The Job That Sees It: The Nanny and the House Manager
The Million Dollar Question: The federal government’s Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey describes itself as the only comprehensive source of occupational wage data for the US economy, covering about 830 occupations. Of the childcare workers employed directly by a private household — roughly one in six of the occupation, by the government’s own count — how many does that wage survey include?
A) All of them B) About two-thirds C) About one in six D) None of themRead on for the answer.
Ask what a nanny earns and you get three answers, none of them wrong. The federal government says about $16.82 an hour. The largest care marketplace in the country says $21.75. The agencies that place staff in large private houses say $80,000 to $200,000 a year. Those are not competing estimates of the same thing: they are measurements of three labour markets that happen to share a job title, and the distance between them is the most interesting fact about the work.
How much does a nanny cost, and what does a nanny make?
Start with the number a household actually writes down.
The average full-time nanny rate on Care.com in early 2026 was $21.75 an hour, or $870 a week. The weekly figures come from the company’s 2026 Cost of Care Report — a nanny for one infant at $870 a week, a nanny for one toddler at $936, both up from $827 and $858 in the prior year’s edition. Two toddlers costs $952, barely more than one, because the nanny is the fixed cost and the second child is nearly free. The hourly conversion is on the company’s own pay-rate guide, which also carries a second, lower national figure of $21.30 without reconciling the two. An infant place at a day care centre is $332 a week and at a family care home $323 — so a nanny runs roughly 2.6 to 2.8 times a centre place, which is the actual decision most households are making. All of these are parents’ self-reported answers to a one-day online survey, not measured wages.
By city, as of February 2026, that guide has San Francisco at $29.17, Seattle $27.01, New York $24.61, Chicago $22.47 and Kansas City $19.35 — cheapest to dearest about 1.5x, narrower than the spread between the three national estimates here.
Now the wage the government measures. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median Childcare Worker (SOC 39-9011) at $16.82 an hour, $34,980 a year, in its May 2025 estimates, across 518,910 jobs:
| Percentile | Hourly | Annual |
|---|---|---|
| 10th | $11.66 | $24,260 |
| 25th | $14.12 | $29,360 |
| Median | $16.82 | $34,980 |
| 75th | $18.55 | $38,570 |
| 90th | $22.12 | $46,010 |
The 90th percentile of the government’s childcare occupation — $22.12 — is within 2% of the average rate on Care.com. The top tenth of the measured occupation starts where the marketplace’s average is.
And then the private-household market, a different business altogether. The Calendar Group, a household staffing agency, publishes a 2026 guide putting a general nanny at $80,000 to $175,000 and a live-in nanny at a $97,500 median. Achieve Hospitality publishes 2026 benchmarks from its placement data putting a full-time nanny at $120,000 to $200,000 and a part-time nanny at $60,000 to $90,000 — a $40,000 disagreement with the other agency at the bottom of the full-time range.
Treat both with suspicion. They are published by firms whose fee is a percentage of the first-year salary they are quoting: the Calendar Group’s own page gives 15% to 20% for nannies, 20% to 25% for house managers and private chefs, and 25% to 30% and above for estate managers. A salary guide that sets the base for the commission is not a disinterested survey. Read them as the asking price at the top of the market.
So the honest answer to “what does a nanny cost” is about $45,000 a year in wages at the national average rate, roughly $60,000 at the San Francisco rate for a 40-hour week and $83,000 there once the week is a guaranteed fifty — this piece’s arithmetic on the city figures — and $80,000 to $200,000 in the kind of household that uses an agency at all. The answer to “what does a nanny make” is lower than all of those, and the next section is why.
The answer is D: the government does not survey private homes
The answer is none of them. The OEWS survey’s own FAQ lists the industries it does not cover, and NAICS 814, Private Households, is on the list, along with the self-employed, owners and partners of unincorporated firms, unpaid family workers and household workers.
Read that against the table above. The Outlook Handbook’s largest-employers table for the occupation puts child day care services at 29% of it, local government schools at 9% and religious, grantmaking, civic and professional organisations at 8% — and private households at 17%, the self-employed at 24%. Those last two are the sample frame’s blind spot. The nanny employed by a family is not in it, and the country’s main wage survey does not ask the question this post is about.
