The raise conversation in nanny employment is one that most people on both sides of it would prefer to avoid. The nanny doesn’t want to seem difficult or ungrateful. The family doesn’t want to have a transactional conversation about money in what feels like a personal relationship. The result is that the conversation often doesn’t happen until something has gone wrong: the nanny is already looking elsewhere, or a competing offer has arrived, or resentment has been building long enough that the conversation arrives with an edge that makes it harder than it needed to be.
The families who navigate this well are the ones who understand that compensation conversations are a normal and healthy part of a professional employment relationship, not an intrusion on the warmth they’ve built with their nanny. And the nannies who handle it well are the ones who approach it as a professional conversation rather than an emotionally loaded request.
When Experienced Nannies Raise It
Professional nannies with enough experience to know the market and their own value tend to think about compensation proactively rather than reactively. They know that the cost of living has risen in most of the cities where Seaside Nannies operates. They know that their skills and experience have grown since they started. They know that the market rate for professional childcare has moved, in most cities significantly, over the past several years.
When to raise it is usually tied to a natural review point: the one-year anniversary of a placement, the annual review if the family has established one, or a moment when the scope of the position has expanded noticeably. A nanny who raises compensation after taking on additional responsibilities, after a cost of living increase, or after a year of strong performance has context for the conversation that makes it easier to have. A nanny who raises it without any framing, or who raises it at a moment when the family is stressed, is starting from a harder position.
The amount to ask for is ideally informed by actual market research, not a feeling. A nanny who knows what comparable positions in her city are currently paying, and who can speak to that in a general way during the conversation, is having a different conversation than one who is asking based on a general sense that she deserves more.
What Families Who Handle It Well Do
The families who navigate raise conversations most effectively treat them as normal professional transactions rather than as awkward intrusions. They respond to the request promptly rather than letting it sit unanswered, which tells the nanny that the conversation is being taken seriously. They do their own research before responding, rather than reacting to the number without context. And they’re honest about what they can do and why, rather than vague.
When the answer is yes, they say so specifically and with a clear effective date. When the answer is a partial increase, they explain their reasoning in a way that the nanny can evaluate. When the answer is not right now, they give a clear timeline for when the conversation can happen again and what would need to be true for the outcome to be different.
What families avoid doing is using the raise conversation to surface performance concerns that haven’t been raised before. If there are performance issues relevant to the compensation discussion, they should have been addressed when they arose. Bringing them up for the first time in response to a raise request tells the nanny that the family isn’t engaging honestly, and damages the relationship in ways that a simple no would not.
The Annual Review
The cleanest way to handle compensation in a nanny placement is to build an annual review into the employment structure from the start. A scheduled conversation, once a year, that covers how the placement is going from both sides, what the market looks like for comparable positions, and what the compensation for the coming year will be. This removes the awkwardness of the raise conversation being initiated by one party and reduces the likelihood of resentment accumulating because the conversation never happens.
At Seaside Nannies, we recommend annual reviews as a standard part of the employment structure we help families set up, because the placements that include them consistently have better communication and longer tenure than the ones that don’t.
