To think nannies are overpaid?

[Fr0thandBubble]

Inspired by another thread about how much people earn. Plenty of nannies earning £50-£60k per year apparently and one on £120k!

Our nanny has just left us (youngest about to start reception, thank goodness) and we were paying her nearly £50k for 8:30am-6:30pm Mon-Fri. She would also pick up quite a bit of extra money babysitting evenings and weekends L. She didn’t even have to do anything from 9-12 each morning while my youngest was at nursery - and then only had my youngest to look after until school pick-up time when she had my eldest too. And nannies these days are very reluctant to help out with any cleaning or ironing so she really was doing nothing much at all in those hours.

She was lovely but has no qualifications and is in her early thirties.

It seems wrong to me that nannies are getting paid more than most teachers when they don’t need any qualifications. What do you think?!

@Mamawingingit1234 I often think house sharing is the way to ace family life😂

Why did you furlough her? Nannies were allowed to work. You made a rod for your own back there.

Surely it would have been better for her to simply work 12-6:30/7:00 to lower wages?

Presumably the OP needs before school care as well.

People comparing nannies to what you would pay a childminder / nursery are wrong.

1. Hiring a nanny you become their employer, so you have to meet the requirements of paying them a fair living wage.
2. Childminders and nurseries are essentially businesses. They can take on more families, set their prices and can charge less as they charge per child rather than per family.
3. Going rates for a childminder where I live are roughly £6.50 per child per hour give or take. They can take 3 pre schoolers so that is £19.50 per hour not to mention the before after school children. They obviously then sort their own tax out and buy their own resources. But comparing it to a nanny isn't a like for like.
4. Same with a nursery, yes you will pay less because what you pay for your child does not go directly to the wage of one person. It is all the children's fees that pay wages of workers there.

To the poster who mentioned all the terrible nannies her colleagues had hired. I think they must all have a really bad sense of character! To have all had terrible nannies.

And saying we aren't regulated. I am ofsted registered, in order to be registered i have to have a full first aid, DBS, childcare qualification and i keep on top of safeguarding. Inspections are random but most nannies I know have had one, myself included.

@Yetiyoga I’m sure us nannies can tell just as many horror stories about parents, I know I can 😂

I was a Nanny 7 years ago. Finished in 2013. The pay rise has been incredible! A 50k Nanny salary was reserved for multi-lingual, super discreet nannies for high profile people back then. A Nanny on £120k will work for a super rich family and most likely work 6.5 days a week and literally be a parent.

50k is standard now as these individuals look after your kids. However an unqualified Nanny shouldn't make 50k i feel. It's a lot. But, they looked after your children so she must have been worth it.

I assume your nanny is/was taking care of all your children all day during school holidays? So you were paying to keep her free to do that, partly, and to look after them if they are home sick, or the school is closed for some reason. It's expensive to live in London, so it's expensive to hire someone in London.

But I think she should be willing to do the children's laundry and ironing, keep their rooms clean as well as tidy, put all their toys away in the common areas before leaving and make sure the kitchen is tidy. I wouldn't expect her to mop the floor or scrub the bathroom, but I would expect everything tidy and the dishes washed and put away.

Wow! None of my grand children’s parents have £50k as a household income with both parents working lol! What people warn astounds me sometimes!

@SuperDuperJezebel

I saw this on Facebook yesterday and it feels apt to share.

That's a brilliantly worded message - I really agree with it 👏👏👏👏

A Nanny shouldn't be expected to provide cleaning / catering services except for, for the children in their care. They are not cleaners or housekeepers.

Qualifications or not, they have huge degrees of responsibilities, for THE most important people in our lives, and in my opinion, that makes their services priceless!

They get paid a lot because they are as much a status symbol as anything else. At least they have managed to leverage this into better pay. I say good luck to them.

They really aren’t a status symbol. They are mostly a necessity for households with 2 working parents with long or unpredictable hours. I know that MN for some reason is deeply uncomfortable with the concept of a nanny’s existence but they are a reality for people who don’t have family close by and/or where both individuals want to maintain their work (and let’s face it it is usually the woman who gets hit with that - the old “why did you have kids if someone else is looking after them” thing).

