Nanny Drives Her Boss’ Kids Up to an Hour Away Every Day in Her Own Car, Is Rarely Reimbursed, and Her Boss Refuses To Renegotiate Their Agreement
She works as a nanny and spends a significant part of every workday driving her employer’s kids around in her own car, taking them to activities, camps, and destinations that can be up to an hour away. The only reimbursement she receives is around $20 to $25 for trips that fall into the longer-distance category. After getting advice that her arrangement wasn’t standard, she brought it up with the mom she works for and asked whether they could revisit the agreement. The answer was no.
She followed up by asking whether she could use one of the family’s three vehicles instead of putting the miles on her own car, or whether they could switch to the IRS mileage reimbursement rate. That answer was also no. She says she understood and accepted the decision itself. What she didn’t expect was the tone of the response she got.
What the mom actually said
The response came back with a level of defensiveness that caught her off guard given that she’d framed the conversation as a straightforward request to renegotiate. The mom told her that using one of their cars was simply not an option because it would require her to be insured and that was an entirely different issue with costs. She said she didn’t believe she should be paying the IRS mileage rate given that driving expectations had been discussed at the start of the job and that she was already paying a supplement for places outside of the norm.
She went further, asking whether mileage on her own vehicle had always been anticipated given that the entire point of the job was driving the girls around for their activities, and noting that the agreement had always been to cover excess gas. She said she had upheld her end of the agreement without faltering and had always given the benefit of the doubt. She closed by saying that if the nanny found she could no longer uphold her end of the agreement, she had some decisions to make, and asked only that she be given ample notice if she decided to leave.
Why the tone landed the way it did
The content of the response and the tone of it are two different things, and she’s clear that she’s bothered by the second one more than the first. Declining to renegotiate is a legitimate business decision. Responding to a reasonable request to revisit a work agreement by implying the employee is failing to uphold her end of things, reciting a list of everything the employer has done right, and ending with a thinly veiled suggestion that she should start thinking about whether she wants to keep the job is a different kind of response.
What the mom described as upholding her end of the agreement is paying roughly $20 to $25 for long-distance trips while her nanny absorbs the daily wear, fuel costs, and mileage depreciation on her own vehicle for a job that is largely defined by how much driving it requires. Framing that as generosity and invoking the original agreement as a reason not to discuss it further puts the nanny in a position where raising a legitimate financial concern is treated as a failure of professionalism rather than a normal part of a working relationship.
What the IRS mileage rate actually represents
The IRS mileage rate exists specifically to account for the full cost of using a personal vehicle for work purposes, not just gas. It covers fuel, depreciation, maintenance, insurance wear, and the general cost of putting work miles on a personal car. In 2024 that rate was 67 cents per mile, which reflects what it actually costs to operate a vehicle on behalf of an employer. A $20 to $25 reimbursement for a round trip that can cover 60 to 80 miles or more doesn’t come close to covering those costs, and asking to be compensated at the standard rate isn’t an unreasonable request. It’s the benchmark the federal government uses specifically because it represents fair reimbursement.
The mom’s suggestion that using one of their three vehicles would require insurance and create costs is worth examining too, because the alternative she’s defending requires her nanny to absorb those costs herself. The insurance and depreciation on the nanny’s vehicle don’t disappear because they’re not the employer’s direct expense. They just fall on a different person’s budget.
Where things stand now
She’s not planning to stay. She’s started looking for a different family to work for, which is the straightforward outcome of a conversation that ended with her employer suggesting she has some decisions to make. She’s not upset that the request was declined. She’s updating her understanding of what the arrangement actually is, and she’s making the decision her employer suggested she make, just not in the direction her employer probably intended.
People renegotiate work arrangements all the time, and a nanny asking whether a family with three vehicles would consider letting her use one instead of putting daily work mileage on her own car is not an unreasonable opening to that conversation. The response she got treated it like a complaint about an arrangement she had agreed to rather than what it actually was, which was a professional asking whether there was a better way to structure something that wasn’t working as well as either of them probably hoped.
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