Nanny holiday sick pay practice Post Reply

[honeygranola]

Hi there, interested in usual practice around nanny holiday and sick pay please.
I know what the legal requirements are but interested in what people do in practice to make sure we’re not off-market.

For example, the legal requirement of 5.6 weeks includes bank holidays. I imagine our nanny won’t work bank holidays but do people tend to take this out of the holiday entitlement (as is legal to do) or effectively give them as extra bonus holiday days?

Is it typical to pay full sick days on top of the SSP requirement and if so is this contractually agreed or subject to discretion?

Thank you in advance - I know there will be many different ways of doing this and so welcome all your different experiences!

[maze]

Hi there.. we give 25 days holiday plus BH but our nanny is really flexible, she doesn’t clock watch so often helps out with extra time and so we’re the same in return

[szerma]

We and many families we know give nannies 25 days in addition to bank holidays as these are the days that we go away as a family on holidays.

Sick pay is tricky. I have a friend who gave a nanny 12 sick days at full pay, so promptly the nanny took off sick days for every cold. SSP feels very paltry though. We ended up giving half pay for the first week of sick pay followed by SSP.

Hope it helps,
M

[AbbevilleMummy]

When we had a nanny, in the contract we would provide 20 days holiday plus bank holiday days.

I received 25 days holiday in my job so I had 5 days I could use if I needed to because the nanny was sick. In reality, the nannies we had were never sick and so they would end up having 25 days holiday. These were bonus days and because my holiday year ran Jan-Dec they were usually taken between Christmas and New Year.

We would also give up to 5 days full sick pay.

[2009Kat]

We give 20 days holiday plus bank holidays. In reality our nanny always gets more holiday as we tend to take more.
For sickness, I think we have written in our contract that sick pay (above SSP) is at our discretion but we may pay up to one week of sick pay. In reality we’ve tended to be more generous and just paid full pay for the odd day off but with one nanny we had to
say that we had a hard limit of paying for 5 days sick per year as she was having 10+ days a year. For another, she had a genuine (but not long term) difficult health problem so we did pay her full pay for more than we needed to.
Upshot is - we put something reasonable but not excessive in the contract but give ourselves flexibility depending on the circumstances.

[honeygranola]

Thank you all so much for your responses - very helpful!