BLS knows the gap and measures it somewhere else. The same Handbook page puts the occupation at 1,010,300 jobs in 2025 — nearly twice the OEWS count — because the employment projections programme builds its National Employment Matrix from a different set of surveys; its methodology documentation says the establishment survey it leans on “do[es] not include the self-employed, workers in private households, and most of the agricultural sector,” and that household-survey data fill those in.
Subtract one count from the other and roughly 491,000 childcare workers exist in BLS’s occupational total and not in its wage survey; the 41% the Handbook assigns to private households and self-employment is about 414,000 people, the right order of magnitude for who is missing. That is the population whose pay the federal government does not estimate. The subtraction is this piece’s, and the two programmes use different source surveys and reference concepts, so treat it as a scale rather than a headcount.
For an actual wage on that population you have to go to the household survey directly. The Economic Policy Institute did, in its Domestic Workers Chartbook 2022, using Current Population Survey microdata. It counted 211,675 nannies in 2021 at a median wage of $13.53 an hour, in 2021 dollars — against $21.76 for all other workers. On an older pooling of the same survey, covering 2016 to 2018, it found 15.1% of nannies with employer-provided health insurance and 3.5% with a retirement plan, against 48.9% and 32.8% for other workers, and a poverty rate of 20.1% against 5.0%. Nine in ten domestic workers were women and roughly a third foreign-born. EPI says its own count is probably low, because some of this work is paid under the table and immigrants are under-represented in surveys.
Those wages are from 2021 and the benefit and poverty rates from 2016 to 2018, so all of them will have moved. But the shape is the point, and it is the opposite of the agency brochure: the same word covers a job with a 20% poverty rate and a job that pays $175,000 with a car.
House manager salary, and the one person who knows what everyone is paid
The hierarchy above the nanny is where the measurement problem gets comic.
Ask a job board what a house manager earns and ZipRecruiter says, as of September 2026, an average of $47,727 a year, or $22.95 an hour, in a range of $30,500 to $77,500. Ask an agency that places house managers into private estates and the Calendar Group says a $130,000 median, upper range $170,000 to $221,000; Achieve Hospitality says $120,000 to $160,000. The agency median is 2.7 times the job-board average.
Both can be describing their own data accurately, because “house manager” is not one job title. It is a standard front-of-house role in theatres and performing-arts venues, and it appears in other non-domestic settings as well, so a figure pooled from every posting that carries the phrase will be dominated by whichever use is most common — which is not the private-estate one. That reading is this piece’s, not ZipRecruiter’s; the page itself says only that its figures come from employer job postings and third-party data.
The nearest thing to an official number is a different occupation entirely. In the same May 2025 estimates, BLS’s First-Line Supervisors of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers (SOC 37-1011) sit at a $23.61 hourly median, $49,100 a year, across 178,760 jobs — close to the job board, and for the same reason: hotels and hospitals, not houses. Property, Real Estate and Community Association Managers (SOC 11-9141), at $69,990 at the median and $139,680 at the 90th percentile, are the only published distribution that reaches into the agency range at all.
Above the house manager sits the estate manager — $185,000 at the median for a single property per the Calendar Group, $280,000 for multi-property, upper bands of $260,000 to $338,000 and $400,000 to $520,000 — and above that a chief of staff at $200,000 to $370,000. Below, an executive housekeeper at a $115,000 median.
What makes the house manager the interesting seat is not the salary but the position in the information flow — and here the description is this piece’s reading of the role as the agencies advertise it rather than a sourced finding. In a staffed house the house manager writes the schedule, approves the overtime, handles the agency and processes the timesheets. The family knows what it spends in total; the nanny knows what the nanny earns; the house manager is the one person in the building positioned to know every number at once.
That is a strange amount of information to hold in a job with no HR department, no union and no wage survey to benchmark against. When a nanny asks whether she is on the going rate, there is no going rate to look up — only a marketplace average built from job postings, an agency guide built from asking prices, and a government median that excludes her by design.
