Sittercity Caregiver Listings Scraper

Scrape Sittercity city/state caregiver listing pages — babysitters, nannies, child care, companion/senior care, pet sitting, and special needs caregivers. Get names, hourly rates, years of experience, ratings, review snippets, trust & safety badges, and area-level aggregate stats (active caregiver counts, average rates) for any US city. Also scrapes Sittercity's family-posted job listings (real jobs families are hiring for, across 6 categories including housekeeping). Includes a Discover Cities mode that enumerates every valid city/state combination straight from Sittercity's own public sitemap, so you never have to guess a city slug. HTTP-only, no login, no cookies, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• 6 caregiver categories: babysitters, nannies, childCare, companionCare (senior/elder care), petSitting, specialNeeds
• 6 job-postings categories: real family-posted job listings for babysittingJobs, nannyJobs, petSittingJobs, companionCareJobs, specialNeedsJobs, and housekeepingJobs — pay rate, schedule, children/pets count, and job description for each open job
• Any US city/state: covers Sittercity's full nationwide coverage — pick any of the 50 states + DC and any city Sittercity lists
• Rich per-caregiver data: name, photo, years of paid experience, distance, hourly rate range (where shown), star rating, review count, bio, trust & safety badges, and a recent review snippet (where available)
• Area aggregate stats: a bonus record per run with area-level numbers Sittercity publishes (active caregiver count, average hourly rate, total 5-star reviews, or total providers in the area)
• Advanced Search mode: hits Sittercity's real full-database, ZIP+radius search endpoint — the true full caregiver count with real pagination (thousands of results in most metro areas), not the curated top-10 the Babysitters/Nannies/Child Care city landing pages cap at — plus real server-side filters: hourly rate, background-check level, years of experience, language spoken, "must have a car", recently-active window, and free-text keyword
• Discover Cities mode: enumerate every city/state Sittercity has a live listing page for, per category, straight from Sittercity's public sitemap — optionally filtered to one state
• Child-care specialty niches: optionally filter childCare (9 niches) or nannies (6 niches) to a specific need — before-school, after-school, tutoring, homeschool, hybrid-learning, eLearning, bilingual, ASL-speaking, or overnight — via the careNiche input, returning a genuinely different set of caregivers than the unfiltered category page
• Empty fields are omitted — a record only contains the fields that were actually present on the page, never null or placeholder values

Output per caregiver

• name — caregiver's display name (e.g. "Anna C.")
• providerId — Sittercity's internal caregiver UUID
• providerNumericId — Sittercity's internal numeric caregiver ID (companion care / pet sitting / special needs only)
• careCategory — friendly category label (e.g. "Babysitter", "Pet Care Provider")
• careType — Sittercity's internal care-type code (e.g. babysitter, nanny, companion_care, pet_care)
• photoUrl — caregiver's profile photo
• yearsExperience — years of paid caregiving experience
• distanceMiles — distance from the searched city center
• city, state, zipCode — caregiver's location (zip code only on babysitters/nannies/childCare)
• bio — caregiver's self-written profile snippet
• badges[] — self-reported trust & safety badges (e.g. "First Aid Training", "CPR Certification", "Basic Background Check", "Enhanced Background Check")
• hourlyRateMin, hourlyRateMax — hourly rate range in USD (babysitters/nannies/childCare only — see Limitations)
• rating — average star rating (0–5)
• reviewCount — number of reviews behind the rating
• recentReviewRating, recentReviewerName, recentReviewText — most recent review snippet (babysitters/nannies/childCare only)
• careNiche — the child-care specialty filter applied, if any (e.g. "Tutoring / Homework Help") — only present when careNiche input was set and valid for the chosen mode
• profileUrl — link to the caregiver's full profile page, as seen on the listing page only — this URL is never itself scraped (see Limitations)
• sourceUrl — the listing page this record was scraped from
• recordType — always "caregiver"
• scrapedAt — UTC ISO timestamp

Output: area summary (one bonus record per run)

