Care.com’s first survey of child care providers asked more than 4,000 nannies and babysitters about their wages, benefits, career paths and work conditions.
The United States is in the midst of a growing child care crisis. Rising costs are claiming larger and larger shares of household budgets, and nearly one-third of families spend 20% or more of household income on child care. With the demand for care so strong, you might expect the supply of child care would be rising — but as most parents can tell you, the opposite is true.
Across the country, some states are reporting double-digit declines in child care providers, and wages for child care workers remain so low that many are below the poverty line. Though more families are dependent on paid care, a shrinking stock of family child care businesses has left fewer and fewer options for working moms and dads. As a result, half of American families live in child care deserts—places where young children outnumber licensed child-care slots by at least three to one. As child care supply shrinks and costs continue to rise, studies show families are working less, spending less, saving less, paying off less debt and even having fewer children.
The key to reversing this trend — and unlocking a major tool of economic growth — is attracting and retaining more child care workers, ultimately expanding the workforce. But research on child care providers is lagging — and what little research exists often ignores in-home caregivers such as nannies, babysitters, and after-school caregivers. These child care providers, who are increasingly filling in the gaps as families struggle to find flexible care solutions, remain invisible.
As the world’s largest digital marketplace for finding and managing family care, Care.com is in a unique position to provide insight into the in-home child care workforce. In 2019, we set out to answer some key questions: How are nannies and babysitters being compensated in relation to child care workers at child care centers? Has the shortage of center-based child care created more and better opportunity for in-home child care providers? How has the rising cost of child care affected the caregivers, many of whom have families of their own?
To better understand what it’s like to be an individual child care provider in today’s market, we conducted our first ever Babysitter and Nanny Survey and dug into Care.com’s marketplace data, looking at the aggregate rates and job opportunities for child care providers across the country. We asked more than 4,000 child care providers about their wages, benefits, career paths and work conditions. This is what we found:
- Platform work pays a premium. In all 50 states and Washington, D.C., jobs posted on Care.com’s digital platform advertise hourly rates higher than the average child care worker’s hourly wage, as provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In some states, the premium is as high as $6 an hour over the BLS data.
- Nannies and babysitters are hustling to make ends meet. More than half of the care providers we surveyed (53%) say they have additional sources of income. Yet more than two-thirds (67%) depend on their child care wages to make ends meet.
- Passion brings them into the profession, but practicality is pushing many out. Nannies and sitters get into care work because they love working with children, enjoy helping families and are drawn to the meaningful, rewarding work. But 40% are considering leaving the profession, because they need to increase their income and/or find jobs that provide professional benefits.
To understand the relationship between in-home and in-center wages, we examined a proprietary database of jobs and wages posted on Care.com and compared the data from June 2017 through May 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) most recent full-year data available on child care workers collected between June 2017 and May 2018. We found that in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., advertised hourly rates for jobs on Care.com were higher than average hourly wages of child care workers according to the BLS. While the platform premium varied from state to state, jobs on Care.com are offering wages between 14% and 40% higher than the BLS averages for child care workers.
But wages are only one piece of the puzzle. We also assessed which states had the highest density of child care jobs. The best states for nannies and babysitters, then, are the states with the highest opportunity and the best wages.
For nannies and babysitters, west is best: Nine of the top 10 states using our criteria are west of the Mississippi River. Colorado claimed the top spot on the strength of its high opportunity score, which we’re using to reflect the ratio of job posts to job applicants. Washington ranked #2, also thanks to strong job density numbers. Nevada, Hawaii and Arizona rounded out our Top 5.
Jobs are a bit harder to find but no less lucrative at the bottom of our list. Mississippi is ranked 48th, but the average hourly rates for jobs posted on Care.com are 40% higher than the BLS average for child care workers in that state. And, though it’s the lowest on our list, nannies and babysitters in Washington, D.C. can earn an average of $18.49 an hour, a nearly 14% premium over the BLS average.
Top 10 states to be a babysitter or nanny*
1. Colorado
2. Washington
3. Nevada
4. Hawaii
5. Arizona
6. Alaska
7. Utah
8. Oregon
9. California
10. Ohio
The pay paradox: Changing the way we value care
While it’s well documented that families are having to spend more on child care, that increased expenditure is not benefitting the caregivers themselves. As a country, we need to do more to support our child care workforce.
Nanny and babysitter wages are higher on Care.com’s digital platform. But in many cases, those wages are still not enough to make ends meet. More than half of the child care providers we surveyed (53%) say they have additional sources of income. While many don’t consider their caregiving wages their primary source of income, more than two thirds (67%) still depend on those wages to make ends meet.
To understand the paradox at the center of our child care crisis, consider this: The vast majority of caregivers (79%) we surveyed have never asked for a raise. Why? 35% say it’s because they know child care is already expensive for the family for whom they work. The result is that, rather than ask for a raise, many are considering leaving the profession altogether.
That reluctance to ask for increased wages reflects a broken system — and it obscures another interesting data point: Of the small percentage who have asked for a raise, more than 3 in 4 caregivers (77%) received one. In other words, the intrinsic value families place on retaining their caregiver outweighs the already high costs of care that they are shouldering.
