How to Handle Salary Gaps in Relationships

There are a few ways to handle a large salary gap in a relationship, and they can almost all be modeled after celebrity couples — that is, according to Haley Sacks, aka Mrs. Dow Jones, a Zillennial finance expert and influencer.

She breaks it down like this: you’re either like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce or you’re Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade. Union and Wade have been quoted in Essence saying that they “split everything 50/50,” despite any differences in pay. This is a common way some couples operate to avoid resentment.

Meanwhile, Kelce reportedly makes an annual salary of $14.3 million through a four-year contract with the Kansas City Chiefs, and Swift recently made the Forbes billionaire list. While they have never commented on how they navigate the gap, songs like “Paper Rings” suggest she likely “doesn’t mind being the one to bring home the bacon and pay for everything,” Sacks says. “This model applies to people where the richer partner pays for the majority of the expenses.”

Of course, there are other alternatives. Some couples devise a percentage split of major expenses (say, 30/70). There’s no “right” way to manage an income disparity, Sacks says, but there are some lessons that can be learned from partners who’ve been there.

“What’s ‘fair’ is subjective,” Sacks says. “What matters is that you’re doing what makes you feel comfortable, and making sure that you’re not being taken advantage of.” Partners who have some sort of understanding or plan in place tend to fare better with these gaps, and, of course, communication is key, Sacks adds.

We asked three salary-gap couples across the country to weigh in on how they handle expenses with equity and understanding, all while steering any resentment toward contentment.

Amethysta and Rita Herrick, 54 and 47
Location: Northern Colorado
Salary gap: $27,000

Amethysta met Rita in 2000 at the University of California, where they shared an office. By 2002, they’d upgraded from coworking to cohabitation, moving in together and eventually marrying in 2007.

“I was working in executive management in technology for most of our relationship, and was always making a ton of money,” Amethysta says. “Despite generally making most of the money, I’m horrible with it. Same with insurance, and anything difficult. I just say, ‘Can you handle that?'”

For the majority of the 24 years they’ve been together, Rita made about $50,000 to $150,000 less than Amethysta and was a stay-at-home mom.

But everything changed in October 2022. “I transitioned gender to present as a woman,” Amethysta says. “When I started hormone therapy, all of a sudden I felt a whole lot better about myself, and so I thought I should start writing about it, so that other people would know how important gender transition and hormone therapy is.” She went full-time as a writer in November of that year, retiring from the tech world.

Meanwhile, Rita took the skills she’d used managing household finances all those years, and built up a bookkeeping business. Rita’s now the primary wage earner in the relationship, and is on track to earn about $27,000 more than Amethysta this year.

“I won’t kid you — this hurts,” Amethysta says. “I still feel I should be providing for my family, and I feel as if I am failing, which makes my writing career all the more difficult to pursue. The overall drop in income is not a huge strain on our family, but my social conditioning kicks in every time I look at a bank statement. Since I was assigned male at birth, I still feel like I need to be the financial caretaker. I feel like what I’m supposed to be doing is providing peanut butter and shoes for the kids.”

The couple has continuing conversations about their emotions around money, and every day is a process. There’s still some tension, but they make sure to take the time to sit down and talk it out when it comes up. “There are days I’m feeling down and like the universe has shown me this isn’t working, and that I should just go back to software,” Amethysta says. “Rita is pretty good about saying, ‘Hey, cut it out. You’re going to be OK. We’re going to budget and it will all work out.'” Rita serves as a voice of reason, and, ultimately, reminds them that they can handle all these transitions as a team.

“It’s never been a competition, and yet I still feel weird sometimes,” Amethysta says. “There are still these social expectations, and whether they’re rational or not, I still continue to play into them.” But when feelings like this come up, the couple works to actively acknowledge that these societal pressures about who “should” be the breadwinner may feel very real, especially socially, but they’re outdated.

As Amethysta says: “At the end of the day, we’re partners in everything.”

Rosco and Ren (names changed), 25 and 25
Location: Omaha, NE, and Seattle, WA
Salary gap: $85,000

Rosco and Ren met in 2016 in college, where they’d constantly run into each other in the athletic department, since Ren ran track and Rosco played soccer. Ren would say hi whenever she passed him near the fields. “He would just smile and wave,” she says. “At first I was like, why isn’t this guy saying hi to me? I found out later he just didn’t speak English.”

Eventually, they pushed past the language barrier and became fast friends. By Ren’s senior year, they were dating and nearly inseparable. They were both on a college student’s salary, so they didn’t talk much about money and it rarely came up until they decided to move in together in the fall of 2021.

Rosco had just graduated and gotten a well-paying job, and Ren was interning and starting grad school soon. Despite the growing salary gap, they split everything 50/50, from rent to expenses. “I felt really strongly about having it be equal and down the middle, with groceries, rent, and everything,” Ren says. “He asked me if I wanted to pay less rent, and I didn’t want to do that — not because it felt like a power imbalance, but because I didn’t want to put that burden on somebody. Even though he’s my partner and we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, I felt it was something that would be easier if we carried together.”