The cost is not the salary, and the gap is bigger than people budget for
Households underestimate what a nanny costs because they budget the wage and not the employment.
A nanny paid the $21.75 national average for 40 hours is a $45,240-a-year wage. On top of that the household owes the employer half of payroll tax. IRS Publication 926 sets the 2026 rules: pay any one household employee $3,000 or more in cash wages in the year and you owe Social Security at 6.2% and Medicare at 1.45% as the employer, matched by the same withheld from the employee, on a Social Security wage base of $184,500. Pay $1,000 or more in any calendar quarter and federal unemployment tax applies too — 6.0% on the first $7,000 of wages, cut to a net 0.6% by the state credit.
| On a $45,240 wage | Employer cost |
|---|---|
| Social Security + Medicare (7.65%) | $3,461 |
| FUTA (0.6% of first $7,000) | $42 |
| Payroll tax subtotal | $3,503 |
| Wage + payroll tax | $48,743 |
| Agency fee at 15–20%, one-time | $6,786–$9,048 |
| First-year total | $55,529–$57,791 |
That is about 7.7% on the wage in tax every year and 23% to 28% above the wage in year one. State unemployment insurance and, in many states, workers’ compensation sit on top and vary too much to put a number on. The table’s arithmetic is this piece’s, on the published rates.
Then there is overtime, which is where the budget breaks. Household employees who do not live in get no domestic-service exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime requirement, so time and a half applies beyond 40 hours. Take the same nanny to a 50-hour week — one late evening and one weekend morning, an ordinary month in a two-career household:
- 40 hours at $21.75, plus 10 at $32.63, is $1,196 a week, or $62,205 a year.
- That is $16,965 more than the 40-hour arrangement: a 37.5% increase in cost for a 25% increase in hours.
The private chef economics work the same way, for the same statutory reason. It is also why agencies push guaranteed hours: a nanny paid a flat guaranteed 45 or 50 hours is a predictable number, and the household has stopped pretending the job is 40 hours.
The law that makes a live-in nanny cheaper
Federal wage law treats domestic work as its own category, and two of its provisions move money.
The first decides whether the federal minimum wage applies at all. Under 29 U.S.C. § 206(f), a domestic worker gets the federal minimum wage if her pay would count as wages under section 209(a)(6) of the Social Security Act — the same cash-wage threshold that triggers the household employer’s payroll tax — or, alternatively, if she works more than eight hours a week in the aggregate across one or more households. So the figure in Publication 926 is not only a tax trigger. It is one of the two lines that decide whether federal minimum wage law reaches the job at all.
The second shows up in offer letters. 29 U.S.C. § 213(b)(21) exempts from overtime — and from overtime only — “any employee who is employed in domestic service in a household and who resides in such household.” The Labor Department’s fact sheet puts it plainly: live-in domestic service workers “are exempt from overtime pay, although they must be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked.” Employer and live-in worker may agree to exclude sleep time, meal time and other periods of complete freedom from duty, but an interruption by a call to duty counts as hours worked, and the employer must keep an accurate record of hours.
Run the same 50-hour week through that exemption. Under federal law alone, a live-in nanny at $21.75 straight through is $1,087.50 a week, or $56,550 a year — $5,655 less in wages than the identical hours worked by a nanny who goes home. That is a saving on the wage bill only. The household is also providing room and board, which the Calendar Group’s guide values at $25,000 to $35,000 a year in its live-in nanny row — four to six times the overtime saving. The point is narrow: the overtime premium, and nothing else, disappears because of where she sleeps, and the total cost of employing her probably does not.
The same statute’s § 213(a)(15) exempts casual babysitters and companionship-services workers from both minimum wage and overtime — so the occasional Saturday-night sitter is outside federal wage law entirely, while the full-time nanny is inside it.
