Is Your Nanny Insured? WorkSafeBC, Explained for Families

"Are they insured?" is the right question asked imprecisely. There are three separate things it could mean, they cover different events, and having one does not give you the others.

**This is general information, not advice on your situation.** WorkSafeBC is the authority on coverage questions in British Columbia, and your own insurer is the authority on your policy.

The three kinds

**1. Your home insurance.** Covers your property and, typically, some liability for injuries to visitors. It is generally not designed to cover someone working in your home as an employee. Many policies say something specific about domestic workers — worth reading rather than assuming, and worth a call to your insurer if you are about to employ someone.

**2. Liability insurance.** Covers damage or injury caused during the work. An agency carrying commercial liability is covering its own operations and its own staff.

**3. Workers' compensation — WorkSafeBC.** This is the one families most often overlook. It covers a **worker who is injured doing the work**: wage replacement, medical costs, rehabilitation. It is a different mechanism from liability insurance and answers a different question.

Confusing the third with the first two is the common and consequential mistake.

Why the third one matters most

If a caregiver falls on your stairs, the questions are: who pays their wages while they cannot work, who pays the medical costs, and who is on the hook if they pursue a claim.

Where the caregiver is an **agency employee**, this is the agency's arrangement to have made. Where the family is the employer, it depends on whether coverage was in place. Whether WorkSafeBC coverage is required for a given domestic arrangement depends on the specifics, and WorkSafeBC can tell you — asking them costs nothing, and asking after an injury is a much worse time.

The gap in the marketplace model

Platforms that introduce families to caregivers are generally not the employer. They are a listing service. That is a legitimate business — it is how they keep prices low, and it gives families choice and speed.

It does mean that coverage is not automatic simply because the introduction came through a platform. If the family becomes the employer, the coverage questions land with the family. Some platforms are explicit about this in their terms; the point is not that anyone is hiding it, but that families frequently do not read it as applying to them.

The reliable move is to ask the specific question — *who is the employer of record here, and who carries workers' compensation coverage* — rather than the general one.

Where Puffin sits

For **hourly care** — childcare, postpartum, senior support, event nannies — caregivers are Puffin's employees. Puffin carries the insurance and is the employer of record. A family booking hourly care is not employing anyone.

Questions worth asking

Any provider should be able to answer the first two immediately.