Nanny share - split days
Hi everyone,
My husband and I are expecting our first child at the end of this month and starting to plan for childcare in the fall. We're hoping to begin a nanny share around September, when our baby will be about 3 months old. Ideally, we'd love to find another family to split the week with, since we only need care three days a week. We can be somewhat flexible on what three days those are.
Is it common to do a nanny share where the families split the days instead of doing full-time together? If anyone has done this, we'd really appreciate any advice on how to make it work and recommendations on how to find a compatible family.
Thanks so much in advance!
May 6, 2025
Parent Replies
I think it’s definitely possible to find another family who’s looking for part-time. The issue is it’s not going to be a true nanny share in terms of the hourly rate—in other words, I think you’ll have to pay the same hourly rate as if you weren’t doing a share (so probably like $35-40). Whereas if you were doing a true nanny share for 40 hours a week you’d only pay half that per hour. So it’s not necessarily cost effective as opposed to doing two families who each want 40 hours.
Also I have found that there are some nannies who only want to do a true share with two kids at a time because the kids help entertain each other. But some nannies don’t care about that.
I had my kiddo in a nanny share situation starting around 4mo that included 3 families, 1 kid whose family hosted, 1 kid who went Tu/Thu, and our kid who went M/W/F. It was doable and it worked for all of us for a while (right up until Covid hit, actually). I recommend writing up exactly what you're looking for and posting about it on BPN and elsewhere. We found the other families through a 1-month subscription to care.com. For us it was a total kismet thing; we all instantly liked each other and two of us had really good friends in common. But I rec you post but also reach out to other families who might have a complementary need. It helped for our situation that the host family was actively interviewing nannies and i trusted them to carry that weight. We worked up a spreadsheet to document shared costs and timing and whatnot. Feel free to DM me to ask more questions or ask for our documentation (there was an employment contract with the nanny as well).