For some, working for the super-rich appears to be a glamorous career.
In Hayu’s 2025 show Million Dollar Nannies, following a group of elite childcare professionals, including Kourtney Kardashian’s former nanny, staff are flown on private jets to tropical islands and even receive designer gifts from their employers.
Earlier this year, billionaires Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg made headlines for spending millions on nearby properties to accommodate members of their household staff, from tutors to other domestic employees.
But such lavish perks come with exacting demands: staff may be expected to remain on call around the clock, work seven days a week and often deal with unexpected, delicate situations.
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Explore the other rankings within the 2026 Spear’s Entertainment Indices:
The domestic staff, nannies and nursing care providers featured in this year’s Spear’s index offer an elite service, centred around discretion and personalised care. With access to some of the most highly educated and experienced professionals in the care market, they are able to connect families with the support they need to keep their households running.
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A new addition to this year’s index is Tiggy Bradshaw, CEO of Access Care. Bradshaw curates bespoke live-in care arrangements for private households across the UK by matching carefully selected carers with individual clients.
‘Our job is to help each person find the right solution, and we’ve been around so long that we can advise in pretty much every aspect of care,’ she tells Spear’s.
Clients seek her help at many different stages of need. Some require simple companionship, while others seek full-time live-in care or palliative support. She reports the largest area of demand in 2026 comes from the relatives of elderly people living with dementia, for whom she can source specialist nurses and doctors experienced in working with memory loss.
[See also: Inside the global shortage of UHNW household staff]
A stalwart of the Spear’s domestic staff, nannies and nursing care providers index is Debbie Salter, managing director of Greycoat Lumleys, which has handled the hiring, vetting and payroll of household staff for UHNWs internationally for over two decades.
‘Our clients may have the luxury of having private domestic staff, but do not have the luxury of time to be able to source the right people, and that’s where we come in,’ Salter says.
Tough Competition
Finding the right person for a family’s staffing needs isn’t easy, especially with talent in short supply and competition high.
A December 2025 report by Morgan & Mallet revealed the UK has the highest demand for nannies internationally, making up nearly a quarter of all placements, but that global mobility and Brexit have contributed to a shortage of viable candidates.
‘Pre-Brexit, the bulk of the work we handled was Europe, but now, those visas are tougher, and we tend to do British and Australian nannies for families in the UK and Middle East,’ explains Louise Taylor of Kensington Nannies.
[See also: What to know when travelling with domestic staff, from visas to working rules]
Some reports suggest that wealthy families have gone to extreme lengths to poach staff from one another, using bribery, backstabbing and even what the Times calls ‘psychological warfare’.
The issues in supply and demand have also driven up the cost of hiring staff. The starting salary for a London-based first-year qualified Nanny with Norland, an agency popular among celebrities and the British Royal Family, is £55,000 and can easily exceed £100,000 for an experienced practitioner.
Changing roles
Household staff have long been a part of upper-class English life. But while in the past, roles such as governesses and butlers had clearly defined duties, today, those lines are blurring, with families increasingly looking for staff who can take on a mix of responsibilities.
‘People are increasingly looking for nanny-housekeepers or chef-housekeepers,’ says Fanny Di Domenicantonio, director of Fox & Cubs. ‘Hiring for them is a bit more challenging so i often look for housekeepers with previous childcare or cooking experience to match a hybrid role.’
Equally, demand has increased for shorter-term experts who families can hire for specific periods of need.
Some nanny candidates have a Master’s degree in Education, Speech and Language Pathology, or advanced qualifications in early years education. They are often hired on fixed-term contracts to help children prepare for entrance exams such as the 8+ and 11+.
This can also extend beyond the children to family members who may need specific medical assistance.
Kamila Nevrklova, head of recruitment at Luna Bespoke, can source a range of specialist staff for families with additional care requirements, including special-needs nannies, healthcare professionals, therapists and medical support staff.
Often, clients will require placements to begin immediately: ‘We are not getting requests for someone who would be looking for a specialist to start in three months; it’s usually requests where someone needs to start working tomorrow,’ she says.
To meet these demands, Nevrklova maintains an extensive network of vetted candidates and works closely with specialist external partners. ‘They come to me because they know I can get it done no matter what.’
[See also: Is Britain’s wealth exodus about to accelerate?]
