When do you start paying your Au Pair? Do you consider her training days to be ‘work’ for you, or do you wait until the Thursday night she arrives in your home before the clock starts?

For our first au pair or two, we just paid them starting when they arrived, because it didn’t occur to me to do anything else. (We did send each of them $40 to orientation so she’d have some souvenir money for the NYC trip and for snacks on the train ride to Virginia.)

Then, I had the idea to pay our next au pair starting with the Monday of orientation– my thought was “hey, she’s working to get trained, so I should pay for that.”

I thought we were being pretty generous since other families didn’t do this, and I thought that this would be appreciated by our new au pair(s). And it was appreciated– until it wasn’t, buy the first au pair arrived with “I’m entitled” stamped on her forehead.

Still, I think that the preferable thing to do is to start her first work week & pay with the Monday of orientation— and feel comfortable having your new au pair be on duty the first Friday and Saturday she is with you. (Remember, most host parents & au pairs agree that the sooner your au pair is on duty with something important to learn and do, the less likely she is to have time to feel super-homesick.)

Assuming that no agency requires you include your au pair’s orientation as time she should get pocket money for, what does your family do?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
See also:

Au Pair Advice: Send a welcome package to your Au Pair’s orientation

Advice: Resist the Amenities Arms Race!

Owl Watch from Hoots4u on Etsy!

Let’s see if we can get some clarity on this question once and for all, and without me calling or email all the agencies to get the official answers. May I call on the LCCs who read AuPairMom, and ask you to tell us what your agency’s official policy is?

I’m talking “Official” policy, not necessarily how you might or might not bend the rules depending on the specific situation.

Please let us know:
1. The name of your Agency
2. Whether your Agency has an official policy or not
3. If it has an official policy, can you give us the verbatim/boilerplate, or a really good summary?
4. Even better, if you can offer a link to your Agency’s regulations page, that would be great.

Go ahead and sign in as “anonymous” if you’d like.

If there are any differences of fact or opinion on any given Agency, we’ll log and note the difference, and I’ll phone that Agency for the official word.

Thanks in advance, LCCs.

Also, we’ll open another post to capture stories from host parents of when they might have withheld pay, and how that worked out ‘officially’.

Thanks everyone. Now let’s get the assorted facts on the table.

Some previous posts on related subjects:
Can you dock her pay if she owes you money? Poll
Settling Accounts — *Before* she departs

Photo credit goes to Jek In The Box, on Flickr. One of her many insanely pretty images.