The Best Free Family Chore App in 2026 (And What Each Free Tier Caps)

Quick answer: of the six free chore apps below, two are usable by a whole family at no cost — Cozi, which covers up to 12 people on one account and pays for itself with advertising, and FamilyWall, whose free tier includes a chore checklist and a home-screen Tasks widget. Everything else caps something. Homsy's free plan stops at 2 members and 3 repeating chores. Tody's free plan is one person only, and sharing a home is not the $9.99 everybody quotes — that tier is Premium Solo, and two people is Premium+ Duo at $24.99 a year. Google's free tools have no chore assignment at all. If the whole family has to be on it and nothing can be paid, start with Cozi. All figures read off the vendors' own pages on 21 August 2026, with Tody's tiers and the store listings re-read on 24 September 2026.

Search for a free family chore app and you will get thirty listicles that all say the same six names and none of which say what "free" means for any of them. That is the only question worth answering, because the free tiers in this category are not thin in the same place — one caps people, one caps sharing, one caps the number of repeating chores, and one has no chores at all.

So this page is the caps, app by app, with the figures taken from each vendor's own pages on the day of writing. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, none is invented.

The Cap That Actually Bites

For a family it is almost always the number of people, and that is the cap most apps put first. It is worth understanding why.

An app that limits tasks is annoying. An app that limits members is unusable, because a chore app with two of your four household members in it is not a chore app — it is a private to-do list that one parent maintains on behalf of everybody else. That is the exact failure the app was bought to fix. So when you compare free tiers, sort by member limit first and worry about feature lists second.

The second cap to check is whether repeating chores are free at all. A chore that does not repeat is a task, and household work is almost entirely repeating work. An app that gives you unlimited one-off tasks and three recurring ones has not given you a chore app.

What Each Free Tier Actually Gives You

Checked 21 August 2026 against each vendor's own pages and store listing; Cozi, FamilyWall and TimeTree re-read on 24 September 2026. "Not published" means the vendor does not state it anywhere we could reach.

Cozi — The One That Is Free for a Whole Family

If the household is four or five people and the budget is zero, this is the answer, and it would be dishonest to write around it.

Cozi's own site says the app is free, and the free version carries the colour-coded family calendar, shopping lists, family to-do lists and the recipe box. Chores exist: you can put a repeating job on a named person's list and it will come back every week. One account covers up to 12 people, by Cozi's own FAQ, so a family of six costs nothing.

What you pay instead is advertising, in an app people open several times a day. Cozi Gold at $39 a year removes the ads and adds month view on a phone, calendar search, more than one reminder per event, change notifications, a birthday tracker and shopping mode. There is a third tier above that, Max, at $79 a year.

Where it stops. Cozi's chores will not rotate a job between two children, will not show you who actually did it last month, and live only in the phone apps. There is one more catch worth knowing before you rely on it: on Android there are Shopping, To Do and Calendar widgets, but on iOS the home-screen widget is a Gold feature by Cozi's own account, and it shows the next event rather than the chore list. If your household's problem is remembering the chores, Cozi is enough. If the problem is fairness, it is not, because fairness arguments are settled by a record and Cozi does not keep one.

Homsy — Free for Two, Paid for a Family

Homsy is honest about being a two-person free plan rather than a family free plan, and this page is the wrong place to pretend otherwise.

The free plan covers 2 household members and caps several things people do not expect: 10 active tasks, 3 repeating chores, 2 shopping lists, 5 recipes and 3 notes. It carries no advertising and does not expire. For a couple or two housemates it is a complete household app at no cost. For a family of four it will run out in the first evening.

What the paid plan buys, at $19.99 a year or $49.99 as a one-time purchase, is the part that matters for a family: unlimited members and unlimited repeating chores. Rotation itself is on the free plan — a rotation cycles a job between named people automatically, so the bins do not land on the same child two weeks running and nobody has to be the person who reassigns it — but a rotation needs at least two names, and on a two-member plan that is only ever the two of you. It starts earning its keep at four. Every chore keeps a completion record, so "I did it last time" is a checkable claim rather than an argument. There are home-screen widgets on iOS and Android showing today's chores, so the list is visible without opening anything, and the whole app works offline.

Version 1.0.21, from 5 August 2026, added account-less members — a child with no phone still gets a name, a colour and their own chores in the household, which matters for exactly the age group most chore apps are aimed at.

Where it stops. It is not free for a family, there is no points-and-rewards layer for young children, and it does not take iCal feeds — it imports events from the Google calendars you connect, and on iPhone from Apple Calendar, and those imports need the paid plan.

Tody — Free for One Person, Paid to Share

Tody is the cleaning specialist: it tracks how long since each area was last cleaned and tells you what is due. Households find it genuinely calming because it takes the argument off the people.

