The rules that decide your pay as a South African au pair

Au Pair Pay 101 · NannyTank

Most au pair pay conversations in South Africa happen on vibes. Someone says R7 000 is normal, someone else says R12 000, and neither of you knows which one the law would agree with.

There is an actual answer. Au pair work in South Africa is generally understood to fall under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act — the BCEA — because the definition of a domestic worker covers a person employed in a private household to look after children. That means there are numbers, and the numbers are public.

Here they are, current as at August 2026. At the end there is a calculator that does the arithmetic on your own hours.

The floor: R30.23 an hour

South Africa's National Minimum Wage rose to R30.23 an hour on 1 March 2026, up from R28.79. It applies to domestic work — that equalisation happened in 2022, so there is no longer a lower domestic rate.

It is reviewed roughly every March, so if you are reading this a year from now, check it.

The catch is that the minimum wage is hourly and most au pairs are paid monthly, so nobody can tell at a glance whether a salary clears it. The conversion the law uses is monthly pay ÷ 4.333 weeks ÷ your weekly hours. On 40 hours a week, R30.23 an hour works out to about R5 240 a month. Below that, on those hours, the number is not legal.

45 hours, then overtime at one and a half

• Ordinary hours are capped at 45 a week — nine a day on a five-day week, eight if you work more than five days.
• Overtime is paid at 1.5× your ordinary rate, and is capped at 10 hours a week, even if you agree to more.

So a 55-hour week is not "a busy week." It is 45 ordinary hours and 10 overtime hours, and those 10 cost half again as much.

The clause almost nobody knows: overtime agreements expire

Under BCEA section 10(5), an agreement to work overtime that you signed when you started — or in your first three months — lapses after one year.

Read that again, because it is the single most useful thing on this page. If you signed a contract on your first day agreeing to work overtime, that agreement is dead twelve months later. After that you may lawfully decline overtime until it is renewed in writing. Working it anyway does not revive the clause.

Most families have never heard of this. Most au pairs haven't either.

Sundays, public holidays and nights

• Sundays — double your ordinary rate, or 1.5× if you ordinarily work Sundays (BCEA s16).
• Public holidays — if you work one, at least double. And if a public holiday falls on a day you would normally work and you don't work, you are still paid for it (s18).
• Night work — hours between 18:00 and 06:00 require an allowance or reduced hours, plus transport being available (s17).

That last one matters more than it sounds for au pairs. Evening babysitting is night work.

⚠ The threshold that switches all of this off

Everything above — the 45-hour cap, overtime, meal breaks, Sunday pay, night work — applies to employees earning below the BCEA earnings threshold, which rose to R269 600.90 a year on 1 May 2026. That is about R22 467 a month.

Earn above it and you are excluded from those sections. No statutory overtime. No 45-hour cap. What you are owed becomes entirely whatever your contract says.

Very few au pairs are anywhere near that number, so for most people reading this the protections apply in full. But if you are at the top of the range, your contract is the only thing standing between you and unpaid extra hours — which is an argument for getting it right rather than an argument for panic.

Kilometres: there is no legal rate

If you drive your own car on school runs, you should be reimbursed. But there is no statutory rate for this the way there is for wages. R4.95 a kilometre is a common starting point in South African au pair arrangements; the figure that actually binds anyone is the one written in your agreement.

Which means: agree it in writing, before you start driving. Petrol and wear on your own car are yours until somebody says otherwise.

What comes off the top

Your gross pay is not your take-home.

• UIF is compulsory for domestic work: 1% from you and 1% from your employer, on earnings up to R17 712 a month — so at most R177.12 each. Your employer is supposed to register with the UIF and pay it over.
• Income tax starts at R99 000 a year for under-65s, which is about R8 250 a month. Above that your employer is generally expected to register with SARS and deduct PAYE. Kilometre money is a reimbursement rather than income and is treated differently again.

If you are near that line, ask SARS or a tax practitioner. Nobody on the internet — us included — can tell you what you owe.

The floor is not the going rate

Everything above is a minimum. The BCEA says what your pay may not go below; it says nothing at all about what the job is worth. There is no legal answer to "is R9 000 fair for three kids and a school run" — that one is settled by the market and by your contract.

So here is the market, as published. Three South African placement agencies put salary guides on their own websites, aimed at the families doing the hiring. Read in September 2026:

Look at what that table does to the argument this article opened with. Someone saying R7 000 and someone saying R12 000 can both be quoting a real published guide for a full-time job. Neither of them is making it up. They are describing different jobs.

Two things move the number more than anything else:

• The car. Au Pair SA prices the same 40-hour week at R10 000 – R15 000 if you drive your own car and R6 000 – R8 000 if you do not. That is the single largest gap in the whole table, and it is worth knowing before you agree to a salary that quietly assumes your car.
• Experience. Little Sunshines splits every band three ways by age and years, and the senior figure is roughly double the junior one for identical hours.

Three caveats, because a table of numbers looks more certain than it is. These are what agencies advertise to families — not law, not what anyone is obliged to pay, and not our recommendation. The guides disagree with each other by a factor of three at forty hours. And the Little Sunshines guide carries no date at all, so treat it as the weakest of the three.

Sources: Au Pair SA, Au Pair Extraordinaire and Little Sunshines.

Work out your own number

Reading rules is one thing; knowing what they mean for your week is another.

Our free South African au pair pay calculator takes your hours, your extra hours, your pay and your kilometres, and gives you the figures above applied to your own situation — your effective hourly rate, what your overtime is worth at 1.5×, whether you clear the minimum wage, and what UIF takes off. It also shows the agency band above for the hours you enter, so you get the legal floor and the going rate side by side. It takes about thirty seconds, there is no sign-up, and nothing you type is stored.

Then keep the record

Every number on this page depends on one thing: knowing what you actually worked.

That is the part that falls over. Nobody reconstructs four weeks of late pickups and unplanned Saturdays from memory, so people round down, or say nothing. You cannot claim what you did not log. Log the day on the day, and the argument stops being about what you remember and becomes about what you can show.

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This is a guide to the BCEA and to publicly published SARS and UIF figures, not legal or tax advice, and it covers South Africa only. Rates change — the minimum wage is reviewed each March and the earnings threshold each year. The agency salary ranges are quoted from those agencies' own published guides and are neither endorsed by us nor binding on anyone. Confirm anything important with the Department of Employment and Labour, SARS, or a labour consultant before relying on it.

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