• activeCaregiverCount — number of active caregivers in the area (babysitters/nannies/childCare)
• averageHourlyRate — average hourly rate for the area (babysitters/nannies/childCare)
• platformFiveStarReviewCount — total 5-star reviews shown on the page (babysitters/nannies/childCare)
• totalProvidersInArea — total caregivers matching the search (companionCare/petSitting/specialNeeds)
• careCategory, state, city, sourceUrl
• recordType — always "areaSummary"
• scrapedAt

Output per job posting (Job Postings modes only)

• jobTitle — the family's job title/headline for the posting
• jobId — Sittercity's internal numeric job ID
• jobUrl — direct link to the job posting
• payRate — single hourly/nightly rate, when the posting shows one flat rate
• payRateMin, payRateMax — pay range, when the posting shows a range (e.g. $10-23/hr)
• payUnit — pay unit, e.g. hr, night, day (omitted when the family didn't list a rate)
• childrenCount — number of children the job involves (babysitting/nanny/child-care/special-needs jobs)
• petsCount — number of pets the job involves (pet-sitting jobs)
• serviceType — the specific service requested (e.g. "Babysitting", "Nanny", "Overnight Pet Care", "Home Care")
• city, state — job location
• distanceMiles — distance from the searched city center
• scheduleType — schedule category (e.g. "Occasional", "One-time", "Weekly")
• scheduleDays — active weekdays for recurring ("Weekly"/"One-time") schedules, e.g. ["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri"] (omitted for "Occasional"/as-needed jobs, which have no fixed weekday pattern)
• scheduleDetail — schedule specifics (times/dates/flexibility notes)
• description — the family's job description (as shown on the listing card, may be truncated with ... — see Limitations)
• postedByName — first name + last initial of the family who posted the job
• postedDate — date posted, as shown (M/D/YYYY)
• postedDateIso — the same date, normalized to YYYY-MM-DD
• jobCategory — friendly category label (e.g. "Babysitting Job", "Housekeeping Job")
• sourceUrl — the job-listing page this record was scraped from
• recordType — always "jobPosting"
• scrapedAt — UTC ISO timestamp

Advanced Search mode (mode: "advancedSearch")

Sittercity's city/state landing pages you get from the normal caregiver-category modes are two different templates:

• Babysitters / Nannies / Child Care: a curated top-10 "SEO landing page", capped hard at ~10 caregivers per city.
• Companion Care / Pet Sitting / Special Needs: real pagination, but no rate/keyword/background-check filtering.

mode: "advancedSearch" instead hits Sittercity's own ZIP+radius search endpoint (the same one behind the "Refine Results" sidebar on their own site) — it returns the true full result count (often thousands per metro area) with real pagination for all 6 caregiver categories, plus real server-side filters. Uses searchCategory (not mode's caregiver values) + zipCode (required) instead of state/city.

Records use the same caregiver-record shape as every other mode, plus extra fields:

• searchZipCode — the ZIP code searched
• searchDistanceMiles — the search radius used
• sortBy — only present when a non-default sort was requested

Filters

Field	Options
searchDistance	1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 25 (default), 40, 50 miles
sortBy	relevance (default), distance (closest first), rate, experience (most years first) — result ordering, verified live across every searchCategory
rateFacet	11-15, 16-20, 21-30, 31-40, 40+ ($/hr)
backgroundCheckFacet	any, basic_criminal, enhanced_criminal, motor_vehicle
yearsExperienceFacet	1-2, 3-5, 6-10, 11+
lastLoginFacet	one_week, two_weeks, one_month, three_months
languageFacet	50 languages (Spanish, Mandarin, ASL, French, etc.)
requiresTransportation	boolean — only caregivers who indicated they have a car
searchKeyword	free-text search of caregiver bios
petTypeFacet	Pet Sitting only — 9 pet types (dogs, cats, birds, horses, farm animals, reptiles/amphibians, exotic pets, small mammals, other)
seniorAgeFacet	Companion Care only — 5 senior age ranges (under 55 through over 85)
specialNeedsAgeFacet	Special Needs only — 5 age groups (infant, toddler, youth, adult, senior)

The last 3 filters are category-specific "Refine Results" facets that only exist upstream for one searchCategory each (verified live 2026-07-26) — sending one for any other category is silently ignored with a status-message note rather than erroring.

