About
About SitterRate
SitterRate helps families and sitters agree on a fair rate and settle up exactly, without spreadsheets, payroll software or guesswork at the door.
What we make
SitterRate: Babysitter Pay is an iPhone app with a babysitting calculator, a sourced rate guide, saved sitters, a live timer and a payment history. This website offers the same calculations for free, plus guides to the questions that come up around paying a sitter or a nanny.
SitterRate is built and maintained by Gabriel Petersen. It isn’t a marketplace, doesn’t place sitters and doesn’t process payments.
How the calculators are checked
The website and the app share one set of rules: time is counted in real minutes, each money line is rounded half-up to the cent once, and totals are the sum of the lines shown. The web calculators are tested against the app’s own calculation engine on more than 1,400 cases, including sessions past midnight and across daylight-saving changes.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure shows its source, what it measures and its date. We quote national figures from UrbanSitter, Sittercity and Care.com with attribution, and use public-domain wage data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for local context. Legal and tax facts come from primary sources: the IRS, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Code of Federal Regulations and state labor departments.
We don’t estimate, scale or average figures across sources. Where no figure is published, we say so. The rate dataset used on this site and in the app is version 2026.10, assembled 2026-10-01.
We update rates when the sources publish (usually January and February), tax thresholds each January, and the BLS data each spring.
What we don’t do
- No reviews, ratings or testimonials we can’t show you the source for.
- No affiliation with UrbanSitter, Sittercity, Care.com or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- No payroll, tax, employment or legal advice. Our pages summarize primary sources and link to them.
- No ads, analytics or tracking on this site or in the app.
Spotted something out of date?
Email gpmediacontact@gmail.com with the page and the source you’re comparing against. See contact and support.
Rate sources
- UrbanSitter, “Babysitting Rates by City (2026),” last updated January 2026.Average hourly pay from completed UrbanSitter bookings (tens of thousands of jobs per year).
- Sittercity, “Average Babysitter & Nanny Pay Rates by US City,” Sittercity provider data, May 2026.Average rate listed by babysitters on Sittercity (Sittercity provider data).
- Care.com, “How much does a babysitter cost?” updated February 12, 2026.Average posted starting rate from babysitters listed on Care.com.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.Hourly wages of employed childcare workers in all settings (mostly daycare centers, schools and organizations). Excludes self-employed and private-household workers.