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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.
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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.
A placement fee is quoted as a share of first year gross compensation, which makes it feel like a clean percentage. It is not clean. Between the intake call and the guarantee expiring you will spend real money on background reports and driving records, and a great deal of unpriced time on sourcing, screening interviews, reference calls, family meetings, contract drafting, and the check-ins that keep the match alive.
The defaults describe an ordinary full time live-out placement: fifty-eight thousand dollars in first year gross compensation, a sixteen percent fee, two hundred forty dollars of screening and sourcing spend, thirty hours of your work across the search, a seventy-five dollar target hourly rate, and fifteen percent of placements coming back inside the guarantee window. Change each figure to your own and watch the margin per hour move.
Your result
Placement fee billed
$9,280
What the family pays for this search before any of your costs come out.
Loaded cost of the search
$2,864
Screening spend plus your priced hours, carrying a reserve for guarantee re-searches.
Margin left after the search
$6,416
What this placement contributes to rent, marketing, insurance, and profit.
Margin per search hour
$214
Read this next to your target rate before you agree to discount a fee.
Your hours are already paid at the target rate inside the loaded cost, so this margin is what the agency keeps on top of paying you, before yearly overhead and the inquiries that never became searches.
Why the guarantee belongs in the cost, not the footnotes
A replacement guarantee is the promise families buy on, and it is also a contingent liability you have already sold. If one placement in seven comes back inside the window, then every search is quietly carrying a share of a second search that earns nothing. Owners who leave that out of the arithmetic set fees that look profitable and are not.
Pricing it in is simple. Take the share of placements you re-run, apply it to the cost of a search, and add that to the cost of every placement. If the number stings, the fix is usually tighter intake and a narrower guarantee scope rather than a higher fee, because a guarantee that fires less often is worth more than a fee that fires customers.
What to do when the margin per hour comes in low
Three levers move it. Raise the fee percent or move to a flat fee tied to the role, which works best when you can point to depth of vetting the family cannot buy elsewhere. Cut the hours per search, usually by scoping requirements harder at intake so you present three strong candidates rather than seven adequate ones. Or reduce the guarantee rate by refusing searches that were doomed at intake.
The lever most owners reach for first, discounting to win the family, moves the number the wrong way. Run a discounted fee through this calculator before you offer it, then look at the margin per hour and decide whether that search is worth the weeks it will take.
Questions about this calculator
Should I use a percentage fee or a flat fee here?
Enter a percentage if that is how you bill, or work backward from a flat fee by dividing it by the compensation and entering the result as a percent. The margin math is identical either way. Flat fees suit agencies with consistent role types, while percentage fees track compensation upward in high cost metros.
Does the deposit change the calculation?
Not the margin. A retainer or deposit changes when cash arrives and how much work you do before being paid anything, which matters enormously for cash flow but does not alter the total the search earns. Track deposits in your placement record and use this tool for the profitability question.
What hourly rate should I put in for my own time?
Use what you would need to earn for the agency to support you, not what you would pay an assistant. Many owners land between seventy-five and one hundred twenty-five dollars an hour once benefits, dead searches, and unpaid administrative time are considered. If you set it too low, every fee will look profitable.
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.