Childcare, pets, and home help
Care.com
Find local families who need babysitting, pet care, or housekeeping in the United States. You apply to jobs families post. You are not employed by the website.
Checked 22 September 2026. Figures are ranges, not offers.
- Where
- United States, in person, in the town where you can actually show up. Large cities and suburbs both post jobs. Not remote.
- Hours
- Date-night babysitting is a few hours. Recurring nannying is a much bigger commitment. Start with the smaller posts if this is a side income.
- Pay
- Families set hourly rates. Local babysitting often sits in the mid-teens to mid-twenties per hour, before tax.
- To start
- Carers can create a profile without buying a placement. Read whether any membership is optional. Do not pay a third party to “submit you to Care.com”.
Why it is listed
Families are looking for a person, the work is ordinary, and the scam pattern (fake families overpaying) is well known enough to warn about plainly.
What you can realistically expect
Trust is the product. References you actually have — a neighbour, a previous family — matter more than adjectives. The first job may be a trial evening.
Who pays you
The family pays you, sometimes through the site’s payment tools. Get the rate and the hours in writing. Never accept an overpayment and wire the rest back.
How to start
- Create a carer profile on care.com.
- Say what you will and will not do, and the hours you have.
- Offer two real references.
- Meet in a low-stakes first booking before you agree a whole term.
Read this before you start
- A family who “accidentally” pays too much by cheque is running a scam. Do not wire anything.
- Do not send identity documents to an email address that is not the company’s.
- If someone wants you to pay for a background check on a random website, stop and use only the check Care.com itself starts.
Sideline will not ask you for money. Anyone who messages you claiming we will is not us. Write to [email protected] if something on this page looks wrong.
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