Having a physical disability may restrict opportunities in many ways, as large literatures have shown. It reduces employment and workhours (e.g., Stapleton and Burkhauser, 2003; Ameri et al., 2018); it lowers labor-force participation (Parsons, 1980; Stern, 1989); it reduces earnings (Haveman and Wolfe, 1990; Charles, 2003; DeLeire, 2003; Kostøl and Mogstad, 2015; Kruse et al., 2018), and thus consumption (Meyer and Kok, 2019) and wealth (Deshpande et al., 2021). A disability affects human happiness (Oswald and Powdthavee, 2008; Freedman et al., 2012; Flores et al., 2015), partly through labor-market effects, partly through its inherent impact. A disability can affect marriage markets (Charles and Stephens, 2004; Singleton, 2018); and its effects can be very long-lasting (Millard, 2025; Corman et al., 2026). Efforts to accommodate disabilities, whether providing income support for someone with a disability or requirements that employers improve working conditions, might alter all these outcomes (DeLeire, 2000; Acemoglu and Angrist, 2001; Autor and Duggan, 2003; Bell and Heitmueller, 2009; Maestas et al., 2018; Hill et al., 2016; Jones and McVicar, 2022; Levere et al., 2025, are just a few of the myriad studies on this issue).

Remarkably, given how both income and time jointly determine utility, much less research has shown how people with disabilities spend their time, and how a disability alters time use. Only a few studies have examined this issue: Pagan-Rodriguez (2013) considered time stress among Spanish workers by disability status; Anand and Ben-Shalom (2014) report on the different ways workers with and without a disability spend their time; Enam et al. (2018) examined heterogeneity of (recalled, not diary) reports of time use; and Kalenkoski and Pabilonia (2023) studied how adults’ time use is affected by their child’s disability. The paucity of studies is disturbing, since learning more about this issue might be as important as examining labor-market outcomes, given that even the prime-age population spends less than a quarter of its time in paid work. It may be especially important for older people, since they are more likely to have a physical disability and less likely to be working for pay, than others. It may also be informative about policies that ease the daily lives of people with a disability.

The difficulty throughout the literature is in designating what constitutes a disability. Measurement error, in the sense that the person who reports a disability may be under- or overstating its severity, might be important, so that using reports of disabilities can lead to biased estimates of their impact on behavior. Several studies have examined this problem in the case of disabilities and related issues, including measuring ill-health (Kapteyn et al., 2007; Kreider and Pepper, 2007; Blundell et al., 2023). To circumvent this problem and make sure that we are dealing with general rather than country-specific issues, we examine the relationship between disabilities and time use by analyzing data from seven countries: the U.S., Poland, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. In Poland disability is an officially certified status, while in the other six it is self-assessed. Moreover, in the U.S. dataset disability status is reported at two points in time, one year apart, allowing estimating how time use differs between those who have and not developed a disability.

In the next Section, we motivate the consideration of the impact of physical disabilities on time use. Section 3 presents the data and describes the central empirical results for the U.S., while Section 4 proposes a test that tries to take the analysis from correlational to causal. Section 5 introduces the Polish data and goes through analyses like those conducted on the American data, but does so over two days of time diaries. Section 6 offers a brief check on the American and Polish results using data from five other countries, in which the presence of a disability/health-based limitation is recorded. Section 7 employs all but the American dataset to examine the impact of one spouse’s disability on the other’s time use, while Section 8 simulates the income equivalent of the utility loss facing those with disabilities because of its relation to their use of time.