States have been closing these gaps one at a time since New York’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which took effect on 29 November 2010 and was the first such law in the country. New York’s rules require overtime after 40 hours for live-out workers and after 44 hours for live-in workers — so the federal exemption does not operate there — plus a 24-hour day of rest every seven days, overtime if the worker agrees to work it, and three paid days of rest a year after a year’s service. The statute’s exclusions reach casual workers, part-time babysitters and relatives of the person cared for, none of which describes a full-time live-in nanny. California’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, enacted as AB 241 and codified at Labor Code §§ 1450–1454, entitles covered personal attendants to time and a half beyond nine hours in a day or 45 in a week — a daily trigger, which matters for a job whose hours cluster around school runs and bedtimes. The catch is who counts: a nanny is a personal attendant only if non-caregiving duties such as cleaning, cooking and laundry stay at no more than 20% of her weekly hours, so a nanny-housekeeper falls outside the nine-hour trigger altogether. Hawaii passed its own law in 2013; Seattle’s Domestic Workers Ordinance passed in 2018 and took effect on 1 July 2019.
So there is no national answer to “what does this nanny cost.” The same 50-hour week is $56,550 under federal rules as a live-in, $59,943 as a live-in in New York and $62,205 live-out — three prices for the same work, set by two statutes and an address. That arithmetic is this piece’s, not quoted guidance.
The only place anyone checks what a nanny is paid
If no survey covers the job, is there anywhere the US government actually verifies a household’s pay for a domestic worker? There is one place, and it is a visa window.
A US citizen with a permanent home or station abroad may bring a personal employee to the United States on a B-1 visa. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual at 9 FAM 402.2-5(D) sets the conditions, and they are more specific than anything in US domestic law. There must be an employment contract, in a language the employee understands, signed and dated by both parties. It must state that the employer “will be the only provider of employment to the domestic employee”; that the employee “will receive the greater of the minimum or prevailing wage under U.S. federal, state, or local law for an eight-hour workday”; and that the employer “will provide the employee free room and board and a round trip airfare.” The employee must have worked for that employer abroad for at least six months beforehand, or the employer must show it has regularly employed a domestic worker in the same capacity. Where the employer is instead a US citizen on temporary assignment in the United States, a further condition applies: the employer must be subject to frequent international transfers lasting two years or more as a condition of the job.
Compare that with the domestic case. A family hiring a nanny down the road signs nothing, files nothing in advance, attests to no prevailing wage, and faces a tax threshold rather than a contract. The identical job for the identical family becomes a documented, wage-attested, written-contract relationship only when it crosses a border — and the attestation is made to a consular officer, once, before the work starts. Judging by the consular guidance that repeats these conditions, that is the only moment in most household employment relationships when a third party reads the terms.
What people get wrong
That BLS publishes a nanny wage. It publishes a childcare worker wage, from an establishment survey that excludes private households by design. The $16.82 median is a real number about day care centres and schools, not a benchmark for a household job. Quoting it to a nanny as the market rate is quoting her the wrong market.
That the agency guides describe the job. They describe the top of the market, and they are published by firms earning 15% to 30% of the first-year salary. The EPI median of $13.53 an hour — about $28,000 on a 2,080-hour year — and the agency floor of $80,000 are both real, and they are nearly three times apart because they count different people. Against the top of the agency range, $200,000, the gap is seven times.
That the salary is the cost. Payroll tax adds about 7.7% every year; a one-time agency fee adds 15% to 20% more in year one; and a 50-hour week costs 37.5% more than a 40-hour week, not 25% more. Households that budget the wage and not the employment are short by roughly a quarter in the first year.
That a live-in nanny costs more for the same hours. Her wage bill is lower, because § 213(b)(21) exempts live-in domestic workers from overtime — $5,655 a year less at a fifty-hour week on these numbers. Her total cost is almost certainly higher, because the room and board the exemption assumes is worth several times that. In New York, where live-in overtime starts at 44 hours, even the wage gap narrows. The place she sleeps changes the shape of the bill rather than its size.
That the IRS threshold is only about tax. It is also the line that decides whether the federal minimum wage reaches the job, through § 206(f)’s cross-reference to the Social Security Act. One number does two jobs, and only one of them is printed on the form.
