Estate planning as a Care.com account holder

Care.com is a marketplace that connects families with caregivers for childcare, senior care, pet care, and housekeeping. Families hold a recurring paid membership to search for and contact caregivers; caregivers hold an account, sometimes with a paid membership, to be found and hired. The estate-relevant money is narrow. Care.com removed booking requests from the platform on January 20, 2026 and ended in-platform bookings and payments on February 28, 2026; it tells caregivers that as of March 1, 2026 all jobs posted on Care.com pay outside the platform and that direct deposit through Care.com is not currently available. Neither a family nor a caregiver account holds a payout balance. Payroll-based pay runs through the separate HomePay service (Breedlove & Associates, LLC, a Care.com company), which deposits into the caregiver's own bank account and is billed and cancelled separately from the Care.com membership. The recurring paid membership auto-renews indefinitely until cancelled and is non-refundable, and closing the account removes access to the message history, so the order of operations matters for an estate.

After a Care.com account holder dies, Care.com, Inc. may transfer account to a designated recipient, but this is handled case by case. The outcome depends on the documentation provided and is entirely at Care.com, Inc.'s discretion.

What happens at death

Care.com publishes no deceased-member or estate-succession process. Its Terms of Use (last updated October 14, 2025) contain no death, deceased, estate, executor, or heirs provision, and a scan of all 233 published Help Center articles found no such article either. The Terms state that a member "may not assign or transfer your account to any other person or entity, or permit any other person or entity to use your account" (Section 3.2, Exclusive Use), and reserve to Care.com the right, in its sole discretion, to "immediately terminate your access to all or part of the Care.com Site and/or Services" (Section 5, Termination) - so there is no beneficiary designation, no self-service account transfer, and no undertaking to hold an account open. Because no rule is published, anything an estate asks for is decided ad hoc, which is why the policy is recorded as case-by-case rather than as a forfeiture or an estate transfer. The money is narrow. Care.com removed the option to send a booking request on January 20, 2026 and ended in-platform bookings and payments on February 28, 2026; it now tells caregivers that "as of March 1, 2026, all jobs posted on Care.com pay outside the Care platform" and that "direct deposit through Care.com is not currently available," and tells families that "payment takes place outside of the Care.com platform." So no account holds a payout balance, and Care.com states it "does not have any enforcement or mediation capability in disagreements or misunderstandings between families and caregivers" - unpaid wages are owed by the family, not by Care.com. Where a household used HomePay (Breedlove & Associates, LLC, a Care.com company), pay was direct-deposited into the caregiver's own bank account, so those funds are located through the caregiver's bank. What does still cost the estate money is the subscription: a paid membership auto-renews indefinitely until cancelled, payments are non-refundable "even if you close your account or cancel your membership, subscription, service, or product in the middle of a term" (Section 8.6), add-on subscriptions cancel separately, a HomePay subscription is not cancelled by cancelling the Care.com membership, and an Apple-managed subscription can only be cancelled through the App Store. One further sequencing point matters more than any of it: Care.com states that closing an account means "removing access to and history of all your Care.com information, including messages to and from caregivers," so records an estate may need should be requested or exported before the account is closed.

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