Roommate Chore List: One Shared List for the Flat

What belongs on a roommate chore list

Living with flatmates is different from living with family: you share a kitchen, a bathroom and the bills, but each of you has your own room and your own life. So the list only needs the shared jobs. What happens in your own room stays off it.

Go through this together, cross out what doesn't apply to your flat and add what's missing.

Kitchen

• Wash up, or empty and load the dishwasher
• Wipe counters, hob and table
• Clean the microwave and the fridge shelves
• Throw out forgotten food from the fridge

Bathroom

• Clean the sink, toilet and shower
• Wash the bath mat and shared towels
• Restock toilet paper, soap and cleaning products

Living room and hallway

• Vacuum and mop the shared floors
• Dust surfaces and tidy the sofa area
• Water the plants

Rubbish and recycling

• Take out the rubbish, recycling and food waste
• Put the bins out on collection day

Shared supplies and the flat itself

• Buy shared basics: washing-up liquid, bin bags, toilet paper
• Pay rent and shared bills, submit meter readings
• Report repairs to the landlord and let tradespeople in

For a fuller daily, weekly and monthly breakdown of household jobs, see our household chores list.

How to agree on who takes what

Everyone in a flat is equal — nobody is in charge and nobody checks up on the others. What tends to help is a calm conversation at the start, ideally in the first weeks of living together:

• Agree what “clean” means. One person's tidy kitchen is another's mess. Talk about the few things that matter to all of you — dishes left overnight, hair in the shower, a full bin — and agree on a shared standard.
• Start from preferences. One of you may not mind cleaning the bathroom; another would rather do all the rubbish runs. Taking the jobs you mind least first usually makes the split feel fair without counting minutes.
• Leave room for different schedules. Someone works nights, someone travels for work, someone is home most of the week. A fair split doesn't have to be an identical one.
• Keep shared supplies shared. Decide together how you buy the basics everyone uses, so it doesn't always fall to the person who notices first.
• Talk again after a few weeks. Once you've lived with the arrangement for a while, check whether anything should change. Small adjustments early are easier than a big conversation later.

If you live with a partner rather than flatmates, our guide to household chores for couples covers that conversation.

Keep the chore list in one shared place

A list on the fridge works until someone is away; a list in the flat group chat gets buried under memes and party plans. Family Errands keeps household jobs in their own place, on everyone's phone. One thing to know first: the app calls the group of people who share items a “family” — up to 5 people in total. For a shared flat, that simply means you and your flatmates, nothing more.

1. Invite your flatmates

   In the Family section, the app creates an invitation link with a 6-digit code that you send through any messenger. After installing the app and signing in, each flatmate opens the link (on iPhone, tap it again once the app is installed) and confirms joining with one tap.

2. Add the shared chores as errands

   Create an errand for each job — “Clean the bathroom”, “Kitchen deep clean” — and add a checklist inside if a job has several steps.

3. Set the ones that repeat

   Taking out the bins every Tuesday evening or watering the plants every few days can be set to repeat, so you set the chore up once instead of adding it again every week.

4. Share them

   Tap your flatmates' avatars to share an errand. Everyone it's shared with sees it and can edit it — nobody assigns jobs to anyone; it's just people who see the same list.

5. Agree who takes what

   Use the list you all see as the starting point of your conversation. When someone takes a job, they can say so in the flat chat as usual — the list itself stays one shared list for everyone.

From then on, whatever one of you adds or ticks off shows up on the other phones automatically while you're online.

When plans change

Flat life rarely goes exactly to plan: someone is away for a weekend, someone has exams, someone picks up an extra shift.

• Transfer a chore for good. If a flatmate agrees to take a chore over permanently, the person the errand belongs to can transfer it: it becomes theirs, with all its future repeats, and disappears from that person's list. For a single week, just agree and leave it as it is.
• Skip one occurrence. If the flat is empty over a holiday, you can skip one occurrence of a repeating chore without changing the rest.
• Each person picks their own reminder. In a shared errand, reminders are personal: one flatmate can be reminded the evening before, another an hour before.
• Keep the undated jobs in view. “Descale the kettle” or “fix the wobbly shelf” don't need a date. An errand without a date is shown every day until it's completed, so it stays visible.

A shared shopping list for the basics

Many flats keep a separate list for the things everyone uses. Create one errand called “Flat basics” with a checklist — washing-up liquid, bin bags, toilet paper — and share it with everyone. Whoever passes the shop opens it, ticks off what they bought, and the others see it straight away. Our article on a shared grocery list walks through this in more detail.

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