We pay our nanny £55k (NI pension etc on top of that). She works 730-630 every day, hasn’t had a sick day in 3 years, will stay overnight on the (very) odd occasion we haven’t been able to manage our diaries to avoid both being away for work (pre corona times) obv. She cooks them healthy nutritious meals, reads to them and does lots of developmental educational stuff, knows what to do if they’re sick and showers them with affection. She is hugely trusted and respected, and really part of our family. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable price to pay (and even if I did, well that’s supply and demand isn’t it?!).

I agree that it’s superficially a very good wage but it’s a skilled job with a huge amount of (unsupervised) responsibility.

(Sorry by every day I meant M-F!)

YABU. Nannies are in demand. That's why they get paid so much. If you don't want to pay so much look after your own children.

Nanny salaries must have gone up massively then. I had nannies up until 5/6 years ago and it was no where near that salary.
But I am out of London, employed live in (which is cheaper, but what we needed), and I nearly always had newly qualified nannies (great - enthusiastic and keen to use all their recently acquired knowledge!)

That job description matched the nanny job I had, and all the nanny jobs of women I know who did nannying

Its a few years since I did a governess job but the families employed nannies seperately and our roles were very different.

However my point was not the relative worth of nanny v governess but the fact that governess job titles attract higher salaries.

Hence the claim that lots of nanny jobs pay 1k per week is not well supported by the two supplied adverts, one citing a salary well below 1k and the other for a governess.

'Live-in' is a benefit in kind on top of a salary of £750 per week (though the governess was also 'live-in' iirc).

I don't think the nanny salary is enough for what the average family requires, the flexibility, etc. When families employ a nanny they are doing so in the expectation that they are going to get an experience for their babies and children superior in ways they consider important to that of the local CM or nursery.

@stealthbanana so nice you appreciate your nanny

South east is about £14g for a good exp quals nanny so £36.5k for a 50hr 8.6 week plus employers ni and and pension which bumps it up

55k sounds a lot but that isn't what she's taking home after tax. And for 11 hour days and the level of responsibility, I think it's a reasonable, fair wage - neither under or over paid.
It must be lovely to go to work and not have to worry about your children at all, to know they are getting a really high standard of care and when you come home you don't have to do all the hard slog involved in parenting but can just be with your kids, doing nice things and enjoying family time. Someone else has cooked their dinner, cleaned their rooms, ensured they have school uniform ironed and ready.
You can just leave your house in the morning and only be responsible for yourself.
For people who are on really high wages, the cost of a nanny is worth every penny for what it gives to your life in terms of ease.

One way to look at it is that median full time salary is circa 30 thousand. Full time for 9-5 with an hour’s lunch break is 35 hours. A nanny will typically work 50 hours, potentially with no lunch break, which is 42% more. That would gross up to about 42,500 which is very close to the OP’s nanny’s salary.

Mixed view here.
I think if you are employing a nanny with extensive qualifications and experience and who organises their own tax and personal liability insurance, then you should pay for their skill set and the fact they are looking after your child/children exclusively.
That being said, there’s absolutely no way you should be paying £50-£60k pa for an unqualified nanny, that’s madness!
As a highly qualified childcare professional, with 15 years experience, who works 50h pw and earns £22k pa before tax, that boils my piss.

I think they should be qualified. It's a profession and really, really important.

www.norland.ac.uk/

Norland nanny salaries & fees

www.norland.ac.uk/salaries-fees/

There are a lot of people in my opinion that are overpaid footballers as example however it is supply and demand.

OP, you seem reasonably commercially savvy.

So you know about supply and demand.

Supply and demand is why nannies are paid what they're paid. And why you're paid what you're paid. There's no point whining about whether or not it's fair or reasonable in this context - it is what it is (and is not to be conflated with situations where normal supply and demand is warped by government involvement eg teaching and NHS staff).

A separate issue is whether or not your nanny is giving you a standard of service which is generally to be expected from nannies who are paid the amount which you are paying to your nanny. If not, then change this - you have most of the power within your relationship with your nanny so you can't whine about that either.

You seem a bit frustrated and stressed. FWIW, I hope you're OK. From someone who worked extremely long hours in stressful jobs for many years - it's easy to see others as having it better than you if you are actually not happy in your work and in yourself. Consider if the status and money are worth it. They were worth it for me for years - until they weren't. I work for myself now and make about half as much and am far far happier.