Sponsors (71)
The bill extends minimum-wage and overtime protections to many in-home caregivers and babysitters and clarifies 'casual' exceptions—boosting worker pay and care reliability—while raising costs and compliance complexity for households and leaving some classification gaps for certain care workers.
Domestic babysitters and in-home caregiving workers (often low-income) become eligible for minimum wage and overtime protections, increasing earnings, reducing unpaid hours, and improving income security and reliability of care for families.
The bill defines 'casual basis' and caps incidental household tasks at 20% of babysitting hours, clarifying when informal sitters are excluded and reducing ambiguity for employers and workers.
Households that rely on informal or irregular babysitters (including many middle- and working-class families) may face higher costs if those workers become eligible for minimum wage and overtime.
Some trained medical personnel and certain home-care workers remain excluded, creating complexity and potential confusion for employers and workers trying to determine who is covered.
Smaller households or individuals who hire occasional sitters may face additional administrative burden to determine worker status and ensure compliance with wage and overtime rules.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Narrows FLSA domestic-service exemptions, removes one exemption, and adds definitions limiting when babysitting is excluded (including a 20% incidental-task cap).
Official title: To amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to ensure that certain caregiving employees are no longer exempted from overtime and minimum wage protections.
Introduced March 12, 2026 by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez · Last progress March 12, 2026
Changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act narrow certain exemptions for domestic and caregiving work so more home- and babysitting-care workers can receive minimum wage and overtime protections. The bill removes one exemption from the FLSA, tightens the remaining domestic-service exclusion language, and creates precise definitions for “babysitting services” and “casual basis” to limit when babysitting is treated as exempt, including a cap that incidental household work may not exceed 20% of babysitting hours. The result is a smaller set of exempt domestic-care roles and clearer rules for when intermittent babysitting remains excluded, which is intended to extend wage-and-hour coverage to more home care workers (for example, home health aides and personal care aides) while preserving a narrow exemption for truly occasional babysitting. No new spending programs or tax changes are created; the changes amend existing FLSA definitions and exemptions.