“She’s pretty stubborn,” Rosco adds with a laugh. “I value what she says and I listen to her, and if [splitting everything] is something she wants to do, I would never want to make her do anything else.”

The half-and-half approach extended to chores too. “The way we split things up was not influenced by our salary difference at all,” Ren says. “Honestly we’d get cleaning done faster if we did it together.” Rosco agrees, adding that the approach was more complementary. “She’d cook, but I’d make sure she had everything she needed with any prep, and I’d do the dishes after.”

About a year ago, Ren got into law school and Rosco got a job in Seattle, and they decided to make it work long-distance. The salary gap is still there — he now makes about $85,000 and she is still in law school and not able to work, except occasional side-hustle gigs teaching workout classes — but they still largely split things, though they’re a bit less rigid now. “We eventually got to the point where if one of us wanted to pick up dessert or buy olive oil, we wouldn’t split that,” Ren says. They haven’t let their salary differences or the distance strain their relationship; in fact, any challenges have just reinforced how much they value each other emotionally versus monetarily.

Now that Rosco lives across the country and is starting from scratch, just as he did in Omaha, Ren makes it a point to check in and show up for him — and that, he says, is worth more to him than any six-figure salary she could bring in. This goes both ways, too. Rosco negotiated to get his work to pay for trips once a month from Seattle to Omaha so the couple could see each other more, which showed her that he was willing to go to bat for her. “I said, ‘I love working with you guys, but I don’t love it as much as being with [Ren],'” he says.

“I’m so proud of the work he’s doing, but if I had emotional and monetary support in front of me and I had to pick one, I’d pick emotional every time,” Ren says. “If I have emotional support, I can do anything. I can’t wipe my tears with cash.”

Karina F. and Terrance Daves, 37 and 37
Location: Lawrenceville, NJ
Salary gap: Karina makes four times more than Terrance

Karina was only 13 years old when she met her now-husband Terrance in their New Jersey town. They dated briefly in high school, and another two times on and off. “I turned him down for so long,” she says,” even though I really wanted to be with him. I was so nervous I’d get pregnant because of how in love with him I was.”

Like magnets, Karina and Terrance kept coming back to each other and eventually stuck. They’ve been together for 12 years now. “When we first got married, the salary gap was immediate,” Karina says. “I spent seven years in school, and he was working as a master technician at Nissan and was making much more than me.”

The couple pooled all their funds and began to navigate the typical challenges of adjusting to someone else’s spending habits. “Terrance is a saver, and I had a really great relationship with Nordstrom — which I had to break up from,” she laughs. “We had to adjust to each other’s ways of handling money, and communicate.”

Over the years, Karina began to earn more, and the couple’s salaries were neck and neck. Then, one day, Karina had a dream. “I had a dream that I was making double my salary and Terrance would have the opportunity to retire from the car industry,” she says. “I asked him what he thought of that, and he shared with me that the work he was doing was making him so tired. It was beating up his body. He was in his 30s feeling like he was 50. He was in so much pain.” When she shared that she’d like to become the “head of household,” she remembered that he seemed to be on board. “He was like: bet.”

Karina applied for 200 jobs, ultimately getting one in the tech space. Terrance left his career and became a facilities manager at Princeton University. As Karina transitioned to making more than double his salary and her old one, there were some bumps. “He didn’t realize at the time he agreed to it how much it was going to bruise his male ego,” she says.

What helped them was the acknowledgment of his feelings, which he worked through in individual therapy. “Through that therapy, he realized he was starting to see me as an opponent rather than his teammate,” Karina says. “I ultimately realized that my partner missed the role he was in. The way he shared it with me was: ‘I still want to take care of you, including financially. I’m going to have days I’m OK with this and days I’m not. How can we make space for those rainy days?'”

They slowly worked through the role reversal by leaning on their support system (the therapist, family, and a good list of babysitters), and with collaborative communication. Karina also adjusted how she was approaching her new role. She began asking things like “What do you think about doing this?” instead of “I make the money and we’re doing this.”

A major breakthrough happened when the couple decided to actively redefine the meaning of “head of household.” It didn’t fix everything, but it helped them get through a stuck period.

“People we know — and society in general — may think that the head of household or breadwinner is the person who makes more money, and that it should be the man,” Karina says. “For us, we had to go back to the anchor of our faith. We had to ask: who really is the head of our household? For us, it was God. But I advise anyone, no matter their religion, to redefine ‘head of household.’ Ultimately, the most important thing for us was to stop allowing the world to define our relationship.”

Molly Longman is a freelance journalist who loves to tell stories at the intersection of health and politics.