How to Find a Babysitter You Can Actually Trust

Finding a babysitter is a trust problem wearing a logistics problem’s clothes. The hard part is not locating someone available on Saturday. It is deciding whether to leave your children with them.

Most advice skips straight past that. This does not.

Where to look

In rough order of how much confidence each source gives you before you have met anyone:

1. A recommendation from a parent you know. Nothing else comes close. Ask in your school group, your street, your NCT or antenatal group. A sitter who has looked after a friend’s children for a year is worth ten profiles.
2. The teenager of a family you already know. You know the household. Start them as a mother’s helper while you are home and see how they are with your children.
3. Neighborhood groups and Nextdoor. Local, and other parents will often chime in with their own experience of the person.
4. Sitter platforms — Care.com, Sittercity, UrbanSitter. The widest choice and the least context. Useful, but the vetting is on you.
5. Agencies. Most expensive, most pre-screened. Reasonable if you need regular care and want someone else to have done the checking.

The pattern worth noticing: the sources that give you the most confidence are the ones where someone you trust has already taken the risk.

What to ask, and what the answers tell you

Ten minutes on a call or at your kitchen table tells you most of what you need. Five questions do the work.

The emergency question is worth dwelling on. A good answer sounds procedural and slightly boring: check they are breathing, call 911 if not, then call you, do not move them unless they are in danger. A vague answer — “I’d stay calm and call you right away” — means they have not been taught, which is fixable but you should know it.

Ask what they ask you, too. A sitter who wants to know about allergies, the bedtime routine, the fuse box and who might come to the door has done this before.

How to verify what you are told

Almost every babysitter profile says reliable, responsible and good with children. None of that is checkable, which means it carries no information.

Three things actually are:

• References you speak to. Not read — speak to. Two minutes on the phone with a parent who has used them is worth more than any written testimonial. Ask one question: would you book them again, and why?
• Training you can look up. Most babysitting certificates are printable PDFs, which anyone can produce. Ask whether theirs can be verified independently.
• A background check from a proper provider — with the caveats below.

On the middle one: it is the reason we built our certification the way we did. Every sitter who passes gets a page on this site showing their name, that they passed and when. You can look it up in seconds, and you never see their score — just whether the credential is real and current. Here is what that involves.

If your current sitter is not certified and you would like them to be, plenty of families pay for it as a gift or a condition of a regular arrangement. It is $45, or $12 for a single class if you only care about the emergencies module — which, honestly, is the one that matters.

Background checks, done properly

This is the part where well-meaning parents create legal problems for themselves, so it is worth being precise.

If you use a background check to decide whether to hire someone, that check is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and rules attach to it. In broad terms:

• You need the person’s written permission before running it.
• You must use a proper consumer reporting agency, not an informal people-search site.
• If you decide not to hire them because of what it says, there is a required process — telling them, giving them a copy, and giving them a chance to dispute it.

The practical version: use a recognized, FCRA-compliant screening service, get consent in writing first, and do not go digging through people-search sites and social media as a substitute. Those are not regulated, are frequently wrong, and using them to reject someone puts you on the wrong side of the rules.

Many sitter platforms include a check as part of their own onboarding, which is simpler than arranging one yourself. Ask what theirs actually covers — the depth varies a great deal.

None of this is legal advice, and the details differ by state. If you are hiring someone regularly rather than for an evening, it is worth ten minutes of proper reading.

The trial run

Do not make the first booking a five-hour evening out.

Book two hours while you are in the house — working upstairs, cooking, anything. You will learn more in those two hours than in any interview: whether your children warm to them, whether they get off their phone, whether they ask questions or guess.

Pay them properly for it. It is a real shift, and starting the relationship by undervaluing it sets the wrong tone.

What you should expect to pay

UrbanSitter’s 2026 booking data puts the national average at $26.24 an hour for one child and $29.87 for two, with real variation by city — San Francisco around $29.63 for one child, San Antonio around $18.21.

Our rate page has the figures for thirty US cities and a calculator that adjusts for ages, hours and what you are asking for.

Things that reasonably increase the rate: more than one child, an infant, bedtime, cooking, driving, last-minute booking, and any expectation of tidying. Paying at the upper end of local rates for someone good is, bluntly, the cheapest part of the whole arrangement.

Red flags

• Vague about the emergency question. Fixable with training, but you need to know before, not after.
• Will not provide references, or the references are all family.
• Pushes to skip the trial run or seems impatient with your questions.
• “Licensed babysitter”. No such license exists anywhere in the US. Someone claiming one either misunderstands or is embellishing.
• An “accredited” certificate with no named accrediting body. There is no accrediting body for babysitting.
• Wildly under local rates. Occasionally a bargain. More often inexperience, or someone who will not stay.

Setting them up to do well

Half of bad babysitting nights are information problems, not character problems. Leave a single sheet with:

• Your cell numbers, and a neighbor or nearby relative as a second contact
• Your address written out — they will need to read it to a dispatcher, and people blank under stress
• Allergies, medication, and anything that must not be given
• The bedtime routine, in order, including the bits that seem obvious to you
• Screen and food rules
• Where the first aid kit, fuse box and spare keys are
• What time you expect to be back, and what to do if that changes

Write it once, keep it on the fridge, update it twice a year.

Common questions

How old should a babysitter be?

There is no legal minimum anywhere in the US — it is a judgment call. Most families start with 13 or 14 year olds for short daytime sits, and want 15 or 16 plus for evenings, infants and multiple children. More detail in how old do you have to be to babysit.

Should I ask for a certificate?

It is a reasonable thing to want, and increasingly normal. What matters more than having one is whether it can be verified — a printable PDF proves very little.

Do I need a contract with a babysitter?

For an occasional evening, no. For a regular weekly arrangement, something in writing covering rate, hours, cancellation and expectations saves a lot of awkwardness later, and good sitters welcome it.

Am I an employer?

For occasional babysitting, generally no. Once someone works for you regularly and you control how and when they work, household employment rules can apply, including tax. Worth proper advice if it is becoming a standing arrangement.

How do I check a certificate is real?

Ask whoever issued it. Ours can be looked up on this site directly; most others cannot be verified at all, which is worth knowing when you are weighing one up.

What is the single best predictor of a good sitter?

A parent you trust saying “we book her every time”. After that, a specific answer to the emergency question.