Nanny Final Pay in New Zealand: A Practical Guide | Pay The Nanny [ ![Pay the nanny logo](https://assets.paythenanny.nz/images/logo-white.png) ](/) [Parents](https://paythenanny.nz/For-Families) [Nannies](https://paythenanny.nz/For-Nannies) [Agencies](https://paythenanny.nz/for-agencies) [Pricing](https://paythenanny.nz/pricing) [Contact](https://paythenanny.nz/contact) [Sign Up](https://paythenanny.nz/signup) [Log In](https://paythenanny.nz/app/login) Article ------- Nanny Final Pay in New Zealand: A Practical Guide ================================================= By Mark Hudson · 25 June, 2026 Wrapping up with your nanny can get complicated fast, and final pay is usually where it shows. Annual leave, public holidays, days in lieu and notice all come into it, and a few of them are easy to miss. Here's what New Zealand families need to know to get that last payment right. ![Nanny Final Pay in New Zealand: A Practical Guide](https://assets.caresies.io/articles/2536/conversions/UtmVZfFlTuGukwmOkPMQ-webp-featured.webp) When a nanny moves on, plenty of families assume the final pay is just the last week's wages and a quick goodbye. Most of the time it isn't. Final pay is one of the parts of employing a nanny that catches people out, and getting it wrong tends to surface at the worst possible moment, usually right when everyone wants the relationship to end on good terms. Here's what should be going into that last payment, and where the common slip-ups happen. Start with the wages owed ------------------------- This is the easy part. Your nanny gets paid for every hour worked up to their last day, including any agreed extra hours and anything still owing from an earlier pay period that didn't quite get squared away. Before you run the final pay, take five minutes to make sure the timesheets are actually up to date. A surprising number of disputes come down to nothing more than a fortnight that never got logged properly. Annual leave is where it gets fiddly ------------------------------------ Unused annual holidays have to be paid out when employment ends, and this is the single biggest source of final pay errors we see. The catch is that there are two different things going on, and they're paid differently. Any annual leave your nanny has already become entitled to (the four weeks that lands on each work anniversary) is paid at the greater of their ordinary weekly pay or their average weekly earnings over the previous 12 months. Whichever figure is higher is the one you use. Then there's the stretch of time worked since their last anniversary, where the leave hasn't formally landed yet. That part is paid as 8 percent of gross earnings for the period, minus any holiday pay already taken in advance. And if your nanny worked for you for less than a year all up, the whole holiday component is simply 8 percent of everything they earned, less anything already paid out. For a nanny on steady hours this is reasonably tidy. For one whose hours moved around, with school terms, a growing baby or the odd week off over summer, the averaging can swing the number quite a bit, which is exactly why it's worth slowing down on. Don't forget public holidays ---------------------------- Public holidays trip families up in two ways. The first is straightforward. If a public holiday falls during the employment, before the final day, and it would otherwise have been a day your nanny worked, it gets paid like any other public holiday. The second one is the sneaky bit. If your nanny still has annual leave owing when they finish, and a public holiday falls within the period that leave would have covered had they taken it straight after their last day, that public holiday has to be paid as well. This is the rule that bites hardest around Christmas and New Year, when several public holidays are bunched together. Someone finishing in mid December can be owed more than the calendar suggests once those days are layered in. Alternative holidays, or days in lieu ------------------------------------- If your nanny worked a public holiday at some point and earned a day in lieu that never got taken, that has to be paid out too. It's settled at their relevant daily pay, or average daily pay where their days varied, for the day employment ends. Days in lieu are the easiest thing on this list to lose track of, because they're earned once and then sit quietly in the background for months. If the records have been patchy, this is the line to double check. Notice periods and deductions ----------------------------- Your employment agreement sets out how much notice each side has to give, and for nannies that's commonly one, two or four weeks. How notice plays out at the end depends on the wording and the circumstances. If you ask your nanny to stop straight away rather than work out their notice, you'll usually owe payment in lieu for that period. Going the other way, if a nanny leaves without giving the notice they agreed to, it's tempting to claw something back from the final pay. Be careful here. You can't simply dock final pay because notice wasn't worked, or because a house key or a pram didn't come back. Deductions need the employee's written agreement, and without that you'd be stepping outside the Wages Protection Act. If you're genuinely out of pocket, get advice before touching the final figure. A few things people regularly get wrong --------------------------------------- Trusted by 1,000+ families across New Zealand & Australia We calculate, file and pay. You don't. ---------------------------------------- Pay The Nanny runs your payroll, files with IRD and pays your nanny on time, so you never have to. [ Enquire Now → ](https://paythenanny.nz/contact)Employment contracts are included for our clients After processing a fair few of these, the same mistakes come up again and again. Leave balances get estimated from memory rather than checked. Days in lieu get missed entirely. Families assume public holidays stop mattering the moment notice is handed in. And generic online final pay calculators get used even though most of them aren't built for domestic employment, where variable hours and in-home arrangements change the maths. It's also worth remembering the payout is still pay. PAYE comes off it, KiwiSaver applies, and a student loan deduction will too if there's one running. The gross figure on your calculation isn't the number that lands in your nanny's account. Give yourself a bit of runway ----------------------------- The best thing you can do is work the final pay out as soon as the finish date is locked in, not the night before. That gives you time to confirm leave balances, check the notice position, deal with any public holidays sitting in the tail of the employment, and make sure the records line up. A final pay done in a rush is a final pay with a mistake in it. One thing on the horizon worth a mention. The Government has introduced the Employment Leave Bill to replace the Holidays Act 2003, and it's expected to move leave to an hours-based system. None of that is law yet, and there's a two-year lead in once it passes, so for now the rules above are the ones that apply. We'll keep our guidance updated as things change. The short version ----------------- Final pay is rarely just the last week's wages. Between annual leave, public holidays, days in lieu and notice, there are a handful of moving parts, and a couple of them (the post-finish public holidays especially) are easy to miss. Taking the time to get it right protects you as the employer and sends your nanny off on a fair note, which matters more than it sounds when you might need a reference or a fill-in down the track. If you'd rather not work through it yourself, [Pay The Nanny](https://paythenanny.nz/) can handle the whole final pay calculation for you and make sure it's right.[ Get in touch](https://paythenanny.nz/contact) and we'll take it off your plate. [ ![](https://assets.caresies.io/articles/989/conversions/f8MOuMXySOlu7FxlhpZ5-webp-featured.webp) ](https://paythenanny.nz/articles/what-to-know-about-redundancy-and-termination-pay-for-nannies)By Mark Hudson · 19 September, 2024 ### [What to Know About Redundancy and Termination Pay for Nannies ](https://paythenanny.nz/articles/what-to-know-about-redundancy-and-termination-pay-for-nannies) Ending a nanny’s employment can be challenging, whether through redundancy or termination. In this blog, we’ll explain New Zealand’s legal requirements for notice periods, final pay, and redundancy compensation. Learn how to handle the process fairly and professionally. 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