Nanny Tax Blueprint — Washington State Household Employer Compliance

Sarah, enrolled agent and maker of the Nanny Tax Blueprint

A note from the maker

I'm an enrolled agent — a licensed tax professional. I work with Washington households on their taxes. And when I hired a caregiver for my daughter during postpartum, even I felt the weight of it.

“If I'm finding this hard to organize — and this is literally what I'm licensed to do — what is every other parent going through?”

I could untangle it. That's my job. But the process itself is genuinely hard and precise — and I kept thinking that if you're not a tax professional, figuring out how to actually become compliant in Washington probably feels impossible. Especially at 11pm, with a newborn on your hip and a deadline on the calendar.

So I built the thing I wished I'd had — the clear, ordered path through it. Not generic nanny-tax advice you could find in a hundred articles, but the specific Washington sequence, with the templates and walkthroughs to actually do it. Let me guide you through it.

Sarah

Enrolled Agent · Eagleview Collaborative

See what I built for you →

Do any of these sound like you?

The line is closer than most parents think.

You pay one caregiver $3,000 or more across the year. That's the federal threshold — and a 20-hour-a-week nanny crosses it in about ten weeks.

You have regular, ongoing help in Washington. L&I's requirement starts on the first day of regular employment — no dollar threshold at all.

You use several sitters and assume you're under the line. The threshold is tracked per caregiver — and the moment one crosses it, you're an employer for that worker.

You pay cash or Venmo and never signed anything. Informal payment doesn't change your legal status — only whether you've registered for it.

If any of these is you, you're likely already a household employer. The good news: that's a solvable problem, and you're in exactly the right place to solve it.

The path I mapped

Five checkpoints. One compliant household.

Not five weeks — five checkpoints, at your pace. Some finish in a weekend, some over two months. There's no cohort and no clock.

Records

Workspace, vocabulary, foundation.

15 min

Setup

EIN, license, state accounts.

30 min

Compliance

Workers' comp, paid leave, coverage.

1 hour

Taxes

Payroll, Schedule H, quarterly.

2 hours

Caregiver

Hiring, documents, onboarding.

4 hours

A toolkit, not reading material

You leave with things you can use.

⬡

Your records system

A ready-made folder structure and zip file — your whole household employer record, organized from day one.

▤

Step-by-step walkthroughs

Screen-recorded guidance through SAW, your EIN application, and IRS Direct Pay — done alongside you.

◷

Time-blocking printables

One per checkpoint — plan the work around your real life, at your own pace.

⊞

The Acronym Guide

Every abbreviation you'll meet, federal and Washington, decoded on two pages.

▦

Templates that matter

Accident prevention plan, offer letter, employment agreement, I-9, W-4 — customized for your home.

✦

The hiring playbook

How to find, screen, interview, and onboard — the human side, from someone who just did it.

What this actually saves you

The Blueprint pays for itself the first year.

The Blueprint doesn't replace payroll — it teaches you a low-cost way to run it yourself, instead of paying a full-service company every year.

Full-service payroll

~$650/yr

Every year, ongoing

Companies like HomePay (~$720) and Poppins (~$600) handle filings for you — but you pay it again every single year, indefinitely.

The Blueprint method

~$100/yr

+ about 6 hours a year

Run payroll yourself with the system I show you — roughly $100/yr in tools, plus about six hours across four quarterly payments. You keep the control and the savings.

~$550 saved every year

And the Blueprint is a one-time cost — so the savings compound from year two on.

Figures are approximate and vary by provider and household; the point is the shape of it — a recurring annual bill versus a one-time skill you keep.

Maker's Launch Price

One price. Everything. Yours to keep.

The Nanny Tax Blueprint

Full Course Access

$497

$397

One-time · lifetime access

📅 Course content unlocks July 1, 2026

Less than one year of full-service payroll — and it covers the setup, the state agencies, insurance, HR, and the skill to run payroll yourself from here on.

Get the Blueprint

Maker's Launch price, this year only. The Blueprint settles to its full $497 in 2027 — launch members lock in $397 and keep every update as it grows.

Referred by a partner agency? Enter your code at checkout for your exclusive rate.

Before you ask

The honest answers.

I only have an occasional babysitter. Does this apply to me?

It might — sooner than you'd think. Pay any one caregiver $3,000 in a year and the IRS considers you an employer. In Washington, L&I's requirement starts on the first day of regular employment, with no dollar threshold at all. Checkpoint 2 walks you through exactly where you stand.

Does this replace a payroll service?

It replaces the need for an expensive one. The Blueprint teaches you to run payroll yourself for about $100 a year and six hours of your time — instead of $650+ every year, forever. If you'd still rather hand it off, the course shows you that path too.

Is this just information I could Google?

The pieces are out there — scattered across agency sites, forums, and outdated articles. What you can't Google is the time. Piecing it together yourself means dozens of hours of research, false starts, and waiting on one step before you understand the next. The Blueprint hands you the whole Washington sequence in order, so you skip the dozens of hours and just do it.

Do I need to be a numbers person?

No. It's built for parents, not accountants. The tax checkpoint is the one people dread and the one most likely to surprise them with how manageable it actually is.

You might already be an employer. Here's how to know.

You didn't hire a nanny to become a compliance expert.