Domestic Help Festival Bonus Calculator

Cash and gifts are not substitutes, and treating them as such is where households most often get this wrong. Cash is fungible: it can pay school fees, clear a debt or cover a medical bill, and the recipient decides. Clothes and sweets are a gesture of the relationship and are widely appreciated as such, but a saree valued at ₹2,000 does not do the work of ₹2,000 in hand, and substituting one for the other quietly reduces the bonus while appearing generous. The common and better practice is to give the cash bonus as cash and treat sweets, clothes or a festival gift as something additional. If your budget is tight, a smaller cash amount plus a modest gift is usually received better than a gift alone.

Before the festival, not after it, and early enough to be useful. The whole point of a Diwali or Onam bonus is that it funds the festival — travel to a home village, gifts for children, new clothes, a repaired phone — and money that arrives on the day itself or afterwards has missed most of that. A week to ten days ahead is the common practice and gives room to shop and to travel. If your help is going home for the festival, ask when they are leaving and pay before that, since travel is usually the largest single cost. Saying clearly what you intend to give, and when, also spares both sides an awkward period of uncertainty in the run-up.

The custom attaches to the main festival of the household or of the worker, not to Diwali specifically. In Kerala the Onam bonus plays exactly the role Diwali does further north; in Tamil Nadu it is often Pongal; for Muslim workers it is commonly Eid; and in Goa, parts of Kerala and the North-East, Christmas and New Year serve the same purpose. The sensible approach is to pick the one occasion that matters most to the person you employ, pay the full customary amount then, and treat any other festivals in the year as small tokens rather than repeat bonuses. Asking which festival they would prefer it at costs nothing and is usually appreciated.

Most households do increase it with tenure, and there are good reasons beyond sentiment. Someone who has been with you five or ten years has absorbed the way your home runs, needs no supervision, and is expensive and disruptive to replace, so a bonus that recognises that is also straightforwardly in your interest. The calculator applies a modest uplift that rises with years of continuous service and levels off after ten years, which reflects the shape of what households commonly do rather than any published scale. A raise in the base salary generally does more for a long-serving worker than a larger one-off bonus, since it compounds every month, so it is worth reviewing both at the same time each year.

Yes, on the same basis — one month of what you pay them, not one month of their total income across all the homes they work in. Each household is a separate arrangement and each pays a bonus on its own salary figure, which is exactly how the worker will expect it. Someone working in five houses at ₹3,000 each should reasonably receive a bonus from each of those five households, and it is not your place to discount yours on the assumption that the others will pay. The same logic applies to a cook or a driver who splits time between two families.