Nursery free hours ~ help
Show your support
Even with the free hours only the nursery will charge for consumables. My little one is doing 9 funded afternoons before we start him full-time. So through sept and Oct I thought it would be entirely free but have had an invoice for £76 for nappies, food, milk, etc
It’s pretty unlikely you’ll have nothing to pay. Have you checked with your nursery ? Majority don’t allow you to just put them in for the ‘free’ hours. To combat it they’ll have policies like you can only use free hours in the morning so you have to pay for the afternoon if In all day etc. they also will likely charge fees for food & resources. I’d double check as I know a few people that expected to pay very little with the funded hours but actually got a pretty big bill per month x
There are two separate things you can claim - the funded nursery hours (up to 15 per week x 38 weeks per year) and tax-free childcare, which is the account where you pay in and it’s topped up by 20% before you use it to pay your childcare provider. You don’t need to set up the second one to claim the first one, but most people will be using both because they’ll be using more hours than the funding covers. If it’s just the funded hours you want to use though you can apply for a code here and then you give that to your provider: https://www.gov.uk/apply-free-childcare-if-youre-working. It’s really quick and easy.