For au pair agencies
NannyTank is a tool and a noticeboard for au pair work. No placement fee, no commission, and we never contact a family or an au pair on anyone’s behalf. What we do have is the paperwork research — and it is free for you and your clients to use.
What we do
What we don’t
Why we are doing this
Au pair work still runs on memory and goodwill. Hours nobody wrote down. Overtime reconstructed from a WhatsApp thread at eleven at night. A placement that ends badly over a number neither side can prove — and a family and an au pair who both believe they were the reasonable one.
The standard we want is simple: every placement starts with a contract, and every month leaves a record.
We are building NannyTank to be how that happens — easy enough, and cheap enough, that it stops being the careful agency’s extra step and becomes the way au pair work is simply done. That is the ambition, and we would rather write it down than pretend we only came here to give you free PDFs.
Agencies are the only people who can make it normal. You are there at the start of every placement, on the day the terms get set — which is the one moment any of this can be put in place. A hundred families changing their habits one at a time will take a decade. Ten agencies changing what they hand over at placement would do it in a year.
The partnership
That is the whole deal. No fee either way, no contract, no exclusivity, and you can walk away whenever you like.
What you get
What we ask
Mention NannyTank on your website.
A line and a link is plenty — on your resources page, in your welcome pack, wherever it honestly fits. Tell the au pairs you place that there is a way to keep a record of their hours, and tell your families there is a contract ready to sign.
That is it. We are not asking for a referral cut, a commission, or exclusivity, and there is nothing to sign.
Tell us who you are and where you place. We will put the listing up and send you the badge.
Free, no login, no attribution
What the check is actually called, which authority issues it, and — the part that catches families out — who is allowed to apply for it. In six of the sixteen countries we have recorded, the candidate cannot get their own check without the employer doing something first.
Ireland
The Garda National Vetting Bureau vets only for registered relevant organisations, and says plainly that vetting “is not conducted for individual persons on a personal basis” — so the candidate cannot vet themselves either. If the placement comes through an agency or a Tusla-registered route, the agency is the only party who can obtain the disclosure. That is worth saying to a family out loud.
Germany
An erweitertes Führungszeugnis under § 30a BZRG cannot be issued without a written request from the employer confirming the role is child or youth protection. A plain Führungszeugnis is not the same document.
Australia
There is no national check: a Working with Children Check in most states, a Blue Card in Queensland, Working with Vulnerable People in the ACT. A NSW check is not valid in Victoria.
South Africa
Section 126 of the Children’s Act 38 of 2005 requires an employer to establish, before employing anyone with access to children, whether that person appears on Part B of the National Child Protection Register.
Portugal
A certificado de registo criminal issued for uso geral is not valid for work with minors — and a family handed one would have no way of knowing it was the wrong document.
Sixteen countries in total, each naming the issuing authority and what has to happen first. Send it to your clients, link it from your own site, put it in your welcome pack — no attribution needed.
Read off the government’s own pages, dated so you can see how current each one is, and written twice: once for the family and once for the au pair.
€280
Germany’s au pair route pays a flat monthly figure regardless of hours — and paying more recharacterises the placement and breaks the permit.
16.5 h
Austria’s lawful week, including time on call — roughly half what Germany and the Netherlands allow, and paid over 15 instalments a year, not 12.
€340
The Dutch allowance is a ceiling, not a floor — written in guilders in a regulation unchanged since 2001.
A shared account for your whole team — not a personal login that takes your listings with it when somebody leaves.
Invite colleagues. Anyone on the team can post, edit, publish and answer applicants.
Not to whoever created them. When someone moves on, the posts and their applications stay exactly where they are.
On the board itself, not buried behind a click.
So two people at the same agency are not answering the same candidate twice.
We are new, and small.
We are not going to quote you a candidate number — go and look at the directory and judge it yourself. Posting is free because the board is young, and it will stay free for agencies who were here early. If what you need today is volume, an established platform will serve you better, and we would rather say so now.
The month after a placement is where most of the friction lives: what the hours actually were, what the overtime came to, whether a payslip was owed. None of it is your job once the match is made — but a placement that sours over money is your replacement to make good.
A BCEA employment contract, the UIF registration steps, and a payslip template — ready to fill in and sign.
See what is in it →Hours, overtime and kilometres logged as they happen, and a monthly claim the family approves in one tap. Free for the family to approve, always.
How it works →The contract pack is a paid product — point a family at it and they buy it themselves, or hand it over as part of what you set up for them. Either way nothing is billed to you and there is nothing to administer.
Where an au pair’s interests and a family’s conflict, we are on the au pair’s side. It is written on our about page and we would rather you read it here than find it later. We think it makes us a better place for your placements to live, not a worse one — an au pair who can show what they actually worked is an au pair who does not resign over a disputed month.
There is no dashboard over your candidates. NannyTank has no location tracking and no monitoring. The au pair holds the account and chooses what to share, with the family and with you.
Applicant data goes to you and nobody else. When someone applies to your listing we pass their details to your agency so you can decide whether to reply. We do not sell it, and we do not repurpose it. Our privacy policy sets out what is kept and for how long, under POPIA.
And a caveat we put on everything: the research above is read off official government sources and dated, but no labour lawyer has reviewed it in any jurisdiction. It is a well-sourced starting point, not legal advice. Every page links the official body so you can check it yourself.
We list your agency, you mention us on your site. Or skip all of that and just post a placement — that is free whether we ever speak or not.