Nanny Benefits Cost: Holidays, PTO and Sick Days

The benefits load nobody quotes you

Nanny pay is quoted as an hourly rate, and the rate is what families negotiate over. But an hourly rate describes what one hour of care costs, while a benefits package describes how many hours you pay for and receive no care at all. The second number never appears in a job listing, and it moves the real cost of a nanny by roughly a tenth.

Start with the calendar. A full-time nanny working five days a week has 260 scheduled workdays in a year. A conventional package covers three separate buckets of paid absence:

• Paid holidays. Commonly six to ten days, depending on how closely the family tracks the federal schedule.
• Paid vacation and personal days. Two weeks, or ten days, is the modal offer for a full-time position.
• Paid sick leave. Where a state mandates it, typically 24 to 64 hours, which is roughly three to seven scheduled days.

Ten plus ten plus eight is 28 days. Against 260 scheduled days that is 10.8 percent of the year, so a useful planning figure is that about 11 percent of what you pay a nanny buys no care. Framed the other way, you are paying for 260 days and receiving 232, which makes each hour of care actually delivered cost about 12 percent more than the headline rate. Both numbers are correct. They simply use different denominators, and mixing them is how families end up surprised.

One detail cuts the load slightly in the family's favour. A nanny is non-exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act, so overtime is owed on hours worked past 40 in a week. Paid holiday and vacation hours are not hours worked, so a week containing a paid day off usually generates no overtime premium at all. A nine-hour paid day off therefore costs nine hours at the straight rate, not at the blended rate you pay in a full week.

What 28 paid days off cost, by wage level

Worked at a five-day week with nine scheduled hours a day, a 45-hour weekly guarantee, and paid leave priced at the straight hourly rate. The last column is the whole annual wage bill including the overtime premium on the weeks actually worked, so you can read the benefits figure as a share of it.

Figures below are estimates compiled from published averages, not quotes for your area. Get real numbers from local providers before budgeting.

The share stays near 10 percent all the way down the table, because both the load and the wage bill scale with the same hourly rate. What changes is the absolute number. At $25 an hour the package of paid days off is worth roughly $6,300 a year, which is larger than most families' entire mental estimate of what benefits cost. At $35 an hour, common in Boston, New York and the Bay Area, it clears $8,800. Our state-by-state rate breakdown will tell you which row of this table applies to you.

Do nannies get paid holidays?

Legally, no. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires no holiday pay from any private employer, and the eleven federal holidays bind federal agencies rather than the family down the road with one employee. No state mandates paid holidays for household employees either. Everything below is convention, and convention is what the market prices in.

The customary household list is shorter than the federal one. Most nanny contracts open at six or seven days and settle between eight and ten. Where a position sits at the top of the local rate range, a fuller holiday list is often what closes the gap instead of another dollar an hour.

Two mechanics are worth settling in writing. First, what happens when a holiday falls on a day the nanny does not normally work. The common answer is that it simply passes, with no substitute day. Second, what the nanny is paid if you ask her to work the holiday. Nothing requires a premium, but time and a half for the holiday itself, on top of any overtime the week generates, is the usual settlement, and a family that leaves it unstated will end up negotiating it in December.

How many PTO days for a nanny?

Two weeks of paid vacation is the modal package for a full-time nanny, and it is usually split: one week chosen by the family to line up with their own travel, one chosen by the nanny with four to six weeks of notice. Three weeks is normal past the two or three year mark, and a third week is the cheapest retention lever a family has, because it costs a fixed number of days rather than a permanent percentage on the rate.

There are two ways to structure it and they behave very differently on the way out. Accrual earns the time as the nanny works, typically a fixed number of hours per pay period. It is self-correcting: someone who leaves in March has only accrued a few days. It also means tracking a balance every pay period and showing it, which most household payroll services now do automatically. A lump grant hands over the full allotment on the hire date or the work anniversary. It is far simpler and it reads as more generous, but a nanny who takes all ten days in February and resigns in March has been paid for time she never earned, and you generally cannot claw that back out of a final paycheck.

Whether unused vacation must be cashed out at the end of the job is a state question, not a contract question. In California, Colorado, Illinois and Massachusetts, accrued vacation is generally treated as earned wages that cannot be forfeited and must be paid out on separation, which makes an unused balance a real liability sitting on your household books. In most other states the written policy governs, so a clearly stated use-it-or-lose-it or no-payout rule is enforceable. Unused sick leave is different again: state sick leave statutes generally do not require any payout when employment ends, which is one good reason not to fold sick days into a single undifferentiated PTO bucket.

