Her flight lands Thursday at 4 PM, and the next seven days will shape the entire program year more than the three months of matching that came before them. The regulation hands you two fixed points: your sponsor's local coordinator must contact you both within 48 hours of arrival and meet you in person within two weeks. Everything else about the first week is yours to design — and most families design it badly by not designing it at all.
The stakes are real: industry estimates put 15–25% of au pair placements in rematch before the year is out, and coordinators trace a large share of them to expectations that calcified — or never got set — in the opening days. This checklist is the day-by-day arrival plan, expanding the arrival phase of our au pair hiring guide into something you can print.
Run the first week as a ramp, not a handoff: no solo childcare before day 5 at the earliest, shadowing on days 3–4, and short solo blocks only after she has seen you run the routines. Fixed program points: the local coordinator (LCC) contacts everyone within 48 hours and meets you in person within two weeks; the 45-hour weekly and 10-hour daily work caps apply from day one, and shadowing counts as work. Before the flight: room ready, house rules printed, car insurance sorted, stipend payment method set. By day 7: bank account open, Social Security application planned, driving assessed, and a standing weekly check-in on the calendar.
Before the Flight Lands: The Prep Checklist
Arrival week goes smoothly in proportion to what you finished the week before. The list is short and concrete:
- Her room, done: the program requires a suitable private bedroom — make it a finished one, with bedding, hangers, a lamp, and a desk, not a guest room you emptied on Wednesday.
- House rules, printed: she should have seen your handbook before matching; now print two copies for the day-3 walkthrough. No handbook yet? Build one this week with our house rules handbook template.
- Car insurance, sorted: if she will drive, she must be on your policy before the first school run — the paperwork takes days, not hours. Our au pair driving and insurance guide covers it.
- Stipend logistics, decided: the $195.75 weekly minimum starts with her first week of work — pick the payment day and method (most families use a bank transfer or payment app) so week one ends with an on-time first payment.
- A phone plan and a small gesture: a SIM or eSIM ready to activate, and a few groceries from her home country in the pantry. Cheap, and it lands.
Days 1–2: Land Softly
Most sponsors run an arrival orientation before she ever reaches your city — the program requires at least 8 hours of child-safety instruction and 24 hours of child-development instruction before placement, and several sponsors deliver it in a multi-day training program for new arrivals. So she steps off the plane already trained, but also jet-lagged, over-stimulated, and running on airport food.
Day one has exactly three jobs: airport pickup (bring the kids and a sign — this is the photo she sends home), a family dinner with zero agenda, and an early night. Day two is a home tour, a slow neighborhood walk, and unstructured time with the children while you are present. No childcare duties, no handbook review, no schedule talk. Somewhere in these 48 hours the LCC will make first contact — that is the regulation working, not a check-up on you.
Days 3–4: The House, the Kids, and the Rules
Now the real onboarding. Day three is the systems tour: the safety walkthrough (medication storage, pool gate, alarm codes, where the fire extinguisher lives), car seats and how they buckle, the emergency card on the fridge — 911, your cells, the pediatrician, a neighbor. Explain that 911 is free and expected in a true emergency; in many sending countries, calling for help works differently. Then the handbook, page by page, out loud, with questions welcomed — a document she skimmed in matching reads differently at your kitchen table.
Expect the kids to test her precisely because she is new — that is normal, and it is another argument for shadow days: for a week she borrows your authority while she builds her own. Days three and four are the shadow days proper: she watches you run the full routine — wake-ups, school run, snack logic, bath, bedtime negotiation — then co-runs it with you on day four. One warning that surprises families: shadowing counts as work. The 45-hour weekly and 10-hour daily caps apply from day one, so a well-meaning "just follow me all day, every day" week can blow through the limit by Friday. Write her training hours down like a schedule, because they are one.
See what a coordinated search looks like. The research is the easy part. In two minutes, watch how a Beverly coordinator runs the rest — agencies, screening, and contracts — so you don't have to.
Watch: Meet Beverly · 2 min →Days 5–6: Paperwork, Wheels, and the Neighborhood
With the house learned, spend two days on logistics that are miserable to improvise later:
- Social Security application: she needs an SSN — her stipend is taxable income and she will file Form 1040-NR at tax time. Locate the nearest Social Security office and plan the visit (some sponsors advise waiting a few days after arrival so her immigration records propagate). Our au pair tax guide covers the host-family side.
- Bank account: open a no-fee checking account so the weekly stipend lands somewhere traceable — bring her passport, DS-2019, and your address documentation.
- The driving assessment: empty parking lot first, then a supervised school-run rehearsal. Licensed is not the same as road-ready in your car, in your town — give it two weeks of supervised runs if she is rusty.
- Her map of the town: the gym, the library, the coffee shop, the transit stop, and — ask your LCC — an introduction to another au pair nearby. Her social life is rematch insurance, and it starts this week.
Day 7: The First Weekly Check-In
End the week with a 30-minute sit-down — the first instance of a standing meeting that should survive all year. The agenda writes itself: What surprised you this week? What do you need from us? Then build week two's schedule together, with her first solo blocks kept short and bounded — a school pickup, a two-hour afternoon window — before any full solo days. Put the recurring check-in on the calendar now; the families who keep it report catching problems at the "small annoyance" stage, and homesickness predictably peaks in weeks 4–10, exactly when ad-hoc communication tends to lapse.
| Day | Focus | Non-negotiables |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Land softly | Airport welcome, rest, no duties; LCC makes 48-hour contact |
| 3 | House systems | Safety walkthrough, emergency card, handbook read-through |
| 4 | Shadowing | She co-runs routines with you; log training hours as work |
| 5 | Paperwork | Bank account; plan the Social Security visit |
| 6 | Wheels & town | Parking-lot road test, supervised school run, meet a nearby au pair |
| 7 | Check-in | 30-minute review, week-2 schedule, standing meeting on calendar |
The LCC's Role, Explained
Every host family is assigned a local representative — sponsors call her an LCC, local childcare consultant, or community counselor. The regulation defines her floor: contact with both of you within 48 hours of arrival, an in-person meeting within two weeks, and personal contact every month for the rest of the year, plus organized events that connect your au pair to others nearby.
Use her as a resource, not a referee of last resort. The LCC has watched dozens of arrival weeks and knows which local Social Security office is fastest, which community college au pairs actually like, and what week-one wobbles are normal. And if things genuinely go wrong months from now, she is the person who runs mediation — the process our au pair rematch guide walks through. Families who built the relationship in week one get better help in week thirty.
The Bottom Line: A Slow First Week Is the Fastest Route
The temptation is to get your money's worth immediately — she is here, you are exhausted, the calendar is on fire. Resist it. A family that spends seven days on orientation gets fifty back at full effectiveness; a family that hands over the kids on day two spends the year re-explaining what one week would have settled, or worse, meeting the transition coordinator. Keep the job inside its legal shape too — childcare and child-related tasks only, per our au pair duties guide — because scope creep that starts in week one is the hardest kind to walk back.
And if you are reading this before you have matched: arrival planning is part of what gets compared when choosing sponsors — orientation quality and LCC strength vary. Weighing that across all twelve designated sponsors is the kind of legwork a Beverly coordinator handles for host families as part of the search itself.
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Even though we work to keep the information, stats, and details in this article accurate and up to date, please do your own financial and legal due diligence before acting on anything you read here, and reach out directly to the private companies and government agencies referenced for the most current details.