Is Care.com worth it for weekend babysitting and pet sitting?

The short answer

Care.com is worth trying for weekend babysitting and pet sitting if you use it to find two or three regular local clients, rather than expecting a steady stream of jobs. Since March 2026 families pay you directly, outside the platform, and the rates you see are what families post, which nobody checks. Try Care.com paying only the required background check fee, skip the paid upgrades until you have a booking, and decide after a month.

Time cost: about three to four hours to set up, then four to ten hours on a typical weekend, plus ten or fifteen minutes on a couple of weeknights for messages and confirmations.

What you are signing up for

Care.com is a marketplace. Its Terms of Use say it doesn’t employ caregivers, apart from Backup Care providers employed by its subsidiaries. So each family or pet owner you work for is your client or, in some cases, your employer. The U.S. site is open to people 18 or older who live legally in the U.S. or Puerto Rico.

The company also changed hands this year. IAC sold Care.com to an affiliate of the private equity firm Pacific Avenue Capital Partners for about $320 million, and the sale closed on March 16, 2026. We haven’t seen any confirmed price or policy changes since then. New owners do sometimes adjust things, though, so read any emails about updated terms before you archive them.

If you have a day job, the useful part is how availability works. Public caregiver profiles show fixed time blocks that families can see, such as a Friday evening window and a long Saturday. Some sitters say in their bio that they only work weekends, and Care.com has a separate listing page for weekend jobs. You can be upfront about your hours from the first message, which saves everyone time. If you’re still weighing sitting against other options, our guide to local side hustles when you only have weekends compares it with similar work.

What weekend sitters are offered, and how to read it

Care.com’s 2026 Cost of Care Report puts babysitting at an average of $175 a week for one child over eight hours, and $169 for two children. Pet care averages $147 for eight hours. These averages come from the hourly rates families put in Care.com job posts, multiplied by a set number of hours, alongside a survey of 3,000 U.S. parents. They tell you what families offer. Nobody checks what sitters are actually paid.

For pet sitting, Care.com’s pet sitting rates page lists average posted hourly rates by city. It doesn’t say when the data was collected, gives no national average, and says nothing about extra pay for overnights or weekends. Use it as a rough local guide.

Care.com’s own history is a reason to treat these figures with caution. In August 2024 it agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission case. The FTC alleged three things:

• A 2021 ad promised “Childcare jobs from $18/hr” while Care.com’s own site showed average babysitter pay of $13 to $14.25.
• Job counts were inflated.
• Cancelling was made deliberately hard.

The FTC also noted that Care.com doesn’t track what caregivers are actually paid. The settlement order now requires Care.com to back up any earnings claims and to offer a simple way to cancel. Use posted rates as a starting point for setting your own rate, and compare them with recent job posts near you.

What it costs before you earn anything

Every individual caregiver has to pass the Care.com Background Check before contacting families, and the check has an annual fee. Premium includes the fee, but only if your Premium membership is active when the check is processed or renewed. Care.com doesn’t publish its caregiver prices clearly. Apple’s App Store listing for the caregiver app shows Caregiver Membership at $8.99, $19.99, $44.99 and $59.99, and a Background Screening Fee at $14.99 or $21.99, without saying what period each price covers. Check the price on screen before you tap.

Everything else is optional. You can pay per job to “boost” an application higher in a family’s list, but Care.com says a boost doesn’t guarantee a reply or a job. Premium is a subscription that, under the Terms, continues indefinitely until you cancel it, and early-termination fees may apply. Payments aren’t refundable, except that free-trial users can ask for a refund within 30 days of being charged. If you subscribed through the App Store, you cancel through Apple, at least 24 hours before the term ends.

On Trustpilot, Care.com scores 3.6 out of 5 from 6,428 reviews, and common complaints include charges after cancelling and refused refunds. The caregiver app is rated 4.6 on the App Store. The app itself may work well. Billing is where people get caught out.

The Terms also send disputes to individual arbitration instead of court, with no class actions. New users can opt out by mailing a notice postmarked within 30 days of first using the site, so if that matters to you, do it in your first week.

Families see only that your background check was completed, not the report itself. Care.com also says checks are “not always 100% accurate,” and some states limit what can be reported. If you pet sit, think about liability insurance too. Insureon, which sells this insurance, says pet sitters pay a median of $42 a month (about $500 a year) for general liability cover, based on quotes requested through its own site.

