The Essentials: Price — Childcare, Babysitting & Nanny Business

Setting Your Base Rate by Structure

Solo drop-in babysitting: $15-22/hour for one to two kids in most metro markets, higher in high-cost coastal cities ($22-30/hour). Full-time private nanny: $18-28/hour ($700-1,100/week for 40 hours), usually quoted as a weekly gross rather than hourly once the schedule is fixed. Licensed in-home daycare: $150-300/week per child, with your total revenue capped by your state's licensed headcount (commonly 4-6 kids), so your effective per-hour rate is lower per child but multiplied across several families at once.

Charging for the Variables That Actually Add Work

Add $2-5/hour for each additional child beyond the first, two kids is not "the same job," and pricing it that way is the single most common way new sitters undercharge. Add a night/weekend premium of $3-6/hour after 8pm or on weekends, since availability at those times is genuinely scarcer. Overnight care (sleeping over, on call for a waking infant) is its own rate category, typically $150-250 flat per night rather than an hourly extension of daytime pay.

What's Reasonable to Fold Into the Rate vs. Bill Separately

Light tasks directly tied to the kids, preparing their meals, tidying their play area, doing their laundry, are standard nanny duties and belong in the base rate. General household chores unrelated to childcare (cleaning other rooms, cooking for adults, running errands for the household) are scope creep and should either be declined or billed as a separate add-on, commonly $5-10/hour extra if you agree to take it on. Set this boundary in writing before you start, because renegotiating it after three months of doing it for free is much harder than declining it on day one.

How Rates Should Move Over Time

Build in an automatic annual increase (3-5%, or tied to your local cost-of-living adjustment) in the initial contract so you're not negotiating a raise in an awkward one-off conversation every year. If a family adds hours, kids, or responsibilities mid-contract, that's a separate, immediate rate conversation, don't wait for the annual review to correct scope that changed six months ago. Nannies who let scope grow silently for a full year without adjusting pay routinely end up 15-20% underpaid relative to what a new hire would charge for the same job.

Reading the Market Before You Quote

Before quoting any family, ask what they currently pay or have budgeted, most will tell you, and it saves you from underquoting a family who would have paid more, or overquoting one who'll simply move to the next candidate. If you're consistently losing quotes to lower bids, verify you're actually being undercut on rate and not on availability or experience, since those are different problems with different fixes.

A Worked Example

Say you're quoting a family with a 6-month-old and a 3-year-old, 40 hours/week, in a market where solo one-child nanny rates run $22/hour. Start from $22, add $4/hour for the second child ($26/hour), and if the family wants two evenings until 8:30pm, add a small evening differential rather than folding it in silently, landing around $27-28/hour, or roughly $1,100-1,120/week. Walk the family through that math explicitly rather than presenting a single flat number; families who understand why a rate is what it is negotiate less and cancel less, because the price feels earned rather than arbitrary. This also gives you a documented basis to point back to if they later ask why a third child or added hours costs more.

The Mistake That Costs the Most

The single costliest pricing mistake in this business is quoting a round number pulled from memory instead of your actual local data, then discovering three months in that every comparable nanny in your zip code charges $4-6/hour more. Re-check your local rate benchmarks every 6-12 months, not just once at launch, markets shift, and a rate that was competitive when you started can quietly become underpriced as local wages and daycare costs rise around you without your own rate keeping pace. Write the new benchmark rate into your contract renewal language so the adjustment feels routine rather than a surprise negotiation each time.

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