True cost of Au Pair in London

[ohIdoliketobebesidethe]

I have had it very gently pointed out to me on another thread that I may not be aware of what an au pair really costs. We are deliberating whether to continue with evening home helps with perhaps a cleaner in the mornings at £8 an hour each or to get an au pair. I thought the latter would be more cost effective.

Please could you tell me what they really cost, i.e. pay, travel, food, trips out, telephone etc?

Thank you all in advance for your wise words.

Hi, ohIdolike ... seaside , where do you live?

West Hampstead. Does that make a difference?

London, excellent. It is slightly different for London in terms of public transport and ease of getting around and higher desirability for aupairs.

Hmmmm,

Food and toiletries - increased by about £25 per week. But we cook almost all dinners and just increase it by one portion so fairly economical. But aupairs have been known to eat families out of house and home, so depends.

Pay - depends on the hours. I would say £55 to £70 is standard for 25 hours a week + 2 nights babysitting. In London, you can probably get away with paying the lower end of the scale simply because of supply and demand. A lot of aupairs want to be in London so you can pick-and-choose. But of course, living costs are a bit higher.

Travel - I don't pay for a bus pass because it is not necessary for her duties. She does the school run on foot. But will if she needed it. If your aupair needs to use a car (and she shouldn't if you are in London within easy access to bus, tube, train), you should investigate the cost of putting her on the insurance because that is the main expense and related to her age.

Trips out - If on her own time and socialising, her expense out of her pocket money. If we ask her to come out with us, we pay for all food, transport and entrance fees.

Telephone - I provide a mobile phone but cost of using it is her own as it is for her socialising. I bar all international and 090 numbers on our home phone. She can use our home phone to make short domestic calls (eg to arrange to meet another aupair) and for her duties to contact us. If she calls us on her mobile, I will ask her to hang up and call her back to save her the charge.

Computer - we let us use a laptop and of course pay for the broadband. She can also use the laptop to Skype.

TV - she did not require a TV but you might want to consider putting one in her room and the cost of that.

Utilites - If you are not around during the day and she is, be prepared for higher gas and leccy bills. I am not sure, maybe say about £20 a month?

English classes - I definitely won't pay or subsidise private classes. But your aupair should be able to find the community ESOL classes which are either free or subsidised by government to around £400 a year. My last aupair did not require me to subsidise but some families do.

As a ballpark no frills (ie no car or big subsidy for English classes/transport/phone), I would add about £150 to the cost of what you are paying her in pocket money per month.

Thanks so much blueshoes - that is is only slightly more than I had anticipated. We are already spending £80 a week for 10 hours from a home help so I think, financially at least, an au pair will make sense.

Great.

The big advantage of an aupair over a cleaner is that an aupair's duties include the schoolrun, childcare (eg bathtimes, making tea for dcs), babysitting on tap and the flexibility of live-in help eg if childcare suddenly breaks down or you need for cover during school hols, she is a good fallback. If all you need is cleaning, you should in most cases be able to make do with a cleaner.

We need help in evenings and getting 3 preschoolers out in the morning - thankfully not until Feb as I'm on mat leave atm. Having back up for our present childcare would be a big plus. For the future, is it fair to ask an au pair to care for one child all day during half terms or a few weeks in hols?

yes, my aupair is currently looking after dd 5 during this half term. But you will have to up her pocket money to reflect the extra hours and she has to agree to do this.

Also, I try to break up the week for her with breaks, especially for the summer hols. I would not like to do long consecutive days of childcare myself and don't want to impose that on her. So I still book the odd day at summer camp, playdates where my dd goes to her friends (if her friends come over then I take the day off to cover). And I do take the odd day off myself to spend with my dd .

Bear in mind the quality of aupairs can vary and you have to be satisfied she is a sensible sort you can trust with sole charge of your schoolage child. Tbh, if I could not trust her, I would have asked her to leave anyway.

The agency we used suggested we should expect to spend as much again as the amount we are giving her in pocket money (ie £60+£60). I'm not sure if it's working out that much - her room has an electric heater, so we'll see when that bill comes!

In general you should not expect her to achieve as much housework per hour as a professional cleaner. However, IMO you're paying for the convenience and flexibility.

We are all eating more cheaply though because she's vegetarian so we're hardly ever eating expensive organic meat! (She doesn't mind us eating meat, just it seems more friendly to all eat vegetarian most of the time).

