Short answer. No. The Family Code makes household management the right and the duty of both spouses, without allocating it by gender. Article 71 states the shared duty, and Article 70 says where the money comes from: family expenses are charged to the couple's property before anyone's separate pocket is reached.

What the law says

The management of the household shall be the right and the duty of both spouses.

Family Code, Article 71 — Management of the Household. Read the full provision →

What the law says

The spouses are jointly responsible for the support of the family. The expenses for such support and other conjugal obligations shall be paid from the community property and, in the absence thereof, from the income or fruits of their separate properties.

Family Code, Article 70 — Joint Responsibility for Family Support. Read the full provision →

The law says ‘both spouses’, and nothing else

Article 71 is one sentence long and it contains no gendered allocation at all. Household management belongs to both spouses, and the article uses two words for it: a right and a duty. Treating it as a right matters as much as treating it as a duty, because it means neither spouse can be shut out of decisions about how the home is run — what is bought, how the household budget is spent, how domestic help is engaged. The widespread assumption that this is the wife's department is a social convention. It is not what the provision says, and it is not what a court reads.

Who pays for it

The second sentence of Article 71 sends the expenses of household management to Article 70, and that article sets an order. The spouses are jointly responsible for the support of the family. Expenses for that support and other conjugal obligations are paid from the community property first; in the absence of community property, from the income or fruits of the spouses' separate properties; and only where that income is insufficient or absent are the separate properties themselves reached. So household costs are a charge on the couple's shared property before they are anybody's personal expense, which is a materially different starting point from ‘whoever earns it, pays’.

Why this matters when a marriage goes wrong

The question is rarely asked in the abstract. It surfaces when one spouse claims the other contributed nothing because they were not employed, or when a spouse who managed the home is told the house belongs to the earner. The Code's structure answers both. Running the household is a duty the law imposes on both, and family expenses are met from shared property rather than from a single wage. A spouse who kept the household is discharging an obligation the Code names, not performing an optional service. That framing is often the difference between how a family talks about the marriage and how the law characterises it.

What a disagreement here actually looks like

In practice this provision seldom stands alone. It becomes relevant alongside questions of support, of who may administer the couple's property, and of what happens to the home if the marriage is dissolved. If you are in a dispute where one spouse has been excluded from household decisions, or where household expenses are being funded entirely from one side while shared property sits untouched, the useful evidence is ordinary and documentary: bank records, receipts, and the titles or instruments showing what is community property and what is separate. Those documents decide the argument far more often than the principle does.

Cases citing this provision

These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.

Related provisions

Note. Statute text quoted on this page is reproduced from the official enactment and is linked to the full provision. The explanation around it is general legal information from Vivas & Nobles Law Office, not legal advice. Whether it applies to your situation depends on facts only a lawyer reviewing them can assess.