Chore rota for 4 housemates

Four people and four chores is the easiest shared house to keep fair, because nobody needs a week off and nobody doubles up. Give each person one chore a week and move every chore on by one person each week. After four weeks everyone has done everything exactly once, and the cycle starts again.

A worked example

Ana, Ben, Cleo and Dev share a flat. They agree on four jobs of roughly equal weight: bins and recycling, kitchen, bathroom, and vacuuming the shared areas. Week 1 starts on a Monday.

Four housemates, four chores, four weeks
Week	Bins	Kitchen	Bathroom	Vacuum
1	Ana	Ben	Cleo	Dev
2	Ben	Cleo	Dev	Ana
3	Cleo	Dev	Ana	Ben
4	Dev	Ana	Ben	Cleo

Read down a column and you see each chore visiting every person once. Read along a row and you see four different people, so the house is covered every week. Ana, for example, does bins, then vacuuming, then the bathroom, then the kitchen.

Three rules that stop arguments

Balance the chores before you rotate them. If the kitchen takes an hour and the bins take five minutes, split the kitchen in two or pair the bins with another small job.
Fix the changeover day. A chore week that runs Monday to Sunday leaves no doubt about who owned Saturday's mess.
Swaps are fine, skips are not. If Cleo is away in week 3, she trades weeks with someone and the table still holds.

Make this rota in a minute

The free generator handles exactly this size: up to 4 people and 4 weeks. Enter the four names and four chores, pick the Monday you start, and press Make rota. Each housemate gets a personal link with their own weeks and a button that adds them to their phone calendar as an .ics file, so the reminder sits where they already look. When the four weeks are up, make the next four; the order simply repeats.

Open the chore rota generator

Chore rota for 4 housemates

A worked example

Three rules that stop arguments

Make this rota in a minute

More guides