A handful of (filter, category) combinations are not reliably supported upstream — verified live: rateFacet + Babysitters, languageFacet + Pet Sitting, and requiresTransportation + Companion Care or Pet Sitting each consistently return an unrendered 0-result page from Sittercity itself, even though the same filter works fine for every other category and the unfiltered category has thousands of real matches. Rather than silently shipping that broken 0-result page as if it were a genuine "no matches" answer, this actor detects those 4 specific combinations, drops just that filter, still returns real results for every other filter/category you asked for, and logs + notes it in the run's status message. All other filter/category combinations (26 of 30 tested) work correctly.

Output: city discovery (Discover Cities mode only)

• careCategory — friendly category label the discovered city applies to (caregiver-listing categories only)
• careType — Sittercity's internal care-type code (caregiver-listing categories only)
• jobCategory — friendly job-category label (job-listing categories only — see below)
• state — 2-letter state code (uppercase)
• city — city slug, ready to paste into the city input field
• cityDisplay — human-readable city name
• listingUrl — the exact listing page this actor would scrape for that city/state/category
• sourceSitemapUrl — which sitemap fragment this city/state pair came from
• recordType — always "cityListing"
• scrapedAt

discoverCategory also accepts 5 job-posting categories (babysittingJobs, nannyJobs, petSittingJobs, companionCareJobs, specialNeedsJobs) — Sittercity's own sitemap separately enumerates real city-listing pages for job postings, distinct from the caregiver-listing pages (verified live: 11,000+ city entries per category). housekeepingJobs isn't included here — its sitemap entries are individual job-posting URLs, not a discoverable city list — but its city/state listing page still works fine if you already know the city slug (use childCare/babysitters' discovered slugs, which cover the same US cities).

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	babysitters	Category to scrape: babysitters / nannies / childCare / companionCare / petSitting / specialNeeds (caregiver listings), babysittingJobs / nannyJobs / petSittingJobs / companionCareJobs / specialNeedsJobs / housekeepingJobs (family job postings), advancedSearch (real full-database ZIP+radius search with filters), or discoverCities (discover valid cities instead of scraping)
discoverCategory	string	babysitters	Only used when mode is discoverCities. Which category's valid city/state pages to enumerate — a caregiver-listing category (babysitters/nannies/childCare/companionCare/petSitting/specialNeeds) or a job-postings category (babysittingJobs/nannyJobs/petSittingJobs/companionCareJobs/specialNeedsJobs)
searchCategory	string	babysitters	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Which caregiver category to search
zipCode	string	(none)	Required when mode is advancedSearch. 5-digit US ZIP code to search near
searchDistance	string	25	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Search radius in miles: 1/2/5/10/15/25/40/50
sortBy	string	relevance	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Result order: relevance/distance/rate/experience
rateFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Hourly-rate filter — see Advanced Search section for options and a known limitation
backgroundCheckFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Background-check level filter
yearsExperienceFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Years-of-experience filter
lastLoginFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Recently-active window filter
languageFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Language-spoken filter — see Advanced Search section for a known limitation
requiresTransportation	boolean	false	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Only return caregivers who indicated they have a car — see Advanced Search section for a known limitation
searchKeyword	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch. Free-text keyword search of caregiver bios
petTypeFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch and searchCategory is petSitting. Type-of-pet filter
seniorAgeFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch and searchCategory is companionCare. Senior age-range filter
specialNeedsAgeFacet	string	(none)	Only used when mode is advancedSearch and searchCategory is specialNeeds. Age-group filter
careNiche	string	(none)	Optional specialty filter. Only real for mode: "childCare" (all 9: beforeSchool / afterSchool / tutoring / homeschool / hybridLearning / elearning / bilingual / aslSpeaking / overnight) and mode: "nannies" (6: beforeSchool / afterSchool / tutoring / homeschool / hybridLearning / elearning). Any other mode, or a niche not offered for the chosen mode, is silently ignored and the normal unfiltered listing is scraped instead
state	string	mi	US state, 2-letter code (dropdown of all 50 states + DC). In discoverCities mode this is an optional filter — leave it out to discover cities nationwide
city	string	detroit	City name — lowercase with hyphens instead of spaces (e.g. detroit, new-york, los-angeles). Not used in discoverCities or advancedSearch mode
maxItems	integer	20	Max records to return (1–500). Babysitters / Nannies / Child Care cap at ~10 per city with their normal mode (the curated landing-page template has no further pagination — use advancedSearch for full pagination on these categories); Companion Care / Pet Sitting / Special Needs support full pagination up to this limit; advancedSearch supports full pagination up to this limit for all 6 categories; Job Postings modes cap at whatever is actually posted for that city (typically 1–15 — the source's own listing page shows only one page, and robots.txt disallows further job-listing pagination); in discoverCities mode this caps the number of city/state pairs returned

