Babysitter rate calculator

Methodology

This tool runs the Kindhow Scale, version 1.0: a baseline drawn from a named publication, plus a stack of adjustments you select. Each adjustment is tagged sourced when a publication backs that exact figure, and house judgment when the reasoning is ours. There is no third tag, and no line on this site is unlabelled.

The formula

published    $26.24/hr one child, $29.87 two, by city   (UrbanSitter)
  ↳ city     swapped for the city's figure, not scaled  (UrbanSitter)
  ↳ 3 kids   city × the national third-child premium            (ours)
  ↳ 4+ kids  + $2.46/hr each beyond the third                   (ours)
  × hours
  + late     +$1/hr to 11pm, +$3/hr past midnight               (ours)
  + holiday  half the base again                                (ours)
  + routine  dinner, bath, bedtime: +$2/hr                      (ours)
  + needs    more than general supervision: +$3/hr              (ours)
  + miles    76¢ a mile in their own car               (IRS, from 1 Jul)
  ─────────────
  = subtotal
  ⌈ $5 ⌉     rounded up, never down
  + $0 lines the three casual-basis tests (29 CFR 552.5, 552.104)
             the under-18 exclusion             (IRS Pub 926)
  ┌ panel ┐  annual wages vs $3,000 · FUTA vs $1,000 a quarter
             overtime past 40 hrs once casual is gone

A rate table, not an opinion about generosity

Most of KindHow runs on etiquette publishers, who tell you what people ought to give. This tool does not, and that is the best thing about it. UrbanSitter’s rate page publishes averages taken from bookings actually made and paid on their own platform — 30 US cities, one child and two, plus a national figure that also covers three. Updated January 2026, and up 4.9% on the year. It is a record of what happened rather than a recommendation about what should, which makes it a stronger kind of source than most pages on this site get to use.

Where you live moves the number more than anything else on the form, which is why the city control swaps the baseline rather than scaling one — the same move our hotel tipping calculator makes when an input changes which publication a line is sourced to. A single child for an evening runs from $18.21 an hour in San Antonio to $29.63 in San Francisco: a 63% spread that no national average can represent and no percentage adjustment of ours should be inventing.

Where the sourced tag stops: the third child

The table has a shape, and the shape decides the tag. One child and two children are printed for every city and for the country, so those baselines are quotations. Three children is printed nationally and nowhere else. Past three, nothing is published by anybody.

So the same control produces three different answers about provenance. Two children in Chicago is $25.83 and sourced. Three children in Chicago is that figure carried up by the national third-child premium (×1.082) — $27.96 — and drops to house judgment, because both numbers are theirs and the multiplication is ours. A fourth child adds $2.46 an hour, the same step their third costs over their second, and that is ours outright. This is the computed-provenance rule our teacher gift calculator introduced, applied to a table that simply runs out.

The 20% rule nobody tells parents about

Babysitters employed “on a casual basis” are excluded from the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act — 29 CFR 552.104(a). That exemption is what makes the ordinary Friday-night arrangement simple, and it has three conditions, each of which is easier to fail than it sounds.

The first is the one that catches people. 29 CFR 552.5 allows “some household work not related to the care of the children” only while it is “incidental, i.e., does not exceed 20 percent of the total hours worked on the particular babysitting assignment”, and § 552.104(c) confirms that beyond that the exemption “does not apply during that assignment”. On a four-hour evening that is 48 minutes. Loading the dishwasher fits. Loading the dishwasher, folding a wash and cleaning the kitchen probably does not.

The tool asks you for your own number rather than estimating it from a list of chores, because the division is exact and our guess would not be — and a guess of ours sitting inside a federal test is the one thing this site is built not to do. Fail any of the three and the ledger gains a sourced $0 line naming which ones and why. It costs nothing tonight: at these rates the federal minimum wage is nowhere near binding. What changes is that overtime exists at all, past 40 hours in a workweek — which is why the panel beside the ledger, not the ledger, is where that lands.

The second surface: what a year of Fridays makes you

The ledger answers a question about tonight. IRS Publication 926 answers one about a tax year, and the two do not belong in the same column — so the household-employer reckoning renders in its own card, the same separation our tooth fairy calculator uses for the whole-childhood total.

Pay any one household employee $3,000 or more in cash wages in 2026 and you owe Social Security and Medicare on all of it: 7.65% as your share and the same again withheld from theirs. Federal unemployment tax is a separate and lower test — $1,000 in any one calendar quarter, then 6% on the first $7,000, usually cut to 0.6% by a state credit of up to 5.4%, which is why that row shows a range. The panel projects your annual wages from how often you book and splits them evenly across quarters; the thresholds are the IRS’, the projection is ours.