I wrote a huge long post and it's disappeared! The upshot is that ours costs about £650 a month but about £40 of that is car ins and petrol so you could replace that with a travelcard and we pay top end pocket money because we are outside London so harder to recruit (we pay £85 per week, £10 per month mobile phone card), food costs £150 (and she is quite good food-wise as au pairs go), she uses skype to phone home (but we provided a pc, headset and tv for her), we spend about £40 a month on treats/trips for her, and our electicity use has shot up by £35 per month (which is high because we are on economy 7 and so time everything to run at night, but she is home during the day and uses power then) - not sure how much heating has/will go up by,

Thanks for your replies. I find the idea of babysitting really appealing but I think I might have to add on the cost of us going out (which has become sooo rare)!

Yes, as Kathy says, you aren't going to get the same standard of cleaning from an ap as a cleaner. I also don't think it's fair to expect this unless you outline it in the job description very clearly. This did frustrate me as I didn't realise it in advance - my cleaning is to a high standard, and I was expecting this to be maintained. It wasn't. Everything was kept generally clean and tidy, but there was a lot which got missed.

Your heating/elec probably won't go up if you're already on maternity leave. What about the w/e's? If you get somebody who does come along with you, would this increase outgoings much? We have lots of memberships which are cost effective over the year, but our ap came almost everywhere once, so not worth buying a membership, but costing an extra £20 or so most weekends.

Phone calls, toiletries, travel passes, petrol for 'lifts', food, presents, bonuses, flights home if agreed.... I'd say around double what you pay is about right. So you could easily end up at around £120 a week. Weigh this up against the inconvenience of having someone in your own home, never feeling like you can truly do as you please (in my case slob out, leave the place a tip at the weekend, watch TV all day in my PJ's with a cold, only cook beans on toast for tea......) and it doesn't seem much of a difference to pay someone to come in daily.

I do miss the babysitting though

To be honest I was thinking of keeping our cleaner on as well - she's worked for us for 8 years and we get on really well. The bare minimum amount of help I need is 2 1/2 hours 4 evenings a week and an hour each morning. So if I did it with live out help it would cost 15 x £8 = £120. So I guess the trade off is between having the bare minimum of help or plenty of help with baby sitting as well but someone living with us. Kathy's description of convenience and flexibility appeals too.

I think I might be stingy and say as we're in London they can sort themselves out at weekends.

I'd advise against getting rid of a liked and trusted cleaner for an unknown and temporary au-pair.

Well, we are also in london and pay £70 a week for 25 hours but in reality it's more like 21 hours a week plus 2-3 nights babysitting. I really don't think that it costs us much more than that. I don't pay for her language courses or for her travel and I don't know anyone in London who does.

Our aupairs have never come out with us at the weekend. I often take them out for the first couple of weeks to show them round london and after that they generally start to make friends and don't want to be with us anyway and to be honest I really don't have any inclination to entertain them on my weekends. My current AP has some friends from home in london so she spends the weekends with them. For some reason she doesn't appear to eat a thing and this concerns me but I do ensure that I always have a full fridge rather than scrabbling around for food if I can't be bothered to go shopping which I would have done in the past. My previous aupairs have eaten more but rather than spending more overall I have looked more carefully at what we eat as a family to avoid increasing my food bills too much. She has her own laptop and we provide a TV / DVD player and stereo. We were however, considering getting a cheap laptop if she hadn't had one.

She's a better cleaner than any of my other cleaners but then round here most of the cleaners are aupairs anyway or other eastern european girls trying to get some extra cash.If I could afford to I would get my old cleaner to come once a week to do the heavy cleaning that I do myself such as inside windows and kitchen cupboards but overall the cleaning she does is fine and the ironing is wonderful, she's the best ironer I've had.

Thanks dannyB. That is very encouraging.

We pay £80 for 30 hours pw just out of London, spend about £25 a week extra on food, about £25 for presents on her birthday and at Xmas, and provide a UK sim card with £10 credit as a one-off niceness. She shares a cheap laptop with the kids, and there's TV/DVD/Freeview/VHS/Hifi in her room already. That's it. No contribution towards language classes (which are only £9 a week locally anyway) and no flights, although I do pay holiday pay along the lines of the legal minumum in the UK (i.e one week per three months). No car, because friends of friends of ours had an au pair who drove over their toddler's leg(!) I would never let my lovely cleaner go, she keeps me sane between au pairs, apart from anything else, and we like each other a lot.

PS Also cleaners can be useful spies for checking up on APs. Truth that dare not speak its name!