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Babysitting Jobs for 14, 15 and 16 Year Olds

What changes between 14 and 16 is not the work. It is what families will book you for, and what you can ask.

Well Paid Babysitter · updated 12 September 2026

Teenagers do most of the babysitting in this country and get paid the least for it, and a good part of that gap is not age. It is that nobody ever tells a fifteen-year-old how any of this works.

What each age can realistically get

Fourteen

Short bookings, daytime or early evening, school-age children rather than toddlers, and usually for a family who already knows you. Two hours while a parent goes to an appointment. A Saturday afternoon.

This is also the age where mother's helper work pays well relative to the responsibility, because a parent is in the house.

Fifteen

Full evenings start opening up. Bedtimes, more than one child, and the first bookings that run past nine. Families begin asking whether you can handle a younger child.

This is the year a certification is worth the most, because it is the year families are deciding whether to move you from afternoons to evenings. We put actual numbers on whether it pays for itself.

Sixteen

Later nights, toddlers, and if you drive, a different category of job entirely. Sitters who can drive themselves home at eleven get booked over sitters whose parents have to collect them, and it is worth being blunt about that.

Sixteen is also where your rate should stop looking like a teenager's rate.

Where to find the work

• Families you already know. Neighbors, your parents' friends, families from your old elementary school. This is where almost every teenage sitter's first three jobs come from.
• Your parents' networks. Their coworkers, their gym, their church. Ask them to mention it, once, rather than posting anything yourself.
• Local parent groups. Most towns have one where somebody asks for a sitter every week. If you are under 18 you usually need a parent to post on your behalf, which is fine and normal.
• A flyer where parents actually are. School offices, the library, the gym with a creche. We covered what to put on it separately.

The apps are mostly closed to you. Care.com, Sittercity, UrbanSitter and Bambino all require members to be 18 or over, so under-18 sitters work through people rather than platforms. That sounds like a disadvantage and it is actually the better channel, because referral work pays more than marketplace work. What each one costs is worth knowing for when you turn 18.

What to charge

Here is the mistake, and almost everybody makes it. You pick a number that feels appropriate for your age. Eight dollars. Ten. Whatever your friend said she got.

That number has no relationship to what the work is worth where you live, and the family you quote it to will still be paying it two years later when you are sixteen and putting two children to bed.

The right way round is to start from the real local rate and adjust for experience, rather than starting from a teenage number and hoping. A fifteen-year-old in a high-cost metro is worth more than a twenty-five-year-old in a low-cost one, and neither of them should be charging eight dollars.

The bit that is genuinely harder at your age

Saying the number out loud. A parent asks what you charge, and there is a pause, and you hear yourself round it down or add "but whatever you think is fine".

That sentence costs more than everything else on this page combined. It is also completely normal, it happens to adults constantly, and it is a thing you can practice rather than a thing you are.

Two practical things

Tell someone where you are. Address, family name, what time you expect to finish, every time. Not because babysitting is dangerous but because it is a job in a stranger's house and that is basic.

Agree how you get home. Before the booking, not at eleven at night. If a parent is driving you, that is part of the arrangement and it should be said out loud when you accept.

For the night itself, from the handover at the door to what to say when they get back, there is an hour by hour version.