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 discontinued its in-platform online booking and payment system on February 28, 2026, so caregivers are now paid directly off the platform, and a caregiver account does not hold a standing payout balance. Payroll-based payment runs through the separate HomePay service (Breedlove & Associates, LLC, a Care.com company), which deposits into the caregiver's own bank account. The recurring paid membership auto-renews indefinitely until cancelled and is non-refundable.

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 does not publish a deceased-member or estate-succession process, and its Terms of Use (last updated October 14, 2025) contain no death, deceased, estate, or heirs clause at all. 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 terminate a member's access "with or without notice for any reason or no reason" (Section 5) — so there is no documented beneficiary designation, no self-service account transfer, and no undertaking to hold an account open. The estate-relevant money on a Care.com account is limited. Care.com discontinued its in-platform online booking and payment system on February 28, 2026; caregivers are now paid directly off the platform (cash, check, or a third-party payment app), so a current caregiver account does not hold a standing in-app payout balance. Any money owed for bookings that occurred on or before February 28, 2026 is handled individually by Care.com's Customer Care team rather than through a published estate procedure. Where a household uses the separate HomePay payroll service (Breedlove & Associates, LLC, a Care.com company), pay is direct-deposited into the caregiver's own bank account, so those funds are located through the caregiver's bank, not held by Care.com. Because any recoverable money is reviewed individually and there is no published estate procedure, the policy is classified as case-by-case. Separately, the recurring paid membership auto-renews indefinitely until cancelled and payments are non-refundable, so the prominent estate task is cancelling the membership to stop further billing.