Free tool
Placement fee margin calculator
Enter the compensation, your fee percent, and the hours a search takes, and see what the placement actually contributes per hour of your time.
Free tool, no sign up
Placement desk capacity planner
Count the real hours a household search consumes and find out how many placements a year one person can carry before quality starts slipping.
Capacity questions get answered by feel, usually in the middle of a busy spring when four families are waiting and every candidate is a maybe. The honest version is arithmetic. A completed placement consumes a family intake, several full candidate screenings including reference calls, and a closing block covering the trial day, the offer, the work agreement, and the first check-ins.
The defaults describe a solo desk with twenty-six hours a week of real search time across forty-six weeks, twelve hours per search on intake and sourcing, three hours to screen each candidate properly, four candidates screened per filled role, and six hours to close and onboard. That comes out at a specific ceiling. Adjust the inputs to your own practice and you will see quickly whether the next step is a coordinator, a narrower niche, or a higher fee.
Your result
Hours per completed placement
30.0
One family taken from first call to a nanny working and settled.
Placement hours available a year
1,196
Your yearly budget of search time, before anything goes wrong.
Placements one desk can carry
39.9
The ceiling at your current hours per search, assuming every search fills.
Desk weeks each search consumes
1.2
Useful when a family asks how long the search will take on your side.
The ceiling assumes every search ends in a placement, so subtract for searches that stall and for guarantee re-runs you do not get paid for twice.
The hours nobody counts in a household search
Ask an owner how long a search takes and she will describe the interviews. The interviews are rarely the problem. The hours disappear into reference calls that need three attempts to reach a family at home, the candidate who cancels a trial day the night before, the family who adds a driving requirement in week two, the work agreement negotiated line by line, and the day three phone call to both sides that keeps a shaky start from becoming a guarantee claim.
Put those hours into the screening and closing inputs honestly. If your real number is seven hours per candidate rather than three, that is worth knowing, because it means either your fee is too low or your screening is doing work that sharper intake could have prevented.
Reading the ceiling before you hire a coordinator
Once you know your placements per year ceiling, the hiring decision becomes concrete. Compare the ceiling with the number of searches you are turning away, then look at which hours a coordinator could actually take: sourcing, scheduling, first-pass screening calls, paperwork chasing, and reference call logistics. Family intake and the final match judgment usually stay with you.
Run the planner twice. Once with your current hours, once with the screening and closing hours a coordinator would absorb. The gap between the two ceilings is the revenue that has to cover her pay before the hire makes sense, and it is usually clearer than the gut feeling that you are busy.
Questions about this calculator
Should I count searches that never fill?
The ceiling here assumes every search ends in a placement, which is optimistic. If a fifth of your searches stall or the family hires privately, reduce the result by roughly that share to get a realistic number. You can also raise the candidates screened per role input, which captures some of the same waste.
How do guarantee replacements fit into capacity?
They consume a nearly full search and earn nothing new, so they eat capacity twice. If you replace one placement in seven, add about fifteen percent to your hours per placement or subtract the same share from the ceiling. That is often the strongest argument for tighter intake.
Is twenty-six hours a week on placement work realistic for an owner?
For a solo owner it is close to the top end. Bookkeeping, marketing, family inquiries that go nowhere, and general business admin take a large slice of any week. Owners who track their time honestly often find twenty to twenty-four hours of actual search work, which lowers the ceiling noticeably.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The placement readiness checklist
Everything that has to be scoped, verified, signed, and followed up before a nanny placement can be called safe, in the order the work actually happens.
Hold that number through a busy spring
The figure on this screen is true until the fourth family calls in the same week and the hours per search quietly double. In NannyMatchDesk the requirement sheet, the reference calls and the guarantee clock all sit on the placement record, so the cost of a search is counted while it happens instead of guessed afterward. Send your inputs over and we will walk them through a live search.