But pay isn’t the only factor driving caregivers out of the profession. Benefits – or the lack thereof – matter as well. Care workers, who are overwhelmingly female and often women of color, have historically been denied traditional benefits that other workers often take for granted – protections like overtime, sick leave, and paid time off. In our survey, a large majority of caregivers (86%) believe they deserve the same benefits as other employees. But when it comes to the matter of who should provide those benefits, respondents are torn: Only 33% say the family should pay; another 27% say the government should; and another 31% say they “don’t know” where these benefits should come from.
They’re not alone in this confusion. Care.com advises families that hiring a caregiver for more than 2,100 hours annually makes the family a household employer who should: pay their caregiver legally as a W2 employee; pay appropriate payroll taxes; and sign a contract. For in-home care providers, this type of above-board employment arrangement makes them eligible for benefits like Social Security, disability insurance and workers comp – protections not available to those working off-the-books. In recent years, a small number of states have passed Domestic Workers Bills of Rights that require household employers to provide minimum wage, overtime, paid time off and other protections to caregivers employed in their homes. Through Care.com’s partnership with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, more than a half-million Care.com families have signed the Fair Care Pledge, which advocates for providing household employees with a living wage, overtime, and paid time off. In 2016, Care.com unveiled a first-of-its-kind platform for “pooled and portable” benefits — meaning families can contribute directly to their household employees’ benefits, and workers can collect contributions from multiple families, if they have multiple employers or move from one job to another. The Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative, in a policy guide to innovative solutions for a 21st century workforce, calls Care.com’s leadership “particularly notable against the historical backdrop in which domestic workers have been explicitly excluded from most work-based benefits and protections.”
Who cares for the caregivers?
There’s broad consensus that child care providers need to be paid more — and also that families are already paying too much. One reason the nannies and babysitters we surveyed are so reluctant to ask for raises is that they know this intimately: 40% have children of their own. When we asked care workers who cares for their children, 68% say it’s just them: They never have anyone care for their children, other than themselves and/or their partner. Of the minority who pay for child care, nearly half (47%) pay rates that the government defines as unaffordable.
Increasing the quality of child care has become a mandate in many states, leaving some day care operators struggling to comply with new regulations. The debate over child care quality often paints a picture of an under-educated workforce. But we found that more than 50% of the nannies and babysitters looking for work on Care.com say they have a college degree. And more than 80% of respondents told us they’d get additional education or certifications if they knew it would help them earn a higher wage as a caregiver. That’s an important reminder to policy-makers, because previous research has shown that early childhood majors have one of lowest return on investment of any field of study.
In the meantime, this broken system is causing child care providers to leave jobs they love. Over 40% of respondents said they’ve considered leaving the profession altogether. Their top reasons are unsurprising: 69% say it’s their need to increase income; 45% cite better job opportunities, and 39% said the lack of benefits would lead them down another career path.
It doesn’t need to be this way. When asked what would attract more nannies to the industry, their most common responses were benefits and higher pay.
Finding jobs and getting paid
So why, despite the challenges, do millions pursue child care as a profession? Quite simply, nannies and babysitters get into care because they care. Asked why they chose a career in care, 89% said they enjoyed working with children, 62% enjoy helping families and 53% were drawn to the meaningful, rewarding work.
The ways nannies and babysitters find work is changing. Respondents told us technology has surpassed word-of-mouth as their preferred method for finding jobs. Their top three choices are: online child care platforms like Care.com (84%), letting family, friends and neighbors know they’re available (61%), and asking their networks to refer them to other families with child care needs (29%). In addition to care-specific platforms, 26% of respondents say they use jobsites that are not focused on the care industry, 17% reported posting on local message boards, and many also mentioned social media.
Being able to find families online is key for child care providers, who often work multiple jobs and for multiple families in a given year: 70% of all respondents say they’ve worked for more than one family in the past year; nearly half (46%) worked for at least three families, and almost one in five (19%) worked for five families or more.
While they’re using technology to find work, nannies and babysitters are less likely to receive payment electronically. They still prefer cash (58%) or check (42%) over mobile payment services (25%) or being paid through a platform like Care.com.
In a slightly ironic twist, although it has no doubt created job opportunities for individual child care providers, two-thirds of the nannies and babysitters we spoke two were unaware of the current child care shortage in the United States.
METHODOLOGY
To calculate the best states for nannies and babysitters, we use proprietary Care.com data on child-care jobs and child-care providers to score states on two factors: “job opportunity” and average wage.
For job opportunity, we calculate the providers-to-jobs ratio based on the number of recurring childcare jobs posts on Care.com between May 31, 2018 and June 1, 2019, and the number of unique applicants to those jobs; and for wages we look at the average advertised hourly wage for recurring job posts on Care.com, relative to median income (taken from Census Bureau). We then normalize these variables and take a weighted average. The two factors are then weighted evenly to create the ranking.
To understand the relationship of Care.com wages to average child-care wages, we also include the Department of Labor’s data for the average child-care rate in each state. This number does NOT factor into our ratings.
