Sponsors (20)
The bill extends wage-and-hour protections to more in-home caregivers—raising pay and enforcement clarity for workers—while increasing costs and compliance complexity for families and casual employers and potentially complicating mixed medical/care visits.
Domestic caregivers and babysitters: More workers would be entitled to minimum wage and overtime, increasing pay for caregivers—especially those working irregular or extended hours.
Care recipients and caregivers: The bill caps incidental household tasks (e.g., chores) at 20% of babysitting hours and clarifies who counts as a babysitter, reducing unpaid or underpaid care time and helping ensure compensation aligns with care provided.
Workers and regulators: Removing the exemption and tightening definitions strengthens worker protections and reduces ambiguity for Department of Labor enforcement, making it easier to apply wage-and-hour rules to household care work.
Households that rely on informal, low-cost babysitters: Families may face higher labor costs if casual babysitters must be paid minimum wage and overtime.
Small employers and individuals who hire casual sitters: Those who rely on friends, neighbors, or occasional sitters could face new compliance burdens and potential back-pay liability if 'casual basis' is interpreted narrowly.
Parents and some healthcare/home-care arrangements: Excluding trained medical personnel and home health workers from the babysitting definition may create complexity distinguishing mixed-care visits, potentially disrupting continuity of in-home care or billing for combined services.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act narrow exemptions that previously excluded many domestic and babysitting services from federal minimum wage and overtime rules. The bill adds new legal definitions for “babysitting services” and for when babysitting is considered “casual,” and it removes an existing statutory exemption, bringing more in-home caregivers (like many home health aides and personal care aides) under FLSA protections. Employers and households that hire domestic caregivers or babysitters will need to review pay and timekeeping practices because some workers who were exempt could become eligible for minimum wage and overtime pay under federal law. The measure excludes trained medical personnel and expressly limits incidental household work during babysitting shifts.
Introduced March 12, 2026 by Patty Murray · Last progress March 12, 2026