A babysitter one of the examples specifically called out as a household employee in the IRS guidance[1], so if you’re doing it right you should be running payroll. That’s pretty tricky to DIY properly.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc756

What made it difficult was: finding out we needed to do anything at all, finding out what that “anything” even was, finding instructions for doing it, parsing the instructions and figuring out if we were reading the correct instructions, figuring out if the various exceptions and other special clauses applied, researching those, then figuring out how to actually do any of this, and so on, and then again a second time for state taxes.

Nevermind going down the rabbit whole of trying to figure out if we need an EIN and then repeating the same discovery and learning process for just that small part of the whole entire thing.

Honestly it would have been a full time job for me to successfully navigate it all. I don’t see how it’s possible to do without already being a CPA or accountant of some sort. It’s an entire domain of knowledge and I had almost none of that knowledge. There’s too much else going on in my life to begin to delve into all that.

All this for a baby sitter 16 hours a week.