The 5 Most Expensive Cities for Valentine's Day Sitters, Study Finds

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and seeing as it’s on a Friday this year, it might be the perfect time to get some one-on-one time with your partner. Of course, before you can make any plans, you’ll need a babysitter. Ahead of the holiday, the popular caregiving website, Care.com, led an analysis on the national average rate for a sitter, as well as the most and least expensive cities to hire one for Valentine’s Day.

Their analysts went through the website’s 2019 data to find the number of babysitting jobs posted either on Valentine’s Day or the weekend before. It was the second most popular holiday (behind New Year’s Eve) for babysitter job postings by parents in 2019. The analysts found that, on average, parents were willing to pay around $17.11 an hour. (To put it into perspective, the national minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour.) However, how much parents were willing to pay was largely dependent on where they lived.

Below are the top five most and least expensive cities for Valentine’s Day sitters, according to the average hourly rate.

Top 5 Most Expensive Cities

1. Seattle, WA: $19.53
2. Buffalo, NY: $19.25
3. San Francisco, CA: $19.08
4. San Jose, CA: $18.77
5. New York, NY: $18.72

Top 5 Least Expensive Cities

1. Jacksonville, FL: $14.36
2. Raleigh, NC: $14.59
3. Las Vegas, NV: $15.70
4. Cleveland, OH: $15.77
5. Columbus, OH: $15.82

To see how all 37 cities ranked, check out Care.com’s full analysis.