Want a Salary Surge? New Data Reveals Working With Mom or Dad Could Be Your Golden Ticket

Forget networking events and LinkedIn hustle—the real career hack might be sitting across from you at Thanksgiving dinner.

Family Ties Pay Off

Fresh data confirms what nepotism skeptics secretly fear: working with parents isn’t just for trust-fund kids. Those who team up with mom or dad see salary jumps that’d make HR departments blush—no MBA required.

The Unwritten Rulebook

Office politics get a whole new meaning when your boss knows your childhood nickname. But the numbers don’t lie—familial collaboration delivers results that outperform cold corporate ladders.

Finance’s Open Secret

Wall Street interns might fetch coffee, but family-business veterans? They’re cashing checks while the rest of us debate ‘quiet quitting’ over $8 artisanal lattes. Sometimes the system works—just not for you.

Key Takeaways

• If you're first job is at the same place where your parent works, you might see a boost in your starting salary by 24%. It could also lift pay for years after, according to new Harvard research.
• Much of the gains came from parents bringing their kids into higher-paying blue-collar fields like construction instead of retail or fast food.
• Parents’ workplace ties help open doors to better-paying jobs; the benefits grow when the parent earns more, research found.

Taking a job where one of your parents works can provide a boost to the money you make from your first job to your last, new data shows.

Census data compiled by Harvard Opportunity Insights researcher Matthew Staiger showed that working for the same employer as a parent increased first-job earnings by 24% on average, and a 20% gain in earnings over the first three years of work compared with employees working elsewhere than their mom or dad.

Kids More Likely to Be Recommended, Hired By Parents in Blue Collar Work, Trades

Staiger found that the workers who benefited the most were young people who started working with their parents in blue-collar industries like construction or another trade. That's because a parental connection brought young workers into those industries, which have higher average pay compared with other common first jobs like fast food or retail.

Based on a sample of 48 million people who lived with a parent and graduated high school between 2000 and 2013, his research found that young workers tended to earn more when working with their parents, whether their mom or dad was a regular employee, a boss, or an owner at the company. The study also found that the benefits grew as the parents' earnings increased, both in terms of the financial gain for the child and how common it was for them to work with their parents.

“Intergenerational persistence in earnings is attributable, in part, to parents using their connections to provide access to higher-paying firms,” Staiger said in a recent presentation of the data to the Census Bureau. “Social networks, more broadly defined, could actually be quite an important determinant of intergenerational mobility.”

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College-Educated Children Less Likely to Work With Parents

About 5% of the people in the sample got their first job working at the same place as a parent, and about 29% had worked with a parent by age 30. Children without a college degree were twice as likely to work with a parent at some point as those with a degree, Staiger found.

"These connections explain a modest, but not insignificant, share of the correlation between the income of parents and children," he said in his Census Bureau presentation.

Kids don't always have to work with their parents to benefit from their careers, Staiger said, as parents can also help a child get a job through friends or other connections.

There were demographic differences among the same-workplace gains. Kids without a college degree were twice as likely to work with a parent, and “these connections appear to benefit WHITE males from high-income families the most,” Staiger noted in his Census Bureau presentation.

The Bottom Line

Getting your first job where a parent works can be more than just a convenient connection—it can mean thousands more in your paycheck now and years into your career. The boost is strongest in higher-paying trades and when parents are top earners, but even average-earning parents can open doors to better-paying firms. In today’s competitive job market, who you know—especially if it’s family—helps to shape your financial future.