Bottom line
A nanny’s pay has no single figure because the word covers three markets. The government’s childcare median was $16.82 an hour in May 2025 and does not include anyone employed by a household. The largest marketplace posted $21.75 as the national average in early 2026. The household-survey median for people identified specifically as nannies was $13.53 an hour in 2021; on an earlier pooling of the same survey, covering 2016 to 2018, their poverty rate was 20.1% and 15.1% held employer health insurance. The agencies that staff large houses quote $80,000 to $200,000. Each of those is an honest measurement of a different group of people doing nominally the same work.
What the household pays is higher than any of them: about 7.7% on top in payroll tax, 15% to 20% more in a first-year agency fee, and a 37.5% premium for the fifty-hour week that most two-career households actually need. Where the nanny sleeps moves the bill by several thousand dollars a year, because of one clause of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
And the seat that sees all of it at once is the house manager’s — schedule, timesheets, agency, every salary in the building — in a role so poorly measured that its own two most-cited pay figures differ by a factor of 2.7. The labour behind an affluent household is the most carefully budgeted part of the lifestyle and the least carefully counted part of the economy. Those two facts are related.
Methods and sources. Wage and employment figures for Childcare Workers (SOC 39-9011), First-Line Supervisors of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers (SOC 37-1011) and Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers (SOC 11-9141) are May 2025 OEWS estimates, the most recent available, retrieved from the BLS public API (national, all industries; series of the form OEUN0000000000000399011xx) and cross-checked against the Occupational Outlook Handbook. OEWS is an establishment survey; its FAQ states that NAICS 814, Private Households, is not surveyed and that the self-employed, owners and partners of unincorporated firms, household workers and unpaid family workers are excluded. That FAQ is the sole basis for the answer to the Million Dollar Question and for the statement that nannies employed by families are outside the survey; it also describes OEWS as the only comprehensive source of regularly produced occupational employment and wage information for the US economy, covering approximately 830 occupations, and the piece uses that description rather than calling it the largest survey. The 1,010,300 employment figure and the largest-employers shares — child day care services 29%, self-employed 24%, private households 17%, local government elementary and secondary schools 9%, religious, grantmaking, civic and professional organisations 8% — are from the Employment Projections programme via the Outlook Handbook, and describe the 1,010,300 rather than the OEWS 518,910. The difference of roughly 491,000 between the two counts, and the 414,000 implied by the 41% household-and-self-employed share, are this piece’s arithmetic; the two programmes use different source surveys, reference concepts and estimation methods, so both are offered as a scale for the uncovered population rather than a headcount. The separate statement that an establishment survey omits these groups is from the BLS Handbook of Methods, where it is said of the Current Employment Statistics survey, not of OEWS. BLS annual wages for predominantly hourly occupations are computed as the hourly rate times 2,080 and do not imply that any worker was paid for a full year. Care.com figures — $870 and $936 a week, $952 for two toddlers, $332 and $323 for an infant place at a centre or a family care home, $21.75 an hour, and the city table as of February 2026 — are from the company’s 2026 Cost of Care Report and its pay-rate guide. The report is based on a survey of 3,000 US adults who are paying parents, fielded on 30 November 2025 by DKC Analytics using the Pollfish platform with no post-stratification; the weekly tables are labelled against the prior year rather than against 2024 specifically, which is why the comparison here is phrased that way. The $332 and $323 figures are the infant rates, and the nanny-to-centre ratio of 2.6 to 2.8 is this piece’s arithmetic measuring both nanny rates against the infant centre rate; matched by age, a toddler nanny at $936 against a toddler centre place at $308 is 3.0 times. The hourly figure appears only on the pay-rate guide, which also publishes a national figure of $21.30 for the same quantity without reconciling the two, and which describes the city rates in one place as parents’ postings and in another as caregivers’ listings. These are asking prices on a platform, not measured wages. Nanny counts, median wages, benefit coverage and poverty rates are from the Economic Policy Institute’s Domestic Workers Chartbook 2022, which analyses Current Population Survey microdata: employment