Anonymous wrote:Actually, the issue of whether MA law requires paying minimum wage to au pairs is still pending before the courts, so we don’t really know that yet. The State Department guidelines are pretty clear that the stipend is determined by looking at the FLSA provisions and deducting out room and board. Au pairs are not considered employees, if they were they would be taxed for personal car use, phone plan, etc.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Yes, they do. From the APIA website (https://www.aupai
"Au pairs must receive a weekly stipend from the host family that is no less than the amount listed above and may not provide more than forty-five (45) hours of child care assistance per week in the Au Pair or Extraordinare Programs, or more than thirty (30) hours of child care assistance per week in the EduCare Program. The required stipend must comply with all legal requirements, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and U.S. Department of State regulations. The Department of State calculates these minimum stipends after accounting for costs associated with weekly room and board."

Based on the bolded statement, the HF has to adhere to the FLSA. So if you look on https://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/ for the FLSA Minimum Wage, you will see: "The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. Many states also have minimum wage laws. In cases where an employee is subject to both state and federal minimum wage laws, the employee is entitled to the higher minimum wage."

As is clear from the bolded statement, the HF has to adhere to the higher minimum wage. In the case of those states where the minimum wage is higher than the federal, the HF is supposed to adhere to the higher minimum wage. For those of us in MA, that is $12 per hour.[/quo



Yeah, but that $12 doesn’t take into account room and board.

MA does not allow the deducting of room if the job requires that the worker live in the home (https://www.mass.gov/service-details/domestic-workers). There are additional rules about charging for food and they require that the employee voluntarily agrees to pay for the meals and then the amount is tiny per meal.

Other states, of course, may be different. My point earlier was that HFs are responsible to adhere to the state laws, so just paying the regular stipend *may* be OK but if you're concerned about legality, then you need to dig a little deeper into your own state's requirements.