Getting paid now that Care.com stays out of it

Most older reviews miss this change. Care.com’s help page on getting paid says that since March 1, 2026, all jobs posted on Care.com are paid outside the platform. There’s no direct deposit through Care.com. Families pay in cash or put you “on the books” through a payroll service, and Care.com says it can’t enforce payment disputes. The Terms still describe card payments through Stripe, but they were written before this change.

So you handle your own billing. Before the first job, agree on these points in writing (Care.com’s messages are fine):

• your hourly rate
• any minimum booking length
• what happens if the family cancels late
• how you’ll be paid at the end of each sit

Asking to be paid on the day, every time, is a normal request for a weekend sitter. Some families use payroll services, including Care.com’s own HomePay, which costs them $59 or $75 a month, so a regular family may ask for your details to put you on the books.

Before you start: your day job

Whether outside work is allowed depends on your employer. Read your handbook for any outside-work or moonlighting clause, and check whether you have to disclose a second job. Keep the two separate: don’t message families from your work laptop or work phone, and don’t take booking calls during work hours.

Be more careful if your day job is in childcare, education or veterinary work, or anywhere else your clients might overlap. Conflict-of-interest rules are more likely to apply there, so ask your manager first. If you’re ever on call at work, block those weekends out of your Care.com availability so you never have to choose between the two. Our guide on making side hustles work around a full-time job covers the boundaries in more detail.

Taxes, kept simple

This is general information, not tax advice. A tax preparer can look at your actual arrangement.

Under IRS Publication 926, a sitter who looks after children in the family’s home, with the family directing the work, is generally that family’s household employee. In 2026, if one family pays you $3,000 or more in cash wages, Social Security and Medicare taxes apply. You and the family each pay 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare. The family files Schedule H and sends you a W-2 by February 1, 2027. Families don’t have to withhold federal income tax, so you may owe some when you file. If the children come to your own home, you’re generally not the family’s employee.

Pet sitting and dog walking for several owners is often run as a small business of your own. If yours works that way, self-employment tax (12.4% Social Security plus 2.9% Medicare) applies once your net earnings reach $400. Payment apps only have to issue a Form 1099-K once you pass both $20,000 and 200 transactions in 2025 or 2026, but income below that is still taxable. Keep a simple log of dates, clients and amounts, and set aside part of every payment.

A realistic weekend schedule

This pattern assumes one babysitting family and two pet clients, which is a sensible limit for the first couple of months.

Friday: finish work, eat, and keep the evening free unless a family has booked you for a date night. If they have, a sit from 6:30 to 10:30 fits well.

Saturday: a morning pet visit or dog walk, roughly 8:00 to 9:30, then home by mid-morning for the rest of the day with your own household. If you take an evening sit, make the afternoon genuinely restful.

Sunday: one short pet visit in the morning if a client needs it, then nothing at all. In the evening, take fifteen minutes to confirm next week’s bookings and log what you were paid.

Will this wear you out?

Babysitting is lighter than a full workday, but you’re still responsible for someone else’s children, often at the end of a long week. Pet sitting is more flexible, but it keeps you close to home: you can’t take a spontaneous day trip if you’ve promised three visits. Overnight stays are the heaviest of all, because you’re sleeping in someone else’s house.

We’d suggest one simple rule. Keep one full day or evening each weekend that no booking can touch, and set your availability blocks to match. Expect requests to bunch up around school breaks, summer travel and the year-end holidays, which are also the times your own family wants you around. Decide ahead of time which of those weekends you’ll work. If you’re unsure how much weekend work your week can absorb, do side hustles work when you only have weekends is a useful reality check.

Spotting scams early

Care.com publishes its own list of warning signs:

• A check arrives before the job starts, with a request to send back the leftover money.
• You’re hired without an interview, often by a family that says it’s relocating.
• You’re asked early on for your Social Security number, bank details, or a photo of your ID with a selfie.
• The pay looks too good to be true.

Keep your messages on the platform. Use the Report button, because blocking someone doesn’t report them, and report scams to the FTC as well.

Scaling it gently

Doubling your income here usually means replacing one-off sits with regular clients, then adding a second regular family who wants alternate Saturdays, so your hours grow more slowly than your pay. Once a family books you every other week, you’re no longer competing for each job, and the app matters less.

That’s also when Premium can start to make sense, especially if you time it so it’s active when your annual background check renews. Until then, we’d spend nothing beyond the required fee. Care.com is a good way for nearby families who want a reliable weekend sitter to find you, but it’s a poor thing to rely on for money you’ve already planned to spend.