Checked against gov.uk: 15 August 2026
No, you don't have to pay them, but your nursery can still ask. Charges for things like nappies, wipes, sun cream and meals are allowed on top of your funded hours, as long as paying is optional and you're offered an alternative.
Funded hours, whether it's 15 or 30 hours a week, cover early education and childcare itself. They were never designed to cover everything a nursery day involves. Government funding is not intended to cover meals, consumables, or extra services, so it's completely normal for a nursery to charge separately for things like nappies, wipes, sun cream, and food.
The Department for Education's statutory guidance for early education and childcare, the rules providers and local authorities have to follow, is clear on the key protection: the funded entitlement must be accessible free of charge to parents, and there must be no mandatory charges tied to taking up a funded place. A nursery cannot make paying for consumables a condition of your child having a funded spot. You have to be offered a genuine choice, including the option to bring your own nappies or food if you'd rather not pay the charge.
Providers, apart from childminders, are also expected to publish a list of their chargeable extras, usually on their website, and to keep invoices itemised. That means your bill should show funded hours, any paid hours beyond that, food charges, other consumables, and activity charges as separate lines, not lumped into one unexplained total.
Beyond consumables and meals, nurseries can also charge for optional extras that sit outside the core funded offer. That includes things like trips and outings, specialist classes such as French, yoga or forest school, and drop-off or pick-up arrangements to and from another setting. These are all meant to be optional add-ons, not conditions of the place itself.
Say your child gets 30 funded hours a week, and the nursery charges £2.50 a day for meals and £1 a day for nappies and wipes. Those charges are legitimate, as long as the nursery has told you about them upfront and would let you bring in your own food or nappies instead if you asked. What wouldn't be legitimate is a nursery telling you that unless you pay those daily charges, your child loses the funded place entirely. The funded hours themselves stay free either way.
This protection is specifically about your funded hours. If you're paying for childcare beyond your entitlement, extra sessions on top of the funded hours you get, for example, the nursery's normal fees and consumables charges for those hours work like any other paid arrangement, and this particular rule doesn't apply to them in the same way.
Ask to see the nursery's published list of charges before you sign anything, and check your invoices each month to see the breakdown. If a nursery tells you that paying for consumables or meals is required to keep a funded place, that's not allowed. Raise it with the nursery directly first. If it isn't resolved, your local council's family information service, or Ofsted, is the next place to flag it.
If you want to see what your actual monthly childcare bill might look like once consumables and extras are added in, the childcare cost calculator lets you add a weekly extras figure, so the estimate reflects real charges rather than pretending funded hours mean a completely free bill.