Average cost of a babysitter
Posted
July 12, 2006 at
4:19 am by
Jessica
Here’s a very interesting article I found in the Kansas City Star on how much babysitters charge and how much you can expect to pay them.
In our area, we have found that if you want someone reliable, you have to pay for it. $8 - $13 an hour is not unheard of. If you want Nanny services part-time, expect to pay on the higher side, $12 - $15 an hour. A full-time Nanny doesn’t expect as much, but in the Chicagoland area I’d still expect to pay a full-time Nanny $10 an hour.
A weekend, infrequent teenage babysitter would probably cost us at least $8 an hour, proving that it’s expensive to have a bad time, so why bother?
The 20 parents who responded to my call for information paid sitters from $2 to $10 an hour. The norm — based on this small sample — seemed to be $5 an hour.
High school or college-age sitters who can drive and take kids to events typically are paid more, and older adults who baby-sit receive a slightly higher premium.
Susan Ramza, who has two children, ages 6 and 9, broke down her salary scale this way: “I pay a youngish neighborhood kid $5 to $6 a hour, a high schooler who doesn’t drive $7 an hour, a high school or college driver $8 an hour, and if we have an adult who has a real job by day, we pay $10 an hour.”
Shirley Brogna said her going rate was $10 an hour to sit for her 6-year-old. “We only hire sitters that are 18 and older because they can drive themselves and hopefully are more mature and more reliable,” Brogna said.
Parents also said their pay rate depends on how much interaction the sitter will have with their children.
“We have two children and have a nanny from 9 to 3 during the week,” said Jayme Nolin. “When we have her baby-sit after her normal hours we pay $7 per hour while the children are awake and $5 per hour when sleeping.”
Here’s a sample of average hourly rates from four cities, based on a recent Money magazine survey:
Austin, Texas Minneapolis, Minn. New York City Santa Monica, Calif. Evening baby sitter age 18 or older $12 $10 $13 $12 Evening baby sitter age 14 to 18 $7 $6 $8 $7
 |
32 Responses to “Average cost of a babysitter”
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately in an effort to remove commercial messages, irrelevancies, excessive foul language, racist/sexist/hateful comments, spoofed/cloaked IPs and/or personal attacks and will be edited/deleted at our discretion. Thank you for your patience.
31. Jessica said:
June 2, 2009 @ 3:50 pm
32. Babys said:
June 12, 2009 @ 9:50 pm
I live in Oklahoma.