Nursery fees

Both parents have to be working Even thought you get funding it’s spread across the whole year so you have to still top up and pay for some of the funding each week plus the general expenses like food etc Even with 15 hours funding it costs us £260/ month for two full days at nursery for my boy

Each parent must be working and each earn less than 100k. I also believe the 30 hours free is for term time only so the way it’s calculated it’s spread so if you are also doing school holiday cover costs would be adjusted. (i may be wrong its not very clear on gov site. speaking to nurseries direct would be better)

You can't really plan right now as the fees tend to go up every year in April but to give you an idea our bill is £467 for 3 full days including the 15 funded hours. You can utilise tax free childcare (https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare) so after that we actually pay £378. We spread our funding out over the whole year but not all nurseries will do this and have set rules on how the funding can be used. We pay £11 for food on a funded day. But yes we should be eligible for 30 free hours providing both parents work which is great 😃 I actually chose a nursery for my son before he was even born as some have wait lists of over a year so you could start looking and then ask them about costs and funding

As others have said about costs, it will be difficult to say now as prices will increase and it will be dependent on areas and individual nurseries whether they will allow funding to be spread or have a minimum number of hours/days. But I will say you are definitely not too early with planning, we have already signed up and paid a deposit for this baby to start nursery as all they had was two days from April 2026 (13 months old) and we can’t get a third day until Sept 2026 (18 months old)🙈