How much to I have to earn to take home the same as my nanny?

[knakered]

I pay my nanny £10/hr gross - 50hrs/week ...costs me grand total of £28,500 with employers nics - as she has been chatting about her upcoming holiday to Jamaica - it just occured to me how much disposable income she has (ignoring the fact that she lives at home rent free etc and I have a massive mortgage and 4 kids to feed and cloth) -- how much do I have to earn to at least take home the same as her ..ie what do I have to earn to pay her from my net salary and have the same net income as her???

Look at the lifestyle calculator here that should work it out.

Or you could use the salary calculator on the same page to work out what you'd have to earn to earn the same as your nanny!

Gosh, how frustrating.

you never know she might bring you back a nice pressie . LOL

At £10 per hour, 50 hours, your nanny is on £500 per week, which is 26,000 per year gross, 19,340.54 take home (2006/7 tax year, single person)

So you need to take home 28,500 + 19,340.54 = 47,840.54

£1381.16 per week, £71,820.32 will give a net pay of £47840.83 for tax year 2006/7.

Figures from Listen To Taxman - Free UK PAYE Tax Calculator

why don't you just work as a nanny knackered??

{grin] only joking!!

what a joke - it just shows how much it costs to get back to work - and the government thinks it is supporting this? I can't get a nursery place (despite being on list for a year) or a childminder so I have to earn £50k in order for it to be worth me working - great!

Thanks Nanny nick...couldnt do the "big sums" myself...I feel sick...£72K to have the same take home as my nanny!!!.......I wont even go into the disposable income part...she live rent free at home etc...I have 4 children to house, feed, cloth etc....wonder what the figure would be to have the same disposable income as my 19 year old nanny...its a scandel...is this the poorest we will ever be in our lives...oh no hold on we have a miserable poverty srticken old age to contemplate as unable to make pension contributions as all our cash is going on childcare..!!

Can i just say and i'm sure i'll be moaned at but for all the parents that complain at the HUGE disposable incomes we nannies have and for all the rent free accomadation etc we enjoy you have chosen to have children and a mortgage. It is a lifestyle choice to have children.

For my huge amount of disposable income i have earnt this week and my rent free accomadation i have worked 68 hours looking after 3 children and on my weekend off this morning i was woken up to hear galloping through the house at 7-30am. While i know i'm not forced to work as a live in nanny and have to make compramises like lack of privacy etc to earn what i admit is a good salary why shouldn't i be entitled to it if market rates dictate that i can. And when i choose to start a family my lifestyle will be curtailed just, as i'm sure yours are.

Why do people get jealous of their nannies?

nannyj, i don't think the posts are meant to attack nannies personally and i'm sure mums like me who employ nannies are very grateful for that childcare option (especially as i would like to keep my current lovely nanny until my children are 18 and maybe even then i'll ask her and her husband and children to all move in with us - hahhaa) I think the posts are more of a generalised airing of frustration for working mums of the sheer financial burden - yes it is a choice we make, but if we couldn't air out our frustrations on some of the choices we have to make, then what a bunch of neurotics we would be. Mumsnet is cheaper than therapy. Don't take it personally.

I don't understand this jealousy either.
Resentment towards your children's nanny can't be healthy can it?
There are lots of childcare options available.

The cost of childcare is always going to be an issue. Unless the parents job(s) is paying a lot of money, the difference between the parents take-home pay, and how much they are charged for childcare, will be negligible. Childcare providers after all are not charities, they have their own bills to pay, mouths to feed, and thus need a reasonable income... otherwise they won't provide childcare and do something else instead.

The original question was "how much do I have to earn to at least take home the same as her ..ie what do I have to earn to pay her from my net salary and have the same net income as her?"

Reality for many 2-parent families with a nanny is that the income from one parent mostly pays for the nanny, while the other parent earns the money to pay the mortgage and other bills. As was established, if someone wants to work and have the same amount as they pay their childcarer (take home) left remaining in their own take home salary, then their income level needs to be high. This applies for all childcare, not just nannies - as all childcare fees (excluding employer supported schemes) currently get paid by parents, from their take-home pay. Few employers offer workplace nurseries or wrap-around-care facilities.

agreed. Of course nannies need to earn a living. I think this is more about how difficult it is for "normal wage earners" (i.e. not super rich) to cover childcare in order to get back to work. I disagree with the suggestion that the wages of one parent cover the cost of the nanny and the other parents do the bills - even then one parent must be earning nearly £50k and for many many people this is not the case. I also know (from personal experience) that there are not automatically lots of other childcare options - my daughter still has no nursery place after 10 months on a waiting list and currently no childminder place either - depending on where one lives sometimes it is nearly impossible to get any care. I think all such costs should come out of pre taxed money so that more parents (and in reality this is normally the mums) can go back to work if they choose.

