The law
Babysitter vs nanny: what NSW law actually requires
A privately arranged babysitter in your own home doesn't legally need a Working With Children Check. A nanny does, and you're the one expected to verify it. Where the line sits, and why.
Ask around and you will hear both of these, often from the same person: "everyone who works with kids needs a Working With Children Check", and "babysitters don't need anything". Neither is right. NSW splits the two, and which side you fall on depends less on hours than most people assume.
Where the line falls
No hour count flips a babysitter into a nanny. What matters is the shape of the arrangement: whether this is someone you occasionally ask over for an evening, or someone in an ongoing, regular caring role in your household.
Babysitter
No WWCC required by law
- Occasional, ad hoc care, usually in your home while you are out for a few hours
- You call them when you need them
- A Friday night, a wedding, a late meeting
Nanny, au pair, or tutor
WWCC required, and you verify it
- Regular, ongoing care that is an arrangement rather than a favour: the same days each week, a routine, responsibility for the child's day
- An au pair lives in and cares for the children in exchange for board and pocket money. Ongoing by definition
- A tutor teaches one to one on a recurring basis, in your home or theirs
The right-hand column sits in child-related work as NSW defines it. The left does not. Whether a nanny lives in makes no difference.
Why the split exists
The gap is not an oversight. The Working With Children Check regime is built around organisations: employers and agencies that engage child-related workers must register with the Office of the Children's Guardian and verify their workers through an employer portal. That machinery works when there is an organisation to carry the obligation.
Private families are not organisations, so the state had to decide where the obligation sat. Casual, occasional babysitting (historically the teenager from three doors down) was left outside the scheme. Ongoing, employment-shaped care was left inside it, with the verification duty landing on the parent because there is nobody else to hand it to.
The consequence catches people out. If you engage a nanny, verifying their Check is your job. Nobody sends you a reminder.
What this means in practice
If you are hiring a nanny, au pair, or tutor
Start from the people who said they want regular work: find a nanny near you is that cut of the site, suburb by suburb. Then ask for their WWC number, family name, and date of birth, and verify it before the first day. It is free and takes about two minutes, and we have written the step-by-step in how to check a babysitter's WWCC. Do it even if they are a friend of a friend, and especially if they are.
If you are booking a casual babysitter
There is no legal requirement, so it becomes a judgement call. Ours: ask anyway. It costs you two minutes and costs them nothing if they hold one. Not holding one is not disqualifying either. A seventeen-year-old doing their first sitting job will not have one, and that is completely normal. It just means the rest of your diligence has to carry more weight.
If you are the sitter
A Check is $112 and it makes you materially easier to hire. In a parent's shortlist it is what separates you from the unverified profiles. If you are sitting regularly enough that it is a real income, it will pay for itself quickly.
What we ask for
Sitters here say which kind of work they want: casual babysitting, regular ongoing work, or both. Plenty want both, and both is a perfectly ordinary answer.
We do not require a WWCC to list, whichever they pick. The law does not require one for casual babysitting, and pretending otherwise would shut out exactly the sitters it deliberately left room for. We also do not stop a sitter saying they want regular work before they hold a Check. That would make the hiring decision for the family, and the law gives that decision, and the duty behind it, to them.
We make the difference visible instead. Sitters can opt in to verification: we check a government ID and a matching selfie, and we check their WWCC status directly with the Office of the Children's Guardian. Those profiles carry a badge with the month we checked. Profiles without one say which of the two checks is outstanding, in the same plain words and in the same place a badge would sit. Sighting their Check is still your job, and nothing on the page pretends otherwise.
Nobody on this site can tick a box and appear verified. There is no self-declared badge.
Verification matters most for regular, ongoing care, because a parent hiring for that is legally expected to verify a Check anyway. A sitter who has already been through ours has made that conversation short.
The things the law does not cover at all
Neither tier says anything about competence. A Working With Children Check is a screening against records. It is not an assessment of whether someone can look after your child.
Whichever side of the line you are on, the same handful of steps does most of the work:
- Ask for two referees, and ring both
- Meet before the first booking
- Write down what you have agreed about rates, hours, and what happens when plans change
None of that is required of you, and it is where most of what you learn about a sitter comes from.
