Daycare vs Nanny vs Au Pair vs Stay-Home Calculator
For 10 family-care life stages, compare daycare, nanny, au pair, and parent-stays-home on monthly cost, career impact, and 5-year net worth — with real Care.com + BLS data.
The 'daycare vs nanny vs stay home' decision is usually framed as a money question and answered as a values question — which is why most family-care content is somewhere between useless and infuriating. We built an honest per-stage calculator that handles both. Each page covers a real life stage (infant, toddler, twins, special needs, after-school, elder care) and runs the numbers across daycare, nanny, au pair, and parent-stays-home with the BLS re-entry penalty baked in (the part most calculators ignore). Numbers come from Care.com's 2024 Cost of Care Report, HHS Child Care Affordability data, and the BLS Current Population Survey. Save scenarios to come back to as your life changes, share a prefilled URL with your spouse, and read 900+ words of analysis specific to your stage — including the hybrid options most calculators skip.
- 10 family-care life stages covered
- 4 options compared: daycare, nanny, au pair, parent-home
- Real Care.com + BLS data
- Career re-entry penalty baked into the math
- Save scenarios, prefilled URLs, print to PDF
- Cited HHS + BLS sources