The Spear’s 2026 Top Recommended Domestic Staff, Nannies and Nursing Care highlights the best advisers for families looking to hire domestic staff, from nannies and private chefs to chauffeurs and nurses.
These are the experts who know how to find the right people for each family, using their experience and understanding of what makes a good match.
Click the links below to jump to a section of this article:
- Methodology
- The best domestic staff, nannies and nursing care providers: some names to know
- The best domestic staff, nannies and nursing case providers: the complete list
- Contact us
Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to The Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
The best domestic staff, nannies and nursing care providers: some names to know
Izzy Boland
- Focus: Staffing for international UHNWs
- Position: Founder
- Firm: Cora Partners
Like so many people in the luxury household service industry, Izzy Boland of Cora Partners started her working life in ski chalets.
‘The chalets that we worked in were at the end of a cul-de-sac and had a gate; they were very private, so we were able to provide services to people who didn’t want the paparazzi being able to get in,’ she says. ‘A lot of them were Hollywood, football, celebrities. [We were] building a network and providing services to people who want something extra.’
With strict controls in place to protect clients’ identities, Cora Partners provides high-net-worth and high-profile homes with staff – from family office specialists to housekeepers, PAs, maternity support and old-age care nurses. ‘Anything that has to do with someone’s lifestyle,’ Boland says.
In recent years, an increasing number of clients have relocated internationally, which Boland is well-equipped to support by sourcing staff in their new jurisdiction.
Read Izzy Boland’s full profile on Spears500.com
Tiggy Bradshaw
- Focus: Bespoke in-home nursing care
- Position: CEO
- Firm: Access Care
Tiggy Bradshaw is the CEO of Access Care, a consultancy that arranges live-in care for private (U)HNW households across the UK.
Her mother originally started the firm after identifying a gap while looking for carers for her own family members. Today, Access Care works alongside lawyers, wealth managers and family offices to connect families with carers, whether it is for companionship or full palliative support. It also can source specialists in a range of illnesses, including Parkinson’s disease and dementia.
‘Essentially, we have a pool of private carers and a pool of private clients whom we match together,’ Bradshaw explains. Clients come from a broad range of backgrounds, including anyone over the age of 18; although, she notes, ‘the core segment is elderly parents’.
‘Our job is to help each person find the right solution, and we’ve been around so long that we can advise in pretty much every aspect of care,’ she tells Spear’s.
Read Tiggy Bradshaw’s full profile on Spears500.com
James Pawle
- Focus: Private household recruitment
- Position: Managing director and chairman
- Firm: Signature Staff
James Pawle is the managing director and chairman of Signature Staff, a household recruitment agency that specialises in sourcing staff for UHNWs in the UK and abroad. With a wide remit, Pawle can connect families with almost every type of support staff they may need, from housekeepers and house managers to private chefs, chauffeurs and childminders.
Singature Staff’s team is made up of individuals who have industry experience themselves, having previously worked in the type of role they will be hiring for. ‘Because they’ve done the job before and know the types of families we work with, they find it easier to understand who is right for the role,’ Pawle explains.
‘We have a very strong team that handles vetting, onboarding, referencing and administration,’ he adds. ‘In an age of discretion where referencing the quality of the candidate is so important, they are vital to finding the best match for clients.’
Read James Pawle’s full profile on Spears500.com
Fanny Di Domenicantonio
- Focus: Nannies, maternity nurses and household staff
- Position: Director
- Firm: Fox & Cubs
In 2021, Fanny Di Domenicantonio purchased a small agency that specialised in connecting London-based families with French-speaking nannies. Following an extensive rebrand, she launched Fox & Cubs, a consultancy pairing HNW families with nannies and household staff of any language and background.
The firm’s primary source of clients is word-of-mouth referrals from existing clients or peers in the relocation, concierge and legal spaces.
‘We work at the higher end in terms of types of roles compared to other agencies,’ she tells Spear’s. ‘The benefit that we give families is that we understand their level of expectation and we speak the same language.’
Read Fanny Di Domenicantonio’s full profile on Spears500.com
The best domestic staff, nannies and nursing care providers: the complete list
Click on the individual names to be directed to more detailed profiles of each adviser on The Spear’s 500 website. The table is ordered by ranking and then alphabetically by surname.
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With additional reporting by Caitlin Kilpatrick.
