To ask how much you’d expect a babysitter to cost on NYE

[ThatMauveRaven]

20yo DD has been asked (last minute) to babysit her manager’s two young children tomorrow night. They’ve offered her £60 in cash to be there from 8pm-1am. The two kids will most likely be asleep in bed, so she won’t exactly have to do much work but I still think that this is quite stingey considering it’s New Years Eve!

Thoughts?

YABU - £60 is enough
YANBU - I’d expect to pay more

Depends, is she their regular babysitter?

No. He is her boss at work.

I babysat 2 children last NYE.

It was 7pm-2am. Children went to bed around 8:30pm and I did bedtime routine.

I charged £20 an hour and then £20 extra to cover a taxi home as I don’t drive. So £160 in total.

For reference, I am qualified in childcare with 9 years experience along with my own children. DBS checked, first aid and references from work and people I have babysat for previously.

Strange isn't it how people are happy to pay a dog walker £20 and a cleaner even more, but not for their children to be cared for.

Yup. My cleaner is nearly £27/hr (midlands).

£27 an hour for a cleaner, more fool you.

That’s how supply/demand works. I need the service, that’s how much it costs, so I pay it. I don’t act like a twat toward our cleaner and try to move the goalposts. I’m well within my rights to choose not to pay her, and to do it myself.

@CowTown I am surprised that a cleaner can charge that much sustainably! That's more than many highly skilled graduate roles. Usually with supply and demand what would happen is that if such rates were available for unskilled work many more cleaners would enter the market to capitalise on this, and then the imbalance in supply and demand would redress itself and therefore the rates would go down again to something more proportionate to the difficulty/ responsibility/ skill of the role.

It is what it is, and until my recent raise, her headline hourly rate was more than mine (although once you subtract her unpaid travel time between clients, lack of holiday pay, and lack of employer pension contributions, I do think I was earning more annually than she was).

I too can go clean houses for £27/hr if I want to, but I have no interest in doing that.

Maybe more cleaners will enter our local market to earn that wage, and prices will go down due to supply/demand. It’s not fun work, so I have my doubts.

If CowTime's worth is more per hour than the cleaner's it's a bargain.

Yes, so weird! My cleaner is cheap actually, at only £15 per hour but she's not brilliant. I value my babysitter more as she is looking after my children, who mean more to me than a clean house.

@CowTown presumably there are many people in your local area who are earning far less than that even when you factor in the costs of travel time and self-employment, doing equally not fun jobs, so you'd expect that there would be new entrants if that is the current going rate due to a supply shortage (it's way above national average for cleaning services). My cleaner is excellent (and it's not easy to find a good one who is thorough) so I pay her an above-average rate but it's nowhere near £27ph.

@PiggyPigalle just because something costs less per hour than you earn doesn't make it a bargain, necessarily. If you need the service and that is the only price it can be obtained at then you have to pay it. If not then it has to be weighed against the opportunity cost of what else you could do with the money.

I hope the normal economics of supply and demand do their job and balance this out so that @CowTown can obtain cleaning for a more reasonable price. Just as I'd hope the rest of the thread will make people think twice about trying to lowball babysitters on pay, especially for days like NYE where they should be very grateful for someone being willing to consider doing it, especially someone with OP's daughter's skillset.

Sorry for the tangent, OP!

Lots of people quoting £100 for the night but how many of you have ever paid that amount to a babysitter? I don’t know anyone in my circle that has.

Hope your DD had a fun night sitting at home.

Genuinely, why are you feeling the need to be so bitter and nasty? DD didn’t feel like doing a cheap, last minute favour on a special evening - so what? Doesn’t have any effect on you.

Personally I wouldn’t pay £100 for a babysitter, hence my NYEs involved staying at home until DD was old enough to be going out to parties of her own. It’s called making sacrifices.

She had a lovely quiet night in with her two best friends, thanks very much 👍

Depending on what the children are like, sitting at home was probably better than looking after someone else's children for the night.

Someone upthread mentioned the poor pay given to carers. I used to pay for care for my mother. (I was working full time and my husband was also disabled.)

The care firm charged much more for overnights and Bank Holidays, though I later found out that the firm was not passing the extra money on to their workers. I'm glad that the OP's daughter refused to be taken advantage of.

Round my way (Central Scotland), the expectation is that you pay a premium for service at Hogmanay once you hit evening hours - the usual is double time.

I have!

I would pay this kind of amount for 5 hours on a normal evening, including a takeaway.

I am a lone parent and would only leave them with someone who knows them well and is appropriately qualified and competent and I know would take good care of them if an emergency arises so when I do need a babysitter I organise it well in advance to ask one of their nannies if they'd be prepared to do it for me.

I would rather go out less frequently than skimp on costs for good care for them so that I can relax properly when out without worrying and have a proper break from my responsibilities.

Like the OP's daughter, nannies have first aid training, DBS checks and know my children (OP stated her daughter knows these children well) so I consider this situation to be broadly comparable: OP may have a little less of a close relationship with the children in question and less childcare experience however the children in question are younger than mine so the job was more likely to involve care during the night. One child was 18 months old so non-verbal and presumably still in nappies and perhaps not sleeping through and might be hard to settle by someone other than the parents, so that should be factored into the rate of pay.

Once, for a big birthday, I had a nanny stay overnight. This obviously cost far more (£300 I think, from memory).

@ThatMauveRaven great to hear that your DD enjoyed her evening. That sounds like a much happier memory for her than having done an evening of childcare alone for not very much pay. 😊

I was paying more than £20 for the evening in late 1990s!!!

Someone siting down on a sofa eating my food, watching my telly and doing nothing g else for five hours. Yes. £60 is a decent amount. Easy money. No tax//pension/NI to pay

Why bother getting a babysitter at all then...

Oh wait. You do it because your children may need someone!!

Theme park?😮

Sorry just saw u updated a bit more about the job.

I was paid that years ago for NYE. Many charge £30 an hour for it now!

She had a lovely quiet night in with her two best friends, thanks very much 👍

Good for her! For some reason, her not being willing to babysit on NYE for £85 seems to have brought out the dickhead in people, for whom it matters not one jot whether she did the job or not.