Childcare twins 2025

[Bobbieiris]

Not sure if I’ve put this in the right section! Just started to think about childcare for my twins who are due early september and I am baffled!! I’m looking to have 9 months maternity leave and then just assumed I would pop them in nursery for 3 or 4 days per week depending on how many days I go back to work.
I emailed my work nursery today, they said they have a waiting list but to send a form through to show my interest. It would be paid for via salary sacrifice, which to be honest I don’t really understand as never used it before . I’ve really struggled to work out the costs but it seems extortionate! So not sure whether a childminder would be a better, cheaper option!
anyone else expecting twins / have twins who can help me make sense of how to manage this? not sure how much I can rely on the 30 hours off free Child care scheme that’s meant to start sept 2025…and not sure how we will manage if nursery fees cost so much!

Unfortunately the cost of childcare is huge with twins. Which is part of the reason I have only just gone back to work now when my twins are 2.

So from Sept 24 all babies over 9 months will get 15 hours of free childcare a week. But this is for school dates only. So most nurseries/childminders etc spread this out throughout the year which equates to approx 11 hours per week. Each twin is entitled to this. A lot of places add on additional costs though to these hours (meals, nappies, activities) as the funding isn't sufficient.

You can also get childcare tax credits which effectively means 20% of the childcare bill is paid by the government.

There are criteria to full fill to get these, for example a min and max salary per parent. Childcare placement being ofstead registered and having certain ratings.

However it's still really expensive. There is no financial help for twins. I currently send my twins to nursery 1.5 days per week each. They are not yet entitled to any free hours. And costs almost £800 per month with the tax free childcare.

The salary sacrifice means it comes out your pre tax and pre NI salary. If you are a higher rate tax payer that's a 40-50% discount so very likely the best option

If not a higher rate tax payer the discount is more like 35% (tax and Ni)

Tax free childcare which you can use with any provider is 20%

Unfortunately whatever you do it is going to be eye watering for twins

That said if you do get 30h that will really help - it's more like 23h so about 2 days of nursery. And you would get salary sacrifice discount on the other 1-2 days

Thanks for your replies guys…I had a bit of a panic when I realised the cost! I knew it was a lot but didn’t expect it to be quite so bad! Feeling a lot better now as had time to let it sink in and worked out that my partner could have two weekdays off as his non working days so he could look after them and they could maybe go to nursery just one or two days a week…fingers crossed it all works out!
Was very reluctant to give up my career as I would likely have to start again at a less senior level so that scared me, I always thought I would just drop to maybe 3 days a week when twins are little and had never considered having to give up work.
I’m going to start putting them on waiting lists now …I also didn’t realise how long the waiting lists were, feel like I’ve been very naive with the whole nursery process…just going to be optimistic and hope it all goes to plan!

Also just make sure you check that the nursery will allow only 1 or 2 days. Some have a 2 or 3 day a week minimum. So just worth asking

@Donimo thank you, I’ve noticed that annoyingly quite a few have 2 or 3 days minimum. It’s all so complicated, I’ve been tearing my hair out over it lol

Ask if the nursery does a multiple birth discount. We got 10% off at the time. I remember that it was still more than our mortgage a long time ago as well.

Ours do this at the moment. But once the funding comes in they are stopping the discount!

We managed to keep ours due to their administrative errors before that. The nursery itself was wonderful, the head office admin not so. Head office really messed up our bills when our funding started, so much so that the nursery manager called me to tell me to cancel my bank payment until she'd got it sorted out. After that, we only paid on receipt and review of the invoice.

My twins are teens now but I worked half time and almost all my salary went on their childcare.
But it meant I was building a pension and keeping my career which would have been hard to restart.

The free hours aren't as useful as you would think, they usually have a top up fee of some kind and from memory they don't cover the whole year so the funding ends up being a part but by no means all of the money required for nursery.