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Overnight Babysitting Rates

What to charge for a night, a full 24 hours or a whole weekend, worked out hour by hour instead of guessed.

Well Paid Babysitter · updated September 2026 · 2026 rates for all 50 states

A typical overnight, 6pm to 9am with one child, comes to about $220 on the 2026 national rate of $22 an hour. A full 24 hours is about $440 and a 48 hour weekend about $880. The method behind those numbers is simple: hours when the children are awake are paid at your normal rate, and hours when they are asleep are paid at about half. That works out to a rule of thumb you can use in your head. An overnight is roughly ten times your hourly rate. Twenty-four hours is roughly twenty times.

Why flat overnight fees go wrong

Overnights are where the worst rates in babysitting happen, because there is no convention and most people pick a round number. A $100 flat fee for 6pm to 8am sounds fine until you divide it. That is fourteen hours at $7.14 an hour, below the federal minimum wage, for a night spent in someone else's house and away from your own bed.

The published averages are not much help either. UrbanSitter's overnight guide puts the national average flat fee at $275, inside a range of $100 to $300 a night, based on its 2024 booking data. That is a useful sanity check, but a range that wide tells you almost nothing about your own night. A flat fee also hides the questions that actually change the price: how long, how many children, how old, and how much of the night you really get to sleep.

How to price an overnight, block by block

Treat the night as two jobs stacked on top of each other. While the children are awake you are doing the normal job, so you charge the normal rate. Once they are asleep you are on call, not off duty. You cannot leave, you are responsible if anything happens and you will not sleep the way you do at home. Half your rate is the fair middle.

The morning is the part everyone forgets. Getting children up, fed, dressed and to school or daycare is some of the hardest work of the whole booking, and it is paid at the full rate.

Overnight rates by number of kids

More children means a higher hourly rate, and the overnight moves with it. These are national figures on the 2026 base. The per child increases follow the same pattern as the rates for 2, 3 or 4 kids on our main rate page: each extra child adds a little less than the one before.

A 24 hour booking here is 16 awake hours and 8 sleeping hours. A weekend is two of those back to back. If the family's weekend is Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime rather than a clean 48 hours, price the real hours with the same two rates instead of rounding to "a weekend".

Overnight babysitting rates by state

Each state figure starts from that state's local babysitting rate, which is the national base adjusted for what a dollar buys there using the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities. One rule is added for overnights: a sleeping hour is never priced below the state minimum wage. In a high minimum wage state, half the babysitting rate can fall under it, so the minimum wage takes over. Those states are marked with an asterisk. Minimum wages are from the Department of Labor's state table.

One child, 2026. Overnight is 5 awake hours and 10 sleeping hours. 24 hours is 16 awake and 8 sleeping. * sleeping hours set at the state minimum wage.

For a city rather than a state, run it through the rate calculator, which has 30 metro areas and does the overnight split for you.

What pushes an overnight rate up

• A baby in the house. An infant under a year adds about $1.50 an hour on top, and an infant who wakes to feed means you are not really getting sleeping hours at all. If you are doing night feeds, those hours are awake hours.
• Newborn night care. Looking after a newborn overnight so the parents can sleep is a specialist job with its own rate. Newborn care specialists run at about 1.75 times the local babysitting rate, around $38.50 an hour nationally.
• Wake-ups. If a child is up sick at 2am for an hour and a half, that time is awake time. Say so when you agree the booking, so you are not negotiating it in the morning.
• Holidays. New Year's Eve is the obvious one. Holidays are worth 20 to 25 percent on top, and on New Year's Eve you are pricing against every other party in town.
• Short notice. An overnight asked for the same afternoon is worth about 15 percent more. You are rearranging a whole evening and the next morning, not an hour.
• Driving and pets. School runs in the morning are about $2 an hour plus mileage. Walking and feeding a dog is about $1 an hour.

The full list of add-ons, with what each one is worth on a normal booking, is in the babysitting rates chart.

Several nights while a family travels

When parents go away for a few days, quote a day rate built the same way so you can show your working. On a $22 base, 24 hours is $440, so Thursday evening to Sunday morning is not "about a thousand dollars". It is two full days plus the evening and morning blocks on either side, priced with the same two rates.

Three things to settle before the family leaves:

• A start time and an end time. "Thursday 5pm to Sunday 11am" is a booking. "The weekend" is a booking that ends whenever their flight lands.
• What happens if they are late. A delayed flight is not free. Agree that anything past the end time is billed at the awake rate.
• Food, money and permissions. Who buys groceries, whether there is cash in the house for emergencies, and written permission for you to get a child medical care if you need to.

Stays like this start to look more like nanny work than babysitting. If they become regular, read what nannies are paid, because the rate and the rules are different.

Do you have to be paid for sleeping hours?

For most casual babysitters, federal wage law does not apply at all. Babysitting done on a casual basis is exempt from the federal minimum wage under 29 CFR 552.104, so what you charge for sleeping hours is a pricing decision, not a legal one.

That changes if babysitting is your job, or if you work more than about twenty hours a week across all your families. Then you are usually covered, and the sleep rules are strict. The Department of Labor's guidance on sleep time for domestic workers says:

• On a shift shorter than 24 hours, no sleep time can be left unpaid, even if you do sleep.
• On a shift of 24 hours or more, up to 8 hours of sleep can be excluded, but only if you agreed to it, there is a proper place to sleep and you usually get an uninterrupted night.
• Any time you are woken to work has to be paid. If you do not get at least five hours of sleep in total, the whole night counts.

So for a nanny doing a normal 6pm to 9am overnight, every hour counts as work, and every hour has to be paid at least the minimum wage. That is why the state table above never lets a sleeping hour drop below it. Pricing sleeping hours at half is fine. Pricing them below the legal floor is not. State law can be stricter than federal law, and this is general information, not legal advice.

How to quote it

Quote the total and show the split in one line. A family is far more likely to accept $220 when they can see where it comes from:

"For Friday night, 6pm to 9am, it would be $220. That is my usual $22 an hour while they are awake and half that while they are asleep."

Then stop talking. The most expensive thing a sitter can do after naming a price is fill the silence with a discount nobody asked for. If the conversation is the hard part for you, the home page has more on working out and saying your number, and our guide to what to actually do when you're babysitting covers the night itself.