The trap on a page about free apps is that Tody's free plan is, in its own words, "the core cleaning plan for one person". Syncing the plan with anyone else is Premium+, not the $9.99 Premium. The App Store purchase list reads Premium Solo $9.99, Premium+ Duo $24.99, Premium+ Family $39.99, Premium+ Team $79.99, checked 24 September 2026; Tody's own pricing page rounds these to $25, $40 and $80. So a family does not start at $9.99 — Solo means one person, two people is the Duo at $24.99, and a household of more is the Family at $39.99. As a personal cleaning tracker Tody is free and ad-free; as a family chore app it is a paid app, and every list that puts it under "free" is wrong about that.

TimeTree and FamilyWall — Read Before Installing

TimeTree is free for up to 500 people on a calendar and has no chore feature whatsoever. It is a shared calendar, deliberately, and Premium at $44.99 a year buys an ad-free calendar rather than chores.

FamilyWall is the better of the two here and is under-rated on free-app lists. Its own free feature list includes shared task lists and a chore checklist for children, and its home-screen widgets are free too — including a Tasks widget, which is one of the few in this category that shows an actual list rather than a calendar. What it does not have is rotation or completion history. Its budget, meal planner, timetables and location are Premium, at $44.99 a year on its own plan page, and the free tier shows ads — check familywall.com before you plan around those.

Google Tasks and Keep — Free, and Not a Chore App

A shared Google Keep note is free, has no published cap on people and works everywhere; a Google Tasks list cannot be shared at all. Keep has no assignment, no schedules and no completion record, so it can hold a chore list but cannot run one. One person still ends up maintaining it, which is the problem you were solving.

A Note on OurHome

Nearly every free-chore-app list still recommends OurHome, and this site did too. The chore-and-rewards app those lists describe is gone. On 21 August 2026 its App Store listing returned no result in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada or Germany, the Google Play link printed on its own website returned a 404, and the site would not load over HTTPS. Re-checked on 27 August 2026: Apple returns nothing for its old bundle, both store links on its own site still fail, and the site is reachable over plain HTTP only. Nobody has announced anything, so that is what we found rather than a verdict.

The name, though, is installable again — and that is the trap. A different developer, Elusios, ships an unrelated app called OurHome in both stores, version 1.8.0, updated 15 July 2026. By its own description it is a shopping list and task list for roommates, not the children's points-and-rewards app the old reviews describe. So a search for OurHome now returns something, and it is not the app the old reviews are recommending. Read the developer name before you install on the strength of a five-year-old review.

Making a Free Chore App Survive the Second Week

The free tier is not usually what kills these systems. Adoption is.

Start with chores that are already non-negotiable. Move the jobs that already have to happen into the app. Do not use it to introduce new expectations in the same week — that turns the app into the thing being argued about.

Let each child own their own list. A child who can see their chores and tick them off without asking a parent is engaged. A child whose parent operates the app for them has not been given a system, and neither have you.

Agree the split before you install anything. Most chore systems fail because the division was never actually agreed, and the app just makes an unfair split visible. Our chore split calculator will divide a real task list between however many people live in the house, weighted by how long each job takes.

Review it briefly, monthly. Five minutes. What is not getting done, and who should it move to? Systems drift, and a rotation only fixes the jobs you remembered to put in it.

For younger children specifically, points and rewards do work for a while — chore apps for kids with rewards covers which ones and how the motivation tends to fade. For a household of adults where star charts are the wrong tool entirely, the best chore app for adults is the version without the confetti. And the best family organizer apps roundup prices the whole category if chores are only half of what you need.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free chore app for families?

For a whole family at no cost, Cozi — it covers up to 12 people, will assign a repeating chore to a named person, and is free in exchange for advertising. FamilyWall is the other one worth trying free: a chore checklist and a home-screen Tasks widget, both in its free tier. For two people, Homsy's free plan covers 2 members with no ads. For a household that will pay a little, Homsy Pro at $19.99 a year adds rotation and a completion record, which is what settles fairness arguments.

Is there a genuinely free family chore app with no subscription?

Cozi, FamilyWall and Google Keep, with different trade-offs. Cozi is a real chore feature paid for with ads. FamilyWall puts a chore checklist and a free home-screen Tasks widget in its free tier, but keeps no record of who did what. Google Keep is a shared note with no assignment or scheduling at all. Homsy's free plan has no ads and does not expire, but it is capped at 2 members, so it is free for a couple rather than for a family.

What does a family chore app need to have?

Three things. Each job assigned to a named person, a schedule so it repeats without anybody re-entering it, and a record of whether it happened. Most free tiers give you the first two. The third is what turns "I always do the bins" from an argument into a checkable claim, and it is usually the paid feature.

How many people can use a free chore app?

It varies more than anything else in the category. Cozi allows 12 people on one account and TimeTree 500 on a calendar. Homsy's free plan is 2. Tody's free plan is 1, because sharing is a paid feature. Check this number before the feature list — an app that fits your household is worth more than an app with a longer checklist.

Can young children use a chore app?

Yes, from around age eight for a well-designed one, and earlier with a parent alongside. What matters more than the age is whether the child gets their own view. Some apps now allow a member with no phone and no account, so a young child still has a name, a colour and their own chores even though the app lives on a parent's device.