According to UrbanSitter, a company that helps families find and secure child care, the hourly rate for a babysitter has reached an all-time high and saw an 11 percent increase from the previous year. This inflation rate is far outpacing the 7 percent jump in consumer prices which recently reached a 40-year high. To help put that into perspective, babysitting rates only rose 3.9 percent from 2019 to 2020. UrbanSitter wanted to calculate the average cost of babysitting and then broke those numbers down further looking into which cities in the US have the highest average hourly rate. The data for both was based on 63,550 UrbanSitter bookings, and it’s clear that babysitting prices have skyrocketed. The national average rate for child care is $20.57 per hour to watch one child, $23.25 per hour to watch two kids, and for three kids, that price jumps to $24.35 per hour.
Which cities are the most expensive for babysitting across the US?
As Axios points out, the increase in prices has been a hit to parents who are already dealing with budgets tightening due to inflation. But the rate increase isn’t bad for everyone. “Higher wages are great news for babysitters themselves, who have traditionally been underpaid.”