And then the exception that decides it for most households: an employee under 18 at any time during the year is excluded unless providing household services is their principal occupation. The example on this page is a weekly sitter at $135 an evening — $7,020 a year, comfortably over the line, with $537 of employer tax attached. Tick that she is seventeen and the same $7,020 carries none of it. Nothing about tonight changes; everything about April does.

Adjustments — house judgment

The rate table is an average across every kind of booking, so it prices none of what makes one evening harder than another. These four do, and all four are ours. None of them is a citation, none is hidden, and every one can be switched off.

The one add-on with a citation is the car. Miles driven in the sitter’s own vehicle are reimbursed at the IRS standard mileage rate: 76.0¢ a mile from 1 July 2026, after 72.5¢ for the first half of 2026 — an unusual mid-year change, which is why the effective date travels with the figure here rather than sitting in a footnote. That rate covers fuel, wear and insurance rather than time, so it sits on top of the hourly rate and never inside it.

The $0 lines

This is not casual babysitting in the federal sense. Appears when the arrangement fails any of the three tests above, names which ones, and adds nothing. It is the site’s eleventh $0 line and the second that argues with the reader rather than with a document they are holding — the first was the older sibling on our tooth fairy calculator. What it changes is the frame: minimum wage and overtime now apply, and the panel beside the ledger works out whether that costs you anything.

They are under 18. Sourced, worth nothing tonight, and the most valuable line on the page for a great many households. Publication 926 excludes an employee under 18 at any point in the year unless household work is their principal occupation, so no amount of Friday evenings creates a filing obligation. It expires on a birthday, which is precisely why it is worth printing.

What this tool will not do

• It is not tax advice and it is not legal advice. It quotes published thresholds and published regulations and does arithmetic on them. It does not know your state, which may add its own wage rules, its own unemployment insurance and its own definition of a domestic employee. A standing arrangement is worth twenty minutes of an accountant’s time.
• It will not tell you the rate in your actual neighbourhood. UrbanSitter’s figures come from bookings on one platform in 30 metros. A platform’s users are not a random sample of sitters, and the number that matters on your street is the number on your street. Treat the baseline as the neighbourhood, not the answer.
• It will not price a nanny. A full-time, regular, live-out nanny is a different job under a different set of rules — not casual, not exempt, and paid on a structure this tool does not model. Where the inputs describe one, the ledger says so rather than pretending otherwise.
• It has no view on whether you can afford it. There is no line here telling you to be more generous and none telling you to economise. The rate table is what other people actually paid; what you do with that is your business.
• It covers the United States only. The rates are US metros, the regulations are the FLSA and the IRS, and none of it transfers. For tipping and gift customs abroad see our tipping abroad calculator.

Sources

• UrbanSitter — Babysitting Rates: how much do babysitters charge, average rates by city — the hourly baseline: $26.24 for one child, $29.87 for two and $32.33 for three nationally, plus a one- and two-child figure for each of 30 US metros. Averages from real bookings on their platform, updated January 2026, up 4.9% year on year.
• 29 CFR 552.5 — Casual basis — the definition of “casual basis”: employment that is irregular or intermittent and not performed by someone whose vocation is babysitting, and the 20% ceiling on household work not related to the children.
• 29 CFR 552.104 — Babysitting services performed on a casual basis — the exclusion from minimum wage and overtime (a), the 20-hour weekly guide (b), the consequence of breaching the 20% ceiling (c), and full-time sitters (d).
• IRS Publication 926 (2026) — Household Employer’s Tax Guide — the $3,000 cash-wage threshold for Social Security and Medicare, the 7.65% each-side rate, the $1,000-a-quarter FUTA test at 6% on the first $7,000, and the exclusion for an employee under 18.
• IRS — Standard mileage rates — 72.5¢ a mile for business use to 30 June 2026 and 76.0¢ from 1 July 2026.

Informational only, not professional advice. The Kindhow Scale is a published model, not a standard, and the lines marked house judgment are our reasoning and nothing more. Nothing here is tax, legal or employment advice: the thresholds are quoted as the IRS and the Code of Federal Regulations publish them, your state may impose more, and a regular arrangement deserves an accountant rather than a web page. Last reviewed: August 2026. Scale version 1.0. The rate table is updated each January, the IRS thresholds each tax year and the mileage rate at least annually, so this page is re-checked on the site’s monthly cycle and hard-reviewed each January.