Declaring your nanny or cleaner every month: CESU and Pajemploi

The service follows the job, and there is no choice to make:

If you employ someone for the children and someone for the house, you will have both accounts. They do not talk to each other, and the deadlines are the same for both.

A month is declared once it is over — or from its 25th, when the remaining days are already known. The deadline is the 5th of the following month.

That pair of dates governs more than the payslip:

• the contributions of the month are computed from it;
• the payslip is issued by the service, not by you;
• for childcare, the CAF's CMG is paid on the strength of it.

So a declaration made on the 12th is not merely late paperwork: it pushes the CMG back, and with it the real cost of the month for your household. The service does stay open after the 5th — a forgotten month is declared as soon as it is noticed. What you must not do is fold it into the next one: the hours, the contributions and the paid-leave counter all stop matching the contract.

Two figures carry the whole declaration, and neither is the net.

• The hours actually worked in the month — not the hours planned, not the hours averaged. In a mensualised contract the salary is the same each month, but the declaration still reports the real hours.
• The gross pay, which follows from the contract: hourly rate × hours, or the averaged monthly salary.

Then, depending on the job:

• days of activity and the maintenance and meal allowances for an assistante maternelle — Pajemploi asks for them separately, and they are not salary;
• paid-leave days where they were taken.

The net salary is computed by URSSAF, from those figures, and comes back on the payslip. It is never something the employer works out and types in. If a service is asking you for a net, you are in the wrong field.

Five mistakes account for most of the trouble, and all five are avoidable:

1. Declaring the mensualised salary as if it were the hours. The salary is smoothed; the hours are not. Report the real hours.
2. Paying the maintenance allowance as salary. It carries no contributions and is excluded from the end-of-contract indemnity — declaring it as pay inflates both.
3. One declaration for two siblings. Since 25 January 2026, Pajemploi declares per child; one line for two children breaks the CMG and the per-child contracts behind it.
4. Skipping a month and doubling the next. It distorts the hours and the leave counter, and it is visible on the payslips forever.
5. Nobody writing the hours down. Not a rule problem — a memory problem. It becomes a rule problem at the end of the contract, when the indemnity is computed on the gross salaries actually paid.

The convention says what is owed. It does not say who is right about how many hours were worked on a week in March.

That is why the useful habit is not a better spreadsheet but a shared month: one party records the hours, the other confirms them, and any difference surfaces before the declaration rather than after the payslip. It costs nothing, it takes a minute, and it removes the single most common source of conflict in home employment — two honest people holding two different numbers.

Whatever you use for it, the principle is the same: agree the month, then declare it.