30 hour free childcare calculator

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Our nursery charges £1600 a month for 5 full days a week. How much can I expect to save when DC (only one child) turns 3 and the 30 free hours childcare kicks in? It will be for 5 full days a week, 52 weeks a year just like it is now. I'm desperately trying to budget for next year but can't find a calculator anywhere 🤯. Can you please let me know how much less will I pay? Thank you.

It will depend on the rate of funding your local authority pays and how the nursery applies it. You’re best asking the nursery finance team to give you an answer.

It's not a universal price list, you'll need to ask your nursery how they deliver their funding and how much you can expect to pay.

You need to ask the nursery as they may do funding in sessions term time only, or may split it over a full year. There may be charges for consumables. The fee you pay for non-funded hours may be different to what you pay now.

I can tell you what mine would have been if we hadn't taken her out and put her into TTO preschool (where we just pay a top-up for lunch session supervision and could also pay for a meal on top of that).

30 hours x 38 weeks is 1140 hours which would then be divided by 51 weeks (out nursery closed with no charge for the week between Xmas and new year). This works out at 22 hours per AYR week or basically just over two days. I think they charged a top-up of about £5 a day to cover meals etc but I think they took the extra 2 hours a week funding and offset that against other consumables. So basically we'd be paying for three days, plus £10 top-up for the 'funded' days. We also got a discount for her going 5 days a week and believe that would have stopped as well.

Nursery where the little one will be going is the same setup in terms of it being 2 days a week funded AYR but their top-up is £7.50 a day. To be fair though they are £10 a day cheaper than the old nursery...!

Agree with asking nursery - ours only allows 30 free hours during term time and worked out if we did the 30 free hours there we would have a top up fee to pay, so DD goes to school nursery 30 hours a week and we only have to pay lunches

Totally depends on how your nursery applies it. Ours is a similar cost to yours without the funding, now DS is 3 we are still paying over £1k a month with the 30 hours applied.

Thank you all, I appreciate the replies I had no idea it depended on the location and nursery I thought it was the same for everyone. I'll contact the nursery again. I've sent an email last week but haven't heard from them yet.