If you have a nanny

[SnuggleBuggleBoo]

with an annual salary, please can you tell me how that works out with changes to the typical week? Say the agreed salary is £35k gpa, if she's off sick one day, or stays on late because your train is delayed, or does a 24 hour stint because you're away for the night, how do you work that out? If you go away on holiday and she has the option to come too is she paid the same as normal if she joins you, and if she doesn't, how do you work out what NOT to pay her? Confused!

My daughter is a nanny, and is paid a salary for 45 hours a week. She keeps a track of her hours, any extra hours done in evenings or extra days or time during holidays with family. She either takes the overtime worked as extra holiday or she gets paid extra. She gets 4 weeks holiday pa plus bank holidays. Family decide 2 weeks of that, and she chooses the other two weeks. If she doesn’t go on holiday with the family then she will take that time as holiday. She is paid the same as normal on holidays with the family and does the same hours as normal. Any overtime on holidays is either paid or taken as extra time off.

I am a nanny so hopefully that’s helpful.

What is her annual salary based on? (How many hours per week have you agreed?)

Either way, ideally you should be able to calculate her hourly rate and use it as a base for all those scenarios.

1- Sick days. I assume she has a certain amount of paid sick days, so unless she goes overboard, she should be paid for them at her normal rate.

2- If you are late and go above the agreed schedule and her agreed daily hours, then yes you should pay her extra.

3- If you are gone for 24 hours, and she accepts to take on a 24 hours then you do need to pay her, her hourly rate x 24 at a minimum (the average amount for a 24 hour stint usually start at £300 per 24 hours worked and that usually includes a 4 hours break so if there is no break it should probably be more).

4- For holidays, if you take her with you then you are responsible for all of her transportation, accommodation and food, and yes for her salary also, which will either be the same (if it’s the same amount of hours just in a different place and the trip is optional) or more (if it’s more hours and if the trip isn’t optional she might ask for an extra fee for being made to be away from home for X days). If she works less than her normal week, she should still be paid her normal salary. If the trip is optional and she chose not to come then you should still pay her since it’s your choice to go on holidays (you can probably agree with her for it to be part of her holidays.)

In other words, you shouldn’t ever really pay less than her base pay and should pay more if you ask for more than what was initially agreed.

For sick days, I get paid my normal wage, but I'm rarely off sick, I don't take a day off unless I'm really unable to work.

If a parent is home late, they give me cash in hand and time in lieu, for example, half an hour late they would give me an hours pay and say come in half an hour later the next morning. This rarely happens though - if you are expecting that you might be late often enough to consider it in the salary, then it would be a good idea to build in an extra paid 15 mins a day to cover commuting holdups.

Occasional proxy parenting, as in a one off 24 hour stint I would get cash in hand. If it's a regular, monthly thing, it probably needs to be built into the salary.

Holidays - if you want her to work on holiday, then she needs her normal salary and an extra payment to cover being away from home, plus transport, accommodation, food etc. If you don't need her to work, then you can take it as one of your choice of annual leave weeks, or (if all the annual leave is used up) just pay her as normal and give her a bonus week off.

Surely if you go away and she chooses not to go, it is either taken and paid as per annual leave, or paid as normal? There is no element of NOT paying?

our nanny was paid a monthly salary that worked out at £15 per hour. if she did extra hours, she got an extra £15 for each extra hour. We never had her do overnights, but that should be paid in the same way.

if there are days when we are away and don't need her to work, she still gets paid because she didn't choose to be off work.

if she needs leave beyond her contracted annual leave / sick pay allowance, she would have to ask for unpaid leave and we would recalculate salary for that month. but she never did.

As others said

Work out hourly rate and pay that for overtime. Ans say sorry. As nannies can't just leave at end of day if you are late

Sick pay. Many get sick pay. If yours doesn't then if feeling nice still pay your nanny if you think is actually ill

24 hr proxy parenting. Discuss before go away and what price /cost

Holiday. Going away with a family isn't a holiday for the nanny so doesn't come out of her holiday allowance

We had all of this outlined in our initial hire contract. The only part that was up for discussion post-hire was when she went on holiday with us (which wasn’t part of her contract).

She told us her nightly rate, what she expected to do when with us and we paid her in addition to her salary for going on holidays because that was outside of her contractual obligations but ended up happening because it worked out well for all of us and she wanted to go. Happy memories. 😊