It is wrong, imo, to say it is jealousy of the nanny. I also have 4 children, work part time and can't find a childminder who would take all 4. I have a nursery for my youngest child, but this closes at 6, before I am home from work. I don't earn enough to cover the nanny's salary, so that isn't an option for me, so I am left with an eternal juggling act between au pairs, nursery, relatives and after-school clubs.

As has been suggested so many times before, the problem really is with paying the nanny's tax on top of your own tax. I am not for one moment suggesting that it is right to suggest to your nanny that you don't pay their tax, but it is this double cost that makes a nanny so unaffordable.

I think the only thing you can hang onto is that the period when you need full time childcare is relatively short (unless you have a large family, in which case you may be better off having one non working parent). When I first went back to work my salary basically paid for the nanny, but I made that choice knowing a)if I stayed at home I would go insane, and b)if I continued at work without a significant break then my salary would continue to rise, and so it would be financially worth it. It would be nice to have more tax breaks as an employer though! Once your children go to school then the cost does go down fairly dramatically (although the arrangements also have a tendency to get very complicated!). The other thing to bear in mind is that being a nanny is a very flat career, as there are no real promotion prospects, so salaries are quite flat.

Very true Nooka, childcarers salaries are rather flat, it is quite rare (in my experience) to get much of a pay rise, and there is no career progression.

Pollyanna, agree that paying for childcare from your net salary is part of the problem, but that's not going to change. Virtually all childcare costs come from parents net salary, be they paying for a nanny, childminder, nursery, pre-school, or holiday club. Nannies are a little different, in that parents are Employers, thus pay Employers NI on top of the childcare cost (gross pay to nanny). Only way to solve that one would be to make nannies self-employed, like childminders, but then you as the parent would lose control over the care provided to your children.

I don't know much about the voucher scheme, but wouldn't it help if we could use vouchers for nannies as well as nurseries?

You can Pollyanna - as long as they are registered with Surestart (which involves proving that they have a valid first aid cert, some sort of childcare qualifications, a CRB check, 100quid and a long long long wait).
But you can only get £243 worth of vouchers per months (£486 if both parents can get them). It depends on your company as to if they are offered. It saves some money, but still very little compared to the tax bill for the average nanny.

that's a start anyway!

It saves some money, but still very little compared to the tax bill for the average nanny.

What is the average tax bill?

Lets say the nanny is paid £8 per hour gross.
Works 50 hours per week, thus £400 gross per week. 52 weeks = £20,800 gross per year. £15,856.54 net pay 2006/07 tax year - net pay figure from Listen To Taxman - UK PAYE calculator or put another way 304.93 per week, or a little over £6 per hour net.

According to the UK PAY calculator , Employers NI is £38.78 per week based on £400 gross salary. So times 52 = £2016.56 per year.

Childcare vouchers for one parent, is worth £243 per month, thus £2916 per year.

Not fully sure how much of that childcare voucher parents are not taxed on, possibly all of it, thus in this example, the annual voucher amount is more than the annual Employers NI bill.

So yes it does cost more usually to have a nanny, but at least using an Approved Nanny and part-paying with Childcare Vouchers does help a bit towards the tax (or to be more precise the NI) bill.

Nannynick - since an employer pays 1 bill ( which covers the nanny's income tax and NI and employers NI ) it is hard to think that by using vouchers you 'get the NI for free'.]

My nanny is on a little over £20k gross. My last nannytax bill (for the last quarter) was about £1400.

I am a lower rate tax payer and pay no tax or NI on the £243 per month of vouchers I get (my dh's company doesn't offer them) - from one of the voucher provider websites I find that each £243 of vouchers saves me about £50 of tax/NI. so towards a £1400 tax bill I have 'saved' £150 (3 times the £50 cos it's a quarterly bill).

And it must be remembered that because I have chosen to sacrifice £243 of my salary each month to pay for the vouchers this has a knock-on effect on my future pension and on future matenity pay (which I won't worry about since I can't afford to have another baby, once littlest one is in full time school I will start to earn money without paying it all (and some of dh's) out in childcare - can't wait - however, cute she is at 3 )

Its not jealousy of the nanny, more a form of torture, when you are working flat out, to have someone in the house who gets up at midday at weekends, and can afford to have holidays.
my au pairs definitely have more fun than me - but then I did, pre-children, as well.

I need to not look at this thread anymore i'm finding it quite insulting. Sorry if over reacting.

No one is saying that nannys don't deserve a good salary - it's more that the cost of childcare in general is not tax deductable even though we need to pay the cost in order to work.

The only time I was 'irritated' by my former nanny's pay was the times when 3 days after pay day she would ask me to give her a £50 or £100 sub from next month's salary as she had already spent it all (and bear in mind ALL of my income was going towards paying her salary and we had very little left each month after paying the mortgage, bills and childcare - I had £20 per month for my own lunches etc).
She was amazed that I couldn't produce £50 from my purse and had to go to the cashpoint, but I gave her the money because I didn't want a stressed person looking after my children.