You won’t believe how much getting a babysitter on New Year’s Eve will cost this year

UrbanSitter surveyed more than 500 parents across the country and folded in transactional data from over 100,000 bookings on its site to calculate its average babysitting rates. This year, it puts the average rate at $29.23 per hour to care for one child on New Year’s Eve, and $30.20 an hour for two children. That’s a 12% increase from a year ago, when the rate was $25.99 per hour for one kid. In 2021, it was $23.96. 

That means getting a sitter for four hours on New Year’s Eve could come to more than $120, and that’s not including the tip — let alone the food, drinks, cab fare and other expenses that can run up a New Year’s Eve tab. Parents tipped babysitters around 16% of the total fee in 2023, which was on par with tipping rates overall last year, UrbanSitter found. That tip would add another $20 or so onto the cost of a four-hour night out. About 65% of parents said they would tip their babysitter, with the most common gratuity during a holiday shift like New Year’s Eve coming in between $15 and $25. 

Babysitting rates vary by location, with a sitter much more expensive in a place like New York City or San Francisco, for example, than in a smaller town, where the going rate may be well below $30 an hour for the holiday. But babysitting rates have been climbing, and not just on UrbanSitter. Caregiving site Care.com has also seen a spike in rates, and while it didn’t have data available yet for this New Year’s Eve, Care.com’s national average was $20.07 last year, up from $19.34 the year before. 

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No wonder just 48% of parents are planning a night out to ring in New Year’s Eve this year, according to UrbanSitter. These parents are expecting to pay 1.5 times the hourly rate that they would on another night of the year to find a babysitter on New Year’s Eve, the platform noted. According to Care.com, sitters sometimes charge as much as double their normal rate for a New Year’s Eve gig. 

Beyond the holiday surcharge, there are a number of forces at play behind the rising rates. On top of the increasing demand for childcare resulting from parents returning to their prepandemic work and social routines, the market continues to see a shortage of babysitters, said Lynn Perkins, CEO of UrbanSitter. Some 1,019,400 childcare workers were employed in November 2023, about 30,000 workers short of the 1,049,800 who were working in the industry in February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

UrbanSitter has also seen a “significant uptick” in the number of skilled professionals turning to childcare, including former teachers, nurses and other early childhood education specialists who left their jobs during the pandemic, Perkins told MarketWatch. Those workers can charge more based on their skills and credentials, likely contributing to the rise in hourly babysitting rates, she said. 

‘You don’t want to take a loan to go out’

Whether a night out is worth spending all that money is a personal call. Many parents make the decision on the day of the event, with the most popular day for families to post jobs and book their babysitters for New Year’s Eve being the actual holiday, according to Care.com, followed by the day before, Dec 30.  

Still, the spiking cost of sitters — not to mention the price of going out, period — is keeping plenty of people at home, even those without kids. Some 63% of people say they’ll spend New Year’s Eve at their own home, according to Numerator data, and 71% of New Year’s Eve revelers are looking to spend under $100 on the holiday. 

“We don’t want to save the whole month just for one night out,” said Kristin Randazzo, a mom of three girls ages 8 to 12 who works in real estate. She and her family plan to spend the night celebrating at home, with pancakes and eggs for dinner.

Randazzo, who lives in St. Lucie County, Fla., has heard of babysitting rates for this New Year’s Eve ranging from $25 to $35 per hour. The high cost of childcare has been the main reason she has chosen to stay home on Dec. 31 for the past few years.

In fact, such rates are lucrative enough that Randazzo has been tempted to consider offering childcare services to other parents on New Year’s Eve. But she said she couldn’t bring herself to charge so much for moms and dads in the same position as she is in. “I don’t want to do that to another parent,” she said. “You don’t want to take a loan to go out.”