Nursery fees

I am in the same boat the prices are absolutely ridiculous and the only option of reducing my hours still feels like it will be crippling 🥹

It's insane isn't it!! Our nursery is £80 a day but my friend is paying £125!!

I’m in Wales, so we don’t even get any funding until they’re 3 years old!! Currently we get a little top up with Universal Credit, which means we also get 85% of the childcare fees back - which essentially goes towards the next month.

Childminders are a bit cheaper, it’s still so expensive though 😩

It’s absolutely crazy, with our monthly budget childminders were literally our only option that’s with both of us working full time. How parents of multiples do it I have no idea but hats off to them. The government really should be doing more to help

Are you able to claim universal credit. I didn’t think me and my partner would be eligible but works out we are and they pay up to 80% of the childcare fees. Use the turn2us benefits calculator and you can pop in potential childcare fees to see if you would get anything x

I’m doing compressed hours when I go back, so instead of 35 hours in five days I’ll do 34 in five. Means I get an extra day with baby and saves us a couple of hundred pounds a month in fees. Could you do something like that?

It's nuts! I'm currently doing a maternity cover for someone else and have found out that they will be returning for 6 weeks before leaving again. So although I will have a job it means I may have to delay the funded hours and tax free stuff - gutting. We pay £82 a day after the nursery hiked their hourly rate up from £6.60 to £11 and changed the way they charge 🙄 No idea how people manage or have more children.

Our nursery bill for 2 kids 3 days a week is £2000, it’s an absolute joke and that’s one using the 2 year funding and tax free childcare. I cant afford to go back to work full time. I’ve going back to work to get some social interaction other than kids 🤣 so it’s worth it in that sense my other one is 9 months just before September so we will get the funding for that but it’s not that much money off

I’ve just got my bill for my 9 month old in nursery for 6 weeks and I’m just shy of 1k, I would never be able to return to work if my 2 year old was at nursery also as it’s just far too expensive

We scrimped and saved whilst I was pregnant and then had a second pretty soon after just so I could stay at home and look at a new job when they are of school age. We’ve had to make some lifestyle changes and sacrifices and definitely struggle to live within our means on one income some months. My mum is retiring next year and my eldest will be eligible for the funding come September so I can go back part time. But even with the funding coming in it’s still astronomical! I really don’t know how people do it!!

It's more than our mortgage. It's crazy. We'll all feel like ballers again when they're at school 😅

So sad that there’ll be so many only children these days bc of this! And grandparents still in full time employment bc they can’t afford to retire too! Times have changed so much since our parents generation

Full time, I calculated with childcare (for 2) I needed to earn £53,000 to break even. And that’s before the cost of commuting! If we are eligible for tax free childcare and 15 hours for both, we could save £11,500, so still need to earn £38,000 before tax just to break even 😖

@Rosie it’s insane! We were speaking about baby#2 and seems as if the only way we’d be able to make it work is if we wait until our LB is in school. The system just isn’t designed to help parents the way the help is needed

@Ida we didn’t think about it, woops! 😖