How many hours should an au pair really work?

Know Your Hours · NannyTank

It's one of the first questions every au pair asks — and one of the most fudged. "Flexible" sounds friendly until it quietly turns into 55-hour weeks. So let's answer it properly, with the actual rules from the countries where most au pairs work.

The short version

There is no single global number — but there are clear, well-established norms, and in most of the world they cluster around 25–30 hours a week. The big outlier is the United States, where the official cap is higher. Here's how the major destinations compare:

Country / framework	Max working hours	Notes
🇺🇸 USA (J-1 program)	45/week, 10/day	Federal cap. "EduCare" track is 30/week.
🇪🇺 Council of Europe (1969 agreement)	~5 hours/day	The original European au pair framework.
🇩🇪 Germany	30/week, 6/day	—
🇳🇱 Netherlands	30/week, 8/day	Also max 5 days/week.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom	~25–30/week	Entitled to minimum wage since Brexit.
🇪🇸 Spain	30/week	—
🇫🇷 France	~25/week	—
🇦🇹 Austria	18/week	Notably low.
🇦🇺 Australia	≤38/week	Minimum-wage rules apply.
🇿🇦 South Africa	45/week, 9/day	No au-pair-specific law — general BCEA limits.

So if you're working much more than 30 hours a week in most of Europe, or more than 45 in the US or South Africa, you're at or over the normal limit — and something needs to be said.

Why there are two completely different "rule books"

This is the part that trips people up. Depending on where you are, "too many hours" means two different things:

1. Program caps (a hard ceiling). In structured exchange programs — most famously the US J-1 au pair program — the limit is a rule you cannot exceed, full stop. A US au pair may not work more than 45 hours a week or 10 hours a day, and the family also has to give 1.5 days off a week, a full free weekend each month, and two weeks of paid vacation over a 12-month stay. Going over isn't "overtime you bill for" — it's a breach of the program.

2. Employment-law countries (extra hours must be paid). In places like the UK, Australia and South Africa, au pairs are treated more like workers. The UK confirmed after Brexit that au pairs are entitled to the National Minimum Wage; Australia applies its national minimum wage and a 38-hour standard week; and South Africa's BCEA sets ordinary hours at 45/week with overtime paid at 1.5×. Here, extra hours aren't forbidden — but they're not free either.

Knowing which rule book applies to you changes the whole conversation.

What actually counts as "working hours"

Here's the bit families and au pairs most often disagree on: babysitting counts. In most host countries, official working hours include time spent babysitting — and that's true even when the children are asleep, because you have to stay available and can't leave. "Watching the baby monitor while they nap" is work. "On call so the parents can go out" is work.

This matters because scope creep almost never looks like one dramatic 12-hour day. It's 30 minutes here, a "quick" evening there, a Saturday that turned into childcare. Individually each feels like nothing. Added together across a month, it's a lot of hours that quietly drifted past whatever you agreed to.

The number only protects you if you can prove it

Notice the thread running through every country above: the rules are about a number — 30 a week, 45 a week, 5 a day. But a number only protects you if you can show what you actually worked against it.

If your hours live only in a vague week-one conversation, you have no baseline. And without a baseline there's no such thing as "too many," because there's nothing to compare reality to. The au pairs who get overworked aren't usually the ones with bad families — they're the ones where nobody was counting, so it was impossible to notice the creep until they were exhausted.

So — how many hours is too many? Three steps to know for sure

Find your number. Check your country's rule (the table above) and what's written in your contract. Whichever is stricter is your real limit.
Get it in writing. Normal daily start/end times, a weekly cap, your days off. A handshake isn't a baseline.
Log every day as it happens — not at month-end from memory. Then you can see, at a glance, whether this week is on track or creeping over.

Where NannyTank fits

NannyTank was built for exactly that last step. You set your normal hours once, then log your real start and end times each day — about two minutes. At month-end it shows your total against your agreed hours, flags any overtime automatically, and turns it all into a clean summary you can share with your host family. No spreadsheets, no reconstructing four weeks from memory, no guessing whether "it felt like a lot" was actually 50 hours.

You can't manage what you don't measure — and you can't claim what you don't track.

Start your 14-day free trial at nannytank.co.za.

Sources

Working-hour rules and wage figures change and vary by visa/program — always check your own country's current regulations and your contract. This is general guidance, not legal advice.