When you need overnight care for a work weekend or a night away with your partner, take a proactive approach and set up logistics with your nanny. You’ll want to determine what your nanny will be paid, ensure you comply with state labor laws, and consider a few perks that will make your nanny’s overnight experience a positive one.

How to Make Your Overnight a Positive Experience for You and Your Nanny

Paying your nanny for overnight time is similar to how nannies get paid for their lunch breaks. Lunch breaks can be interrupted — just like sleep — by your children’s urgent needs. When a nanny provides overnight childcare, they are displaced from their home for the night and unable to participate in their regular evening activities. In other words, they’re at work and on the clock.

Acknowledge the Added Responsibilities of Overnight Care

Take into consideration the potential sleep disruptions your nanny will have. They won’t be sleeping in a familiar environment, they may sleep restlessly because of the additional responsibility of overnight care, or they may need to tend to your children throughout the night. Your nanny’s pay for their overnight care should compensate for this additional workload. You are paying your nanny to work — not just to sleep ‘on the job!’

Your nanny acts as a house sitter, pet sitter, and care provider when they stay in your home overnight. Remember to account for their additional security responsibilities, pet duties, and light housekeeping that may be necessary while you are away.

Compensate Your Nanny for Meals

Since overnight care usually includes evening and morning hours that your nanny would not usually be in your home for, they may need to eat meals or order food for themselves. Nannies should be reimbursed for their food expenses or given a stipend for meals eaten while on the job.

Put Overnight Care in Your Household Employee Contract

Families who know they will have overnight care needs, especially if their needs will be frequent, should include overnight logistics and a compensation plan in their nanny contract.

How Much to Pay Your Nanny for Overnight Childcare

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to pay your nanny for overnight care. The cost of overnight care varies depending on the age of your children, how many children you have, and what a typical night looks like for your children.

“With very young children, such as newborns, overnight work can sometimes cost more,” says Sam Zariwala, owner of Little Einsteins Babysitting and Nanny Services.

As you’ll find out in the next section, there are times when you legally do not have to pay your nanny for overnight time. However, we require our My Household Managed families to pay for overnight hours and strongly recommend that you do, too.

A Basic Equation to Use

There is a basic payment equation that industry experts and nanny and household employment agencies, like My Household Managed, recommend you start with. This equation is most appropriate if you give your nanny a guest room to sleep in, they are likely to get uninterrupted sleep, and your weekend getaway is over 24 hours. For this circumstance, you should establish a per night flat rate for overnight care with your nanny and add paid waking hours to that amount.

A ‘night’ begins when the children are asleep, and the nanny’s hourly rate resumes when the children wake in the morning. A typical flat rate for an overnight nanny in the Chicago area is $75-150 per night plus hourly waking care.

You and your nanny should determine what fair overnight compensation is. You can customize your agreement to your unique needs as long as you comply with state labor laws.

How to Comply With Illinois Wage and Labor Laws for Your Overnight Childcare

Ask yourself these four questions to determine if you are complying with Illinois wage and labor laws for household employees:

Do you have appropriate overnight accommodations for your nanny?

Nannies should have a comfortable guest room while providing overnight care.

Will your overnight needs put your nanny’s weekly hours over 40 total hours worked?

If this is the case, you’ll need to pay time and a half for any hours over 40 that your nanny works.

Will your nanny be at your home for more than 24 hours straight?

“A household employee must be paid for the entire time they are working for any shift that is less than 24 hours. This includes time they need to be on the premises even if they are allowed to sleep or engage in other personal activities,” says GTM Payroll.

When overnight care adjoins two scheduled work days, your nanny will fall into the ‘over 24 hours’ category for pay. Under these circumstances, eight hours of uninterrupted sleeping time can legally be unpaid. Your nanny must agree with this exclusion of sleep time. While excluding sleeping hours under certain circumstances is legal, we still do not recommend it.

Any time your caregiver is awake at night to feed your baby or tend to your children, they are on the clock, and you must pay them for those hours, regardless of whether the total hours worked is more or less than 24 hours.

Are you compliant with the most recent Chicago/Illinois requirements for providing household employees with time off?

In a previous article, we covered the new meal break and time off requirements for nannies in Illinois. One of these is that your household employee (nanny) receives one day off every seven rolling days. This requirement still applies when a nanny works overnight shifts for your family.

You’ve got enough on your plate in your day-to-day life — let us make your life easier by handling your unique household staffing needs.

If you are a family looking for a nanny, house manager or other home service, submit an application with My Household Managed.

If you are a professional nanny or house manager looking for a job, apply at My Household Managed.