Examples

Example: babysitters in Detroit, MI

{
  "mode": "babysitters",
  "state": "mi",
  "city": "detroit",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: nannies in Los Angeles, CA

{
  "mode": "nannies",
  "state": "ca",
  "city": "los-angeles",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Example: bilingual before-school child-care providers in Detroit, MI

{
  "mode": "childCare",
  "careNiche": "bilingual",
  "state": "mi",
  "city": "detroit",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Example: senior/companion caregivers in Austin, TX (up to 100)

{
  "mode": "companionCare",
  "state": "tx",
  "city": "austin",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example: pet sitters in Miami, FL

{
  "mode": "petSitting",
  "state": "fl",
  "city": "miami",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: babysitting job postings in Detroit, MI

{
  "mode": "babysittingJobs",
  "state": "mi",
  "city": "detroit",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: housekeeping job postings in Chicago, IL

{
  "mode": "housekeepingJobs",
  "state": "il",
  "city": "chicago",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: Advanced Search — Spanish-speaking, 6-10 years experience nannies near ZIP 48228

{
  "mode": "advancedSearch",
  "searchCategory": "nannies",
  "zipCode": "48228",
  "searchDistance": "25",
  "languageFacet": "spanish",
  "yearsExperienceFacet": "6-10",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: discover every companion-care city in Texas

{
  "mode": "discoverCities",
  "discoverCategory": "companionCare",
  "state": "tx",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Use cases

• Local market research — compare babysitting/nanny rates across cities and states
• Childcare marketplaces & directories — enrich local listings with real caregiver counts and average rates
• Competitive intelligence — track caregiver supply and pricing trends for a childcare or senior-care business
• Parenting content & local guides — source real caregiver availability data for city-specific articles
• Senior care & pet care planning services — pull companion care and pet sitting availability by area

Limitations

Individual profile pages are intentionally not scraped

Sittercity's robots.txt disallows crawling /babysitter/{id} individual profile pages:

Disallow: /babysitter/

This actor honors that as a hard policy boundary and only scrapes listing-level pages (city/state search results), which robots.txt does not restrict. The profileUrl field on each caregiver record is copied verbatim from the link shown on the listing page for reference only — it is never fetched by this actor, regardless of whether the specific URL path it points to (/providers/{uuid} or /provider/profile/{type}/{uuid}) is technically reachable. If you need full profile detail pages, you must visit them yourself, in your browser, respecting Sittercity's terms of service.

Hourly rate and recent-review fields only appear on 3 of the 6 categories

Sittercity serves caregiver listings via two different page layouts:

• Babysitters, Nannies, Child Care — a "top result" landing page that shows hourly rate, star rating, review count, and a recent review snippet, but is capped at roughly the top 10 caregivers per city with no further pagination.
• Companion Care, Pet Sitting, Special Needs — a paginated search-results page that supports fetching the full caregiver count for the area, but does not display hourly rate or a recent-review snippet on the listing page (Pet Sitting does show a star rating).

