two things help and one does not.

Helps: name the jobs, not the time. "You do the dishwasher, your sister does the bins" is checkable. "You both help out" is not, and unfalsifiable rules feel unfair even when they are not.

Helps: let the split be renegotiated, on a schedule. Once a term, jobs can be swapped. Knowing there is a legitimate route to change it removes most of the reason to argue about it in the moment.

Does not help: paying different amounts for the same job to different children. Whatever the reason, it will be discovered and it will be the only thing anyone remembers.

Payment gets complicated here

At nine the money starts to matter to the child in a way it did not at six, and the market rate becomes a thing they know. Nine-year-olds compare pocket money at school with more accuracy than most parents would like.

Two things worth knowing before you set a number. The UK average sits near £9.90 a week across ages 7-18, which is not the number for a nine-year-old - the average is dragged up by teenagers. And per-job payment produces a predictable outcome: the child does the well-paid jobs and stops doing the cheap ones, which is rational and is probably not what you wanted.

How much pocket money, by age has the figures, including an official UK benchmark most people have never seen.

What stops working at ten

Sticker charts. Completely, and usually overnight.

A ten-year-old finds them babyish, and being seen to be motivated by a sticker is worse than not doing the chore. Whatever replaces it has to look like it was designed for someone their age - which for most families means either plain money, or something on a screen that does not look like a nursery wall.