and demographics pooled 2019–2021, wages from the Outgoing Rotation Group pooled 2019–2021 in 2021 dollars, and benefits and poverty from the ASEC pooled 2016–2018. Those figures are four to ten years old and have not been updated here; EPI states its count is likely an undercount. The International Nanny Association’s salary and benefits survey covers 2022 and is a self-selected sample of 978 complete responses collected in early 2023, finding an average of $27 an hour; it is not relied on for any figure in the text. Agency salary ranges are as published by The Calendar Group (page bylined April 2026) and Achieve Hospitality (stated as 2026 active placement data); neither discloses a sample size or methodology, both firms are compensated as a percentage of placed salaries, and the text says so. The Calendar Group page is also the source for the fee tiers (15–20% entry to mid-level, 20–25% senior, 25–30%+ executive) and for the valuation of live-in housing, given as $25,000 to $35,000 in its live-in nanny row and $25,000 to $45,000 in its general discussion, and stated to include utilities and sometimes meals. The house manager figures of $47,727 average and $22.95 an hour, the $30,500–$77,500 range and the September 2026 date are from ZipRecruiter, which describes its estimates as derived from employer job postings and third-party data; the explanation that the title is diluted by non-domestic uses, chiefly front-of-house roles in theatres and performing-arts venues, is this piece’s reading rather than ZipRecruiter’s, and that page’s own hourly and annual ranges do not reconcile with each other. The description of what a house manager sees — the schedule, the overtime approvals, the agency relationship, the timesheets — is likewise this piece’s characterisation of the role as household staffing agencies advertise it, not a finding from a job analysis or survey. The 2026 household employment tax rules — the $3,000 cash-wage threshold, the 6.2% and 1.45% employer rates, the $184,500 Social Security wage base, the $1,000 quarterly FUTA trigger and the 6.0% rate reduced to a net 0.6% — are from IRS Publication 926; the 2025 threshold was $2,800, which is why older guidance cites that figure. All employer-cost, overtime and live-in comparisons, and the percentages derived from them, are this piece’s arithmetic on those published rates and on a $21.75 hourly wage, and ignore state unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and benefits; the live-in comparison is a comparison of wage bills only, and the text says so and gives the agency’s valuation of room and board alongside it. The $60,000 and $83,000 San Francisco figures are the same arithmetic on that city’s $29.17 rate at 40 and 50 hours. The minimum-wage coverage test for domestic workers is at 29 U.S.C. § 206(f), which cross-references section 209(a)(6) of the Social Security Act rather than naming a dollar figure; the live-in overtime exemption is at 29 U.S.C. § 213(b)(21) and the casual-babysitter and companionship exemptions at § 213(a)(15). The quoted characterisation of live-in workers’ entitlements, the sleep-time and meal-time agreements, the interruption rule and the recordkeeping requirement are from the Labor Department’s fact sheet on domestic service employment. New York’s requirements are from the state Department of Labor; the 29 November 2010 effective date and the law’s status as the first of its kind in the nation are from a contemporaneous employment-law advisory and are not stated on the state page. The statute’s exclusions for casual workers, part-time babysitters and relatives of the person cared for are the reason the piece treats a full-time live-in nanny as covered; that conclusion is an application of the exclusions rather than a published determination. California’s nine-hour and 45-hour triggers and the Labor Code §§ 1450–1454 citation are from the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, which describes the covered group as “certain personal attendants”; the 20% limit on non-caregiving duties in the personal-attendant definition under Wage Order 15 is as set out in a law-firm analysis of AB 241. Hawaii’s 2013 law is SB 535; Seattle’s Domestic Workers Ordinance took effect on 1 July 2019. The B-1 personal-employee conditions are quoted from 9 FAM 402.2-5(D), with the same requirements set out on a consular guidance page; the observation that this is the only point at which a third party reviews the terms of most household employment is this piece’s, not the State Department’s. Nothing in this piece describes the pay or conduct of any identifiable household or worker.
Related reading: Chefs, Nannies, and Household Help: The Labor Behind Affluent Life · Staff: Outsourcing Daily Life · Estate Managers: Running Large Homes Like Businesses · Children: How Wealth Shapes Upbringing and Opportunity · The Job That Sees It: The Estate Manager · The Job That Sees It: The Private Chef · The Job That Sees It: The Private Banker
