What is an Au Pair Plus?

Au Pair or Au Pair Plus, what’s the difference?

An Au Pair or Au Pair plus is a foreign young person who travels to the UK to experience British culture and learn a foreign language. Usually, and Au Pair or Au Pair Plus is not considered to be an employee or paid worker.

The main difference between and Au Pair and an Au Pair Plus is the number of hours that can be worked and the pocket money to be paid. An Au Pair Plus can work 31 to 35 hours and earn between £90 and £120 per week versus the 25 to 30 hours and £70 to £90 per week that you can expect from an Au Pair. It is also worth noting that Romanian and Bulgarian Au Pairs may not work more than 25 hours per week.

What duties can I expect my Au Pair Plus to carry out?

The guidelines on what you can expect from an Au Pair plus are the same as those for an Au Pair, please see our guide titled What is an Au Pair? for further information.

Your Au Pair plus will be part of your family for the duration of her stay and should be treated as such. She will muck in, providing an extra pair of hands for the hours she’s on duty but should also be allowed free time to attend a local language school and to make friends with other Au Pairs in the area.

Your Au Pair Plus should be given the opportunity to return home to visit her family each year and this is at her expense. Some host families doe offer a return ticket to the Au Pairs home county as part of the package but this is at the discretion of the host family and is not a standard requirement. The current recommendation is that your Au Pair Plus has 28 days paid holiday each year, or 1.66 days per month pro-rata for less than a year’s stay.

Extra hours should not mean that you can expect heavy duty cleaning, it is also important to remember that an Au Pair Plus is not expected to care continuously for children under the age of two, on a sole charge basis.

Before your Au Pair Plus arrives, it can be useful to put together a welcome pack, outlining the local area, your children’s favourite places to go, where she may find things she needs while she’s living with you and where the local language school is located.