This is a genuine difference in what Sittercity's own pages expose, not a scraping limitation — fields that aren't shown on a given category's listing page are simply omitted from the output rather than being filled with placeholder values.

City must match Sittercity's own listing pages

city must be a slug Sittercity has an actual listing page for (lowercase, hyphenated, e.g. new-york, los-angeles). An unrecognized city/state combination returns 0 records with a clear status message rather than an error. Use mode: "discoverCities" to get a list of valid city slugs straight from Sittercity's own sitemap instead of guessing.

Search-facet filters are now exposed via mode: "advancedSearch" — with 4 known incompatible combos

An earlier version of this actor investigated Sittercity's filter form (distance radius, hourly-rate band, background-check type, years of experience, language spoken, "must have a car") and initially left it out after finding some facet/category combinations returned an unrendered 0-card page. A later pass (2026-07-26) mapped this precisely: of 30 (facet × category) combinations tested live, 26 work correctly and only 4 are genuinely broken upstream — rateFacet + Babysitters, languageFacet + Pet Sitting, and requiresTransportation + Companion Care or Pet Sitting. These 4 consistently 200 OK with 0 cards even though the same filter works for every other category and the unfiltered category has thousands of real matches, confirmed non-transient across 2 different ZIP codes.

Rather than leaving out the whole feature (as the earlier version did) or silently shipping those 4 combos as a false "0 results", this actor now exposes the full filter set via mode: "advancedSearch" and automatically drops just the incompatible filter for its known-broken category — you still get real, correctly-filtered results for every filter you asked for that IS supported, and a note in the run's status message + logs when one was dropped. See the Advanced Search section above.

Stacking 3+ filters at once can occasionally hit the same unrendered-shell response, separately from the 4 known-broken combos above. Verified live (round-8 QA, 2026-07-26): backgroundCheckFacet + yearsExperienceFacet + languageFacet combined all three at once for Babysitters returns the same unrendered 0-card page Sittercity serves for a genuinely broken combo — even though every pair of those three filters works correctly on its own, and swapping in different filter values reproduces the same failure. This is a narrow upstream filter-combination limit, not scrapeable-page-count or account-side, and it isn't practical to enumerate every broken 3-or-more-way combination the way the 4 known 2-way combos are. If a request with 3+ filters returns 0 results, the actor's status message already suggests the correct fix — try removing one filter (start with languageFacet, the common factor in the one confirmed-broken 3-way combo) or widening searchDistance.

Babysitters / Nannies / Child Care top-10 lists can vary between runs

The "top result" landing pages (Babysitters, Nannies, Child Care, and the careNiche specialty variants) are Sittercity's own SEO/marketing pages, not a stable paginated feed — the specific caregivers shown in the top-10 can rotate between separate runs for the same category/state/city (verified 2026-07-25: two consecutive runs of the same input returned different, overlapping-but-not-identical caregiver sets). This reflects Sittercity's own listing logic and is not a scraping defect. Companion Care / Pet Sitting / Special Needs (the paginated search-results pages) do not exhibit this — the same input reliably returns the same caregivers.

The same rotation applies to mode: "advancedSearch" when sortBy is left at its default relevance — verified live 2026-07-26 (two consecutive identical-input runs against the same ZIP returned only 5/20 identical providers). This is Sittercity's own "relevance" ranking rotating/promoting listings, not a scraping defect. Set sortBy to distance, rate, or experience for fully deterministic, repeatable ordering — verified live to return byte-identical provider order across repeated runs.

Duration/age-specific sub-category pages (weekend, hourly, overnight, toddler, etc.) are not exposed — but the real child-care specialty niches ARE

Sittercity also publishes URLs like /child-care/weekend-babysitters/{state}/{city} and 27 similar duration/age-specific variants. These were investigated and found to be marketing landing pages, not real caregiver listings — live testing across 9 sample slugs/cities found 0 caregiver cards on 7 of them and only 1–2 on the other 2, versus 10–15+ on the corresponding base category page. They were left out to avoid shipping a mode that would return empty or near-empty results most of the time.