State sick leave: which laws actually reach a household employer

This is the part families get wrong. There is no federal paid sick leave mandate, so parents assume the whole question is discretionary. Across roughly a third of the country it is not. Most state sick leave statutes define a covered employer as anyone with at least one employee, and a family with one nanny is exactly that. A handful of states set a size floor high enough that a single-nanny household falls below it, in which case the leave is still protected and job-secure but does not have to be paid.

The table below reads the question the way a household employer needs it read: not what the headline entitlement is, but what a family with one nanny actually owes. Thresholds and effective dates in this area change frequently, so treat it as a starting point and confirm against your own state labour department before writing a contract.

A plain-language summary of statute and state agency guidance verified in August 2026, not legal advice. Coverage thresholds and effective dates change often; check your state labour department before relying on any row.

States deliberately left off this table

The last two years reshuffled this map more than any period since 2020, and a few states are genuinely unsettled rather than simply uncovered.

• Alaska. Paid sick leave took effect on July 1, 2025 under the 2024 ballot measure, at one hour per 30 worked with a 40-hour cap for employers under 15. But the underlying state wage and hour law carries a domestic service exemption and we could not confirm how it interacts with the new leave right, so we left the row out rather than guess.
• Nebraska. The Healthy Families and Workplaces Act took effect on October 1, 2025, but LB 415 amended it to exempt employers with 10 or fewer employees outright. A single-nanny household is not covered.
• Missouri. The sick leave provisions of Proposition A took effect on May 1, 2025 and were repealed effective August 28, 2025. There is currently no state mandate.
• City ordinances. Seattle, New York City and San Francisco, among others, run their own sick leave rules that can be more generous than the state floor and can reach household employers directly. If you are inside a city limit, check the city rule as well as the state one.

Guaranteed hours, and why they are not optional

Almost every serious nanny contract guarantees a weekly minimum. The family agrees to pay for a set number of hours whether or not it uses them, so a week the parents work from home, a week the grandparents visit, and a week the family is at the beach without the nanny are all still paid weeks. Nannies insist on it because the alternative is a job whose income swings by a third from week to week, and the strongest candidates will not take that. It is the single clause that separates a professional arrangement from a babysitting one.

The cost is easy to miss because it is contingent. A guarantee is free in every week the family uses its full hours and expensive in the weeks it does not. A family that takes two weeks of its own travel a year without bringing the nanny has added ten more paid non-working days on top of the 28 above. That is 38 days out of 260, and the load moves from roughly 11 percent to nearly 15 percent. On a $25 nanny it is another $2,250. If you travel with your nanny instead, the arithmetic changes entirely and is worth costing separately in our nanny travel and vacation guide.

Write the guarantee as hours at an hourly rate, never as a flat weekly salary. A nanny is non-exempt, so overtime is owed on hours worked past 40 regardless of what the agreement calls the payment, and a flat salary that quietly absorbs overtime is the most common way household employers create a back-pay liability for themselves.

When and how much to raise the rate

Set the review on the work anniversary and put the date in the contract, because the alternative is the nanny raising it first, which turns a routine adjustment into a negotiation with a resignation implied behind it. A short written review, a rate that moves on a stated date, and no surprises is worth more to most nannies than an extra half percent.

Three to five percent a year is the normal band. Treat it as two separable things: a cost-of-living step that keeps the real rate flat, and a merit increase on top for a nanny who has taken on more, such as a second child, a school run, or a household management load that was not in the original job. Adding a child in particular is a rate question rather than a raise question, and we work through it separately in the second-child rate guide.

Remember that a raise compounds through everything above. Every paid day off is priced at the new rate, so a four percent increase on a $25 nanny lifts the benefits load from about $6,300 to about $6,550 as well as lifting base wages, and it raises the employer payroll tax on both. If your budget is tight, a third week of vacation or two more paid holidays is a smaller and more predictable concession than a percentage on the rate, and nannies frequently value it more.

Getting it into the offer

A benefits package that lives in a conversation will be remembered differently by each side within six months. Six lines in the work agreement settle it: the named holiday list, the number of vacation days and who picks them, whether they accrue or are granted, the sick leave entitlement and its statutory basis if your state has one, what happens to an unused balance at the end of the job, and the guaranteed weekly hours. Every one of those now has a dollar value you can compute from the table above.

Then budget the whole number rather than the rate. Paid time off sits alongside employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation coverage where your state requires it, and any year-end bonus, and together those are what separate the rate you negotiated from the amount that actually leaves your account. Our calculator guide walks through assembling the pieces, and the cost calculator puts a number on the comparison against daycare.