We’re paying our two babysitters, who are both ~18 years old, $8/hour, and they seem quite happy with that. But I feel kinda guilty, knowing that that’s not much more than the $7.25 minimum wage, and babysitting the 2 year old Firebug is unquestionably more demanding than your typical minimum-wage job. (Babysitting is exempt from the Federal minimum-wage law, FWIW.)
So I’m curious: how much do other Doper parents pay their babysitters?
We have been paying $5/hr for a girl to watch our two little girls, but I will freely admit that I think that is way low. For some reason the girls around here feel guilty accepting any more than that. I don’t complain!
I pay mine $5 an hour. That’s way too low, but we just can’t afford much else. Luckily my babysitter is a nice person who needs something to do anyway. 
Our babysitter is our niece, who is 13. We give her $5 an hour. I’ve heard ‘regular’ babysitters around here get $10/hour, I hope she doesn’t find out!!
But then again, we’ve done so much free sitting of her and her siblings over the years that we figure her parents owe us - they should chip in the rest.
10 or 15 an hour depending on who it is.
I pay $15.00/hr. Teenagers charge a bit less ($10.00), but my two go-to sitters are women in their early 20’s who are in university and seem to genuinely like kids and sitting. It’s worth the extra few bucks to me to have someone more mature whom my kids adore (plus they have their own cars, so I don’t have to drive them home at midnight).
We pay the 16 year old across the street something in the $10-12 range for occasional babysitting. When we had a full time sitter over the summer, we paid her $15/hour. FTR, we have two kids, 7 and 3 years old.
(Come on, I can’t believe I’m the first one to think of this!)
We’ve usually been able to sucker our friends into doing it for free, sometimes it’s for pizza, sometimes we give a $20 for the night.
Well, it’s not hard to ‘babysit’ 9YO mudgirl. If I’m just going to be gone an hour or two, I’ll leave her here on her own (she’ll be 10 next month, and has emergency plans in place). But if I’m going to be gone overnight, or all day or something, I’ll pay one of my tenants to babysit her. I pay the tenant $5.00/hr (well, knock that amount off the back-rent they owe us), plus I leave mudgirl a key to our apartment so if she wants some time away from the tenant’s three (younger) kids, or to do homework, or to take a bath in her own bathroom, she can.
If there are several occasions I leave the tenant to babysit more than once or twice in a month, I’ll usually buy them $20-$30 worth of groceries, too. They don’t have a lot of money. Feeding my kid shouldn’t have to come out of their food stamps!
This, of course, is a whole different scenario from babysitting an energetic 2YO, or even a problematic 9/10YO (after my tenant babysat for me the first time, she said “I have never seen a more polite child than your daughter!”)
$12 an hour. She’s worth it.
On the flip side: I do some occasional babysitting, and I charge $15 an hour for one child, and an additional $2 per hour for each additional kid.
