Having kids is expensive. Everybody knows this. I knew this going in. And yet still nothing quite prepared me for the cost of nursery fees.
For just two days per week at nursery, we fork out a staggering £642 a month, and the money is still payable even if our baby misses days due to illness, or even being in hospital, as we found out. Hell, they still charge us even if THEY close. It’s painful.
So when the nursery emailed to tell me that we can claim free childcare hours which will bring down our bill, I shot straight to gov.uk within seconds – and within minutes had saved £3,840 a year.
It turns out there’s a scheme for free childcare hours once the baby turns 9 months old, though we weren’t able to claim this until the following term when he turned 12 months old, because new claims have to be made at the start of each term or something. So we were paying the full whack for the first three months of his time at nursery.
It’s not a well advertised scheme and it doesn’t even have a name. On the government’s website it’s just called ‘check you’re eligible for free childcare if you’re working’.
Confusingly, this is different to Tax-Free Childcare, which is also terribly named because it’s not tax-free but simply gives you a 20 percent discount on childcare costs.
This scheme gives working parents 15 hours per week of free childcare.
To claim, you need to go to the gov.uk website and start a claim, and punch in your child’s date of birth, your National Insurance number, your partner’s, and the nursery’s address. Then it generates a six-letter code which you give to the nursery.
Unlike most benefits, this scheme is not for people on zero or super low incomes – in fact, there’s a minimum amount you have to earn, although it’s not that high.
You need to earn £2,380 over the course of three months, which works out at £183 a week, in order to qualify, so it’s pretty low, but if you’re not working you don’t get the support.
The support is then provided to anyone earning up to £100,000 (I am happy to make public that I don’t get paid £100,000 for this job).
The entire application took literally five minutes on the government website.
Once we gave the nursery this code, they sent us a ‘revised invoice’, taking into account the 15 hours free, and it slashed our monthly bill from £646 to £324.
Across a year, that’s a saving of £3,864. Over the four years he’ll be in nursery, this will save us more than £13,000.
Combined with tax-free childcare, which gives us 20 percent of the cost of fees back – up to £2,000 a year – and we are £5,864 a year better off with the combination of these two schemes.
