Childcare in the UK is one of the most expensive in the developed world. A full-time private nanny is out of reach for most families once you add employer's National Insurance, pension contributions, and tax. Nursery is cheaper but means a 1-to-3 or 1-to-4 ratio for the youngest children. The nanny share sits in the middle: a single nanny, two families, the children cared for together. Cheaper than a sole nanny, more individual attention than a nursery, and harder to set up than either. For more on choosing childcare, visit Healthbooq.
How a Nanny Share Works
One nanny is employed by two (occasionally three) families at the same time and looks after all the children together. Care usually takes place in one family's home, sometimes alternating, sometimes mostly in one with occasional days at the other.
The structure that catches families out: each family is a separate employer. Not a "co-employer." Not a "contributor." A full employer, with its own PAYE registration, its own employment contract, its own pension obligations, and its own statutory holiday and sick pay liability.
The nanny's gross hourly rate is agreed as a single figure, and each family pays its share plus its own employer's National Insurance on top. A nanny on £15 gross per hour in a two-family share gets £7.50 per hour from each family, and each family pays employer's NI on its £7.50. HMRC's online calculator estimates the employer cost at any wage level.
Most families use a payroll service (Nannytax, PAYE for Nannies) to handle the admin. The cost is around £300 to £400 a year per family and saves a lot of time and HMRC errors.
Finding the Other Family
This is the decision that actually determines whether the share works. Families spend weeks vetting nannies and 20 minutes vetting each other, then are surprised when the share collapses six months in.
Practical compatibility:
- Same hours and days needed
- Children within a year or two in age, and similar enough in temperament to spend whole days together
- Geographically close enough that one home is the obvious base
- Aligned on the wage and on whether you are paying gross or net
Philosophical compatibility — the part that quietly breaks shares:
- Routine versus flexibility (the family with the strict 12:30 nap will lose patience with the family who is fine with naps in the buggy)
- Screen time, snacks, sweets
- Outdoor time and risk tolerance — climbing frames, scooters, picking up worms
- Whether the nanny does any household tasks (children's laundry, tidying after the day, food prep) or pure childcare
Most matches happen through NCT groups, nursery wait-list networks, or local parent Facebook groups. Some nannies broker introductions when they want to move into a share themselves.
The Employment Contract
Each family needs its own contract. Templates are available from Nannytax and similar services, and nanny-specialist employment lawyers will produce one for a few hundred pounds. Worth it for the exit clause alone.
Cover at minimum: duties and hours per family, location of care, gross wage, holiday accrual (and how the families coordinate their holiday weeks — this is a regular flashpoint), sick pay, notice period, and what happens if one family leaves.
The exit clause is the single most-neglected element. If one family pulls out, what notice are they giving? What happens to the nanny's hours and pay? If the remaining family cannot cover the full wage, the nanny may have a redundancy claim, and the departing family may be on the hook for part of it. None of this is comfortable to discuss when the share is starting and everyone is excited. It is much less comfortable to discuss six months in when one family has been offered a job in another city.
Practicalities of the Shared Home
Whose pram, whose car seats, whose high chair, whose stair gates? Resolve this in advance. Two common patterns:
- Each family uses its own kit at its own home, and shared trips out use the host family's kit.
- The families jointly buy specific pieces of kit (a double buggy is the usual one) with a written agreement about what happens to it on exit.
Children's compatibility matters too. Wildly different sleep schedules, different dietary needs, or temperaments that grind on each other turn the nanny's day into management instead of care. Spend a few mornings together with the kids before signing anything.
Rules and routines should be aligned enough that the nanny is not enforcing two opposing standards in one room. The nanny who cannot give one child a biscuit without the other child noticing, or who is putting one to nap while keeping the other awake, is working in an unnecessarily hard environment.
The Legal Bits Both Families Must Know
Both families are employers. That means each family must:
- Register with HMRC as an employer and run PAYE from the first pay day.
- Enrol the nanny in a workplace pension (most nannies earn over the auto-enrolment threshold).
- Issue a payslip every pay period.
- Pay statutory sick pay when the nanny is ill.
- Provide statutory holiday — 28 days pro rata including bank holidays for full-time, scaled to the hours that family employs.
- Issue a written statement of employment particulars within 2 months of the start date.
None of this is optional and HMRC does investigate. Penalties for undeclared nanny employment are significant. If you are looking at a share where someone suggests "we just pay her cash," walk away — that is the single fastest way to land both families with back tax, penalties, and an unpaid pension liability.
When a Nanny Share Works Well
Two families with similar working hours, kids within a year of each other, aligned values on the basics, a written contract with a real exit clause, and a payroll service handling the paperwork. In that setup, a nanny share gives each child a 1-to-2 ratio at roughly half the cost of a sole nanny, with no daily handover to a strange room and a small social peer who is, by the end of a year, basically a sibling.
When it goes wrong, it is almost always because the families skipped the boring bits at the start.
Key Takeaways
A nanny share is two (sometimes three) families splitting one nanny's time and cost, usually in one of the homes. It costs roughly half a private nanny while keeping a 1-to-2 or 1-to-3 ratio. Both families are full employers — separate PAYE, separate contracts, separate pension obligations. The arrangements that work have a compatible second family, an honest exit clause written before the relationship sours, and aligned rules so the nanny is not refereeing two parenting styles every day.
