Best Child Care Services

With Sittercity, you can review sitter profiles (which include everything from availability and first-aid training to the foreign languages they speak) before moving on to interviewing. References from other parents who have hired that sitter are available for you to peruse, too.

The company verifies its sitters' identity through Experian and may screen them through the Family Watchdog database. Families also have the option of ordering a background check prior to hiring a potential sitter.

While no childcare service can guarantee safety 100% of the time, Sittercity goes above and beyond to make sure as many precautions as possible are taken to protect its families and its sitters. 

You can pay monthly for about $39, quarterly for around $29 per month, or annually for approximately $15 per month, giving you access to the site's network of caregivers, as well as post unlimited jobs, reviews, and references. 

Care.com can be intimidating because of its sheer size, but you can search for sitters using a number of different filters, sorting by hourly rate, availability, experience, comfort level with pets, non-smokers, and more. Plus, options for child care have expanded to nanny shares, learning pods, and more in efforts to respond to the changing needs of families.

Care.com runs its sitters through a multi-tier background check that includes searching state and federal criminal records, sex offender data, and motor vehicle information. The site also requires annual background checks for all caregivers and recently announced its Safety Advisory Council which works to give expertise on Care.com's safety protocols.

The rate that you’ll pay your babysitter varies by state, but Care.com provides a babysitting pay-rate calculator based on your zip code that can help you figure out comparable local fees.

It’s one of many helpful guides the site offers, so if you’ve never hired a babysitter through a service before, you might appreciate the resources available to walk you through the process. 

To view full caregiver profiles, access reviews and references, and gain unlimited messaging between you and providers, you need to sign up for the premium membership. Prices are not readily available on the website.

UrbanSitter allows you to sort through sitters with local referrals in mind. You can search by caretakers who are popular with other parents in your area and check out how many times other families have repeatedly booked the same nanny. That way, you know the sitter was a hit with their kids.

The app is available for Apple or Android, so you can find sitters wherever you are. However you’re accessing UrbanSitter, you can handle all your postings, bookings, and payments right within your account. The site also hands out badges to sitters who have cleared their background check searches within the last 12 months.

This site offers a monthly plan for $30, quarterly for $50, or an annual one for $125. Whatever you choose, you get to access all of UrbanSitter's networking, booking, and payment tools.

Though Nanny Poppinz isn’t quite as widely available as some of the other sites, if it is in your area, you’re in luck.

If you require a particular babysitting service, Nanny Poppinz has you covered: It offers sitters for in- and out-of-home care, 24/7 emergency services, nighttime newborn support, mothers' helpers, hotel resort babysitting, sick child care, and more. 

The company has been in business since 1992, working to make sure the professionals it hires are qualified and experienced. You tell Nanny Poppinz what kind of sitter you’re looking for, and the service handles all the administrative work for you. Its staff performs thorough background screening, reference-checking, and personal, face-to-face interviews in its search for your perfect professional. 

There are no application or membership fees to join the service, although the agency does make it difficult to find out how much you pay, once you’ve chosen a sitter.

The concierge-style service provides its nanny-searching services for free until you select a professional for your family. Then, you'll pay a commission based on the type of services you need.

Au pairs are typically young, single women from foreign countries who travel to live with a host family and care for their children (unlike a nanny who typically already resides in the U.S.). To find one, it's best to work with an experienced service like Au Pair in America, which matches families to au pairs and handles much of the paperwork, logistics, legal contracts, and financing. 

The process is overwhelming, but hiring an au pair is an investment (financially, emotionally, and otherwise), so you want a qualified service that knows what it’s doing.

On that note, hiring an au pair can be pricey. But if you're looking for someone to take care of your child for more than one-off occasion, it will be a financial undertaking. At roughly $20,000 per year, you'll want to make sure your au pair arrangement is one that fits your needs.

With Au Pair in America, you'll pay a match fee, a program fee, and a minimum, weekly stipend to your nanny. This will include transportation, orientation and training, partial medical insurance, and liability coverage for your au pair.

All Au Pair in America applicants will have successfully passed a background investigation, which includes verification of schooling, references, a psychometric test, and a criminal record check.

If you've found an au pair whose service you'd like to use, Au Pair in America offers regional managers and local counselors (who are there to answer questions), and 24/7 emergency help.

Still feeling squeamish about hiring a stranger, even when a service is conducting thorough background checks? Consider giving Bambino a try.

If you don’t have a lot of Facebook friends using babysitters or registering with the Bambino app, you can still add “friends” and preferred sitters through the service as it looks for sitters in your community.

If a fellow mom around the corner has hired a sitter through Bambino, for example, you could connect with her to see whether she recommends that caretaker and why. 

This app is free to download and use in full, but once you've booked and paid for a sitter, Bambino charges a small service fee between approximately $2 to $3, depending on the experience level of your sitter.

Although this service is a little more user-intensive than some of the others, Bambino still performs background checks on its sitters, offers in-app bookings and payment, and hands out “refer-a-friend” credits. If your preferred way of hiring a babysitter is word-of-mouth, then the Bambino app is for you.

Several of the other services listed here require monthly or yearly subscriptions to access their databases of sitters. But SeekingSitters operates a little differently. Let’s say you only need babysitting help occasionally during summer vacation. You could sign up with SeekingSitters in June by paying the activation fee, then choose to pay individual booking fees each time you need a sitter. When summer is over, you might not need access to sitters anymore, and you won't have to pay again either.

For this service, after paying the activation fee, you choose from a customized billing plan (either a small monthly fee giving you unlimited access to booking or individual pay-per-request fees). All background checks and screenings are free after the activation fee is paid.

With SeekingSitters, you’re not paying to maintain a monthly subscription that you’re hardly using. This is probably the most pay-as-you-go option around, making it work within your budget.