The page that decides whether they call
A day nursery has a harder pricing page than almost any other local business. The rate changes with the age of the child, the number of days, the length of the session, the time of year, and whether a government scheme covers some of the hours. Most nurseries respond to that complexity by publishing nothing and inviting a phone call.
The parent responds by ringing the nursery that published something. Fee confusion is one of the three problems this kind of site exists to fix, and it is fixed by building the page as structured records rather than as prose.
Build the fee table from three axes
The table almost every day nursery needs has age band down one side and session type across the top.
Age bands. Whatever your rooms actually are: under two, two to three, three and over. Use your own room names next to them so the table matches the tour.
Session types. Full day, morning session with lunch, afternoon session, school-day session for the preschool room, and any short day you run. Give each one its actual hours, not just a name.
Rate. Per session, with the weekly figure for the common patterns alongside it. A parent who wants three full days should not have to multiply.
Add a minimum booking rule if you have one, because two days a week minimum is a deal breaker for some families and they would rather learn it here than at the viewing.
Term time only, all year round and holiday club rates go in the same table or a clearly labelled second one. Do not leave a parent guessing which column applies to them in August.
Say what is in the fee, and what is not
The single most common complaint about nursery billing is discovering a charge after enrolment. List what the fee includes: meals and snacks, nappies and wipes, formula or not, sun cream, wet weather clothing, sessions with visiting teachers.
Then list what is charged separately and what it costs: registration fee, deposit and when it is returned, late collection charge and the unit it is charged in, holiday and sickness policy, the notice period for reducing days or leaving, and how far ahead of the annual increase you tell families.
That last one matters more than nurseries expect. A parent budgeting eleven hundred a month wants to know a rise arrives with a term's notice, not a fortnight's.
Funding, explained as orientation and no further
Every country handles subsidised early years places differently, and several change the rules year to year. The website's job is to tell a parent whether they are likely to be eligible, what you accept, and where the official checker lives. It is not to be a benefits guide.
Say which schemes you take part in, using their proper names. Say how the funded hours interact with your sessions in practice, because that is the part parents genuinely cannot work out alone: how many funded hours you can stretch across which weeks, whether you offer funded-only places, and what any consumables or additional hours charge is and what it covers.
Then link the government eligibility checker for your country and say plainly that entitlement is decided there and not by the nursery. Add the deadline pattern for applying ahead of a term start, since missing a code deadline is the most expensive mistake a new family makes.
Give the same treatment to employer schemes, tax-advantaged childcare accounts, voucher schemes you still accept, and any local authority or state subsidy you are approved for.
Scheme names, rates and eligibility differ by country and often by region, and they move. Keep this page as an orientation page, note the date it was last checked, and let the country pages carry detail.
The mechanics that keep it right
Build fees as records, not as a hand-typed HTML table. One record per age band and session type, with a rate, an effective-from date, and a note field. Then a rate rise is a spreadsheet-shaped afternoon, not a rebuild.
Show a last updated date on the page. Parents distrust an undated fee table more than a high one.
Put the same figures in whatever runs your enquiries, whether that is Famly, Blossom or Kinderly, so the fee estimate a family receives after their viewing matches what they read. A quote that contradicts the site costs a place.
Include a worked example. Three full days in the toddler room, term time, with fifteen funded hours applied, showing the monthly figure. One example does more than four paragraphs of explanation.
What not to do
Do not publish a from price with no ceiling. Do not put fees behind a form; the parent fills it in for the nursery down the road instead. Do not use the word affordable. Do not describe funded hours as free unless every hour genuinely is at your setting.
Where this sits
A structured fee table with funding explained plainly is one of the pages we build first on a day nursery website, and the same approach carries across our childcare and family websites. Package details are on pricing. Publish the number, explain the scheme, and let the viewing be about the rooms.