The childcare sector has changed a lot in the past few years. There were 24,700 childminders registered with Ofsted in England as at March 2026, and that number has fallen by around 39% since 2018. Fewer childminders means fewer places too. Childminders offered an estimated 145,700 registered childcare places in 2025, a drop of around 7% on the year before.

Money is tight for a lot of childminders right now. Average fees in 2025 sat at around £6.36 an hour for children under two and £6.21 an hour for three and four-year-olds, the lowest hourly rates among the main childcare provider types surveyed. Around 60% of childminders said their income covered their costs in October 2025. That means roughly 40% did not, and with childminding services stretched thin in some areas, the childminders who stay in business need their finances working just as hard as their afternoons do.

Childminders have to care for children and run a small business from the same home, often working alone. Getting your Income Tax, business expenses, and financial health right takes one more pressure off a genuinely demanding job, and every set of expenses tells a story about how your year actually went. We tell you this not to worry you, but to explain why we built Vexo Accounting around supporting childminders specifically, not general small business clients. Small margins mean every allowable expense and every bit of tax relief actually matters. A generic small business accountant will miss things a specialist catches every time, and that gap tends to show up as an unnecessarily high Income Tax bill, or a set of business finances that never quite add up.

Childminding comes with a genuinely unusual set of allowable expenses, because your home is your workplace. HMRC has long recognised this, and childminders can claim a business proportion of costs that most self-employed people can't touch, including a share of household costs such as heating and metered water, and a smaller share of fixed costs like council tax and mortgage interest. Running costs like these add up fast across a full childminding week, and getting the expenses split fairly between business and personal use is where a specialist accountant earns their fee.

Food and drink is one of the most common expenses we deal with. The food and drink you provide to minded children is deductible, and HMRC accepts a reasonable estimate for food and drink rather than asking for a receipt for every biscuit and banana.

Here's what we typically help childminders claim:

• Food and drink provided to the children in your care, based on a reasonable estimate rather than itemised receipts
• A share of household expenses and running costs, worked out from the hours worked each week
• Wear and tear on furniture and household items, often claimed as 10% of childminding income where the rules still allow it, or the actual costs of replacing items instead
• Car expenses, including mileage at the current HMRC rate of 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in the 2026/27 tax year
• Toys, craft materials, safety equipment such as safety gates and car seats, and other household items used only for minded children

One thing that trips people up is that you can't claim expenses for time spent looking after your own children. HMRC only lets you claim for the hours you care for children who aren't part of your own family, and getting that boundary right protects you if HMRC ever asks questions. Working out that business proportion with a reasonable method, and applying it consistently, is exactly the kind of detail that turns into a problem if it's done casually.

You don't have to guess between the flat wear and tear allowance and actual costs either. We work out which one leaves more in your pocket, and we make sure you can claim tax relief on training and safety equipment too, since a paediatric first aid course is usually an allowable cost. Sorting out childminding expenses like these properly, rather than lumping them into one guess at year-end, is where most of the savings come from. We check every category of expenses, from council tax and household items through to the smallest craft materials and any other expenses you're unsure about, before anything goes near your Self Assessment return.

Childcare providers juggle several income streams at once, and childminders operate with more of these than most self-employed trades. Parent fees, government-funded hours from the local authority and tax-free childcare payments can all land in your account in the same month, and each one needs recording correctly against what you're actually owed.

We also help with the practical side of running a childminding business day-to-day, from setting fees that reflect your real running costs to explaining what your business proportion of household costs should look like for your circumstances. Financial management isn't just about filing a return once a year. Good financial management means knowing, throughout the year, whether your income is actually covering your costs, and adjusting before a bad month turns into a bad quarter.

If you're thinking about growing, perhaps by choosing to care for children beyond your usual numbers, working with an assistant, or extending beyond school runs and early years care, we can talk you through what that means for your Income Tax, your National Insurance and your record keeping. Growing a childminding business brings its own unique challenges, and financial management support from day one makes that growth a lot less stressful than working it out alone. We'd rather help you plan for these than have you react to them after the event.