Separately, a genuinely different family of 9 (childCare) + 6 (nannies) specialty-niche pages — the ones actually cross-linked from Sittercity's own babysitters/nannies landing pages ("School help" section) — were verified to return real, distinct top-N caregiver sets (not a duplicate of the base page, not empty) and are exposed via the careNiche input. See "Output per caregiver" above for the field and the Input table for the full option list.

Job postings: single page only, and childCare jobs are the same as babysitting jobs

Sittercity's robots.txt disallows crawling ?page=-style query-string variants of job-listing paths (e.g. Disallow: /babysitting-jobs/*?*), so this actor only ever fetches the first page of a job-listing category (typically 1–15 real postings, varying by city and category — this is the actual number of open jobs, not a truncation). Separately, /child-care-jobs/{state}/{city} was verified to return byte-identical postings to /babysitting-jobs/{state}/{city} (Sittercity files both under the same underlying job type), so childCareJobs is intentionally not offered as a separate mode — use babysittingJobs for that content. housekeepingJobs is included even though there's no matching housekeeping caregiver-listing category, because Sittercity does publish a distinct, real housekeeping job-postings page.

The description field is the job card's own preview text and may end with ... if Sittercity itself truncates it on the listing page — this actor does not fetch a separate job-detail page to get the full text.

FAQ

Is this affiliated with Sittercity? No. This is an independent, third-party actor that scrapes Sittercity's own publicly accessible listing pages. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Sittercity Incorporated.

Do I need a Sittercity account, cookies, or a proxy? No. All listing pages scraped by this actor are publicly accessible without logging in, and no proxy is required.

Why is hourlyRateMin/hourlyRateMax missing for Companion Care / Pet Sitting / Special Needs records? Sittercity's own listing pages for those 3 categories don't display an hourly rate on the search-results card — only on Babysitters / Nannies / Child Care. See Limitations above.

Why do some caregivers have no badges, rating, or bio? Not every caregiver has completed every optional profile section (background check, first aid/CPR certification, or received reviews yet). Fields that Sittercity itself doesn't show for a given caregiver are omitted rather than filled with a placeholder.

How fresh is the data? Every run scrapes Sittercity's live listing pages at request time — there is no caching layer in this actor.

Can I get every caregiver in a city, not just the first page? For Companion Care, Pet Sitting, and Special Needs, the normal mode paginates through the source's own city listing results pages up to maxItems. Babysitters, Nannies, and Child Care are capped at Sittercity's own fixed ~10-result landing page for that category when using their normal mode (no additional pages exist on that curated landing-page template). For a much larger, truly paginated result set across all 6 categories (typically thousands of caregivers per metro area), use mode: "advancedSearch" with a zipCode instead — it hits Sittercity's real full-database search endpoint. Note that Sittercity's own advertised total counts (totalProvidersInArea in the bonus areaSummary record, or the "Showing N" count behind advancedSearch) are frequently larger than the number of genuinely distinct caregivers actually reachable through pagination — past a certain page, the source starts repeating already-seen caregivers rather than surfacing new ones. This actor de-duplicates caregivers within a run (by provider ID) and stops early once it detects the real unique pool is exhausted, so you'll never receive duplicate records, but you may receive fewer unique records than the advertised total or maxItems suggests for smaller/less-dense areas.

How do I find valid city slugs without guessing? Run the actor with mode: "discoverCities". It reads Sittercity's own public sitemap (declared in their robots.txt via a Sitemap: directive — the standard, crawler-permitted way to advertise a site's URL list) and returns every city/state combination that has a live listing page for the category you pick, including a ready-to-use listingUrl for each.

What does the careType field mean? It's Sittercity's own internal classification for the caregiver, as encoded in the profile link on the listing page (e.g. babysitter, nanny, companion_care, pet_care). Note that Child Care and Special Needs categories are internally filed under Sittercity's babysitter careType — this is how Sittercity itself organizes the data, not an artifact of this actor.