This past summer, on a visit to Palm Beach, Florida, I met a nanny named Jovana Capric at a coffee shop at the Breakers, the historic oceanside luxury resort, built in 1926. It was late June, the season when the town’s wealthy residents leave for Nantucket, the Hamptons, or Europe. The used tea sets at the Church Mouse, a local charity shop, had all been picked through; the mansions along Ocean Boulevard were shuttered and dark at night. On the patio, where we sat beneath flower-covered trellises, only a few people lingered, drinking iced coffee in the thick summer air.
Capric, who is thirty-three years old, grew up in Port St. Lucie, Florida, about an hour north of Palm Beach. Her career working with children began in high school, while she had a job as a hostess at a Chuck E. Cheese in Boca Raton. “There was someone having his second-birthday party, and the parents just loved how I interacted with their son,” she told me. “And they’re, like, ‘Hey, do you by chance babysit?’ ” The conversation led to a gig as a part-time babysitter for them, and then to work as an assistant teacher at their children’s Montessori school. “Then, when I was a teacher,” she said, “I had families kind of shark me out of working for the school.” The pay was better, fifteen to twenty dollars an hour instead of eleven, so she left, in 2015, to nanny full time for a family with twins and dropped out of Florida Atlantic University, where she had been studying for a degree in psychology. “I could have paid thousands of dollars to get my Montessori certification,” she said, “but for me and in any job that I’ve had, experience trumps anything.”
She began deliberately looking to work for more affluent families and found one through a listing on the website care.com. When that contract was up, she said, “I was, like, O.K., I gotta find out how I can find more of these families, and it’s not gonna be through care.com.” Eventually she came across an agency, the Nanny League, that had offices around the country and specialized in placing prospective educated employees with wealthy families. Capric has an associate’s degree, and, to make herself a more attractive candidate, she pursued certifications in subjects such as conscious discipline. “I’m an expert in temper tantrums,” she told me.
In 2021, after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Capric, who by then was nannying for a well-to-do family in Houston, returned to South Florida. She was following the money: “These people coming from the Northeast are used to paying a lot.”
Palm Beach is an island—known locally as “the Island”—connected to the larger and less posh city of West Palm Beach, on the mainland, by a series of bridges. It was first developed as a winter escape for the wealthy, in the late nineteenth century, by the railroad and Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, and quickly became an old-money enclave whose pretentiousness was entwined with antisemitism and racism. (From 1939 until 1986, an ordinance required service workers in Palm Beach to register their fingerprints and carry an identification card, which Garry Trudeau once compared in “Doonesbury” to the pass books of apartheid South Africa.) But Palm Beach and West Palm Beach have seen a transformation since 2020. Financial firms, particularly from the Northeast, have migrated to Florida to form what’s now being referred to as “Wall Street South.” Drawn by the state’s low tax rates, lack of pandemic restrictions, conservative politics, and balmy weather, at least a hundred asset-management firms, according to the Palm Beach Business Development Board’s website, have opened offices in the county since 2020, among them Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and hedge funds such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel, Paul Singer’s Elliott Investment Management, and Steven Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management.
Some of the biggest firms share a newly built office building in downtown West Palm Beach, adjacent to a branch of the Wall Street steak house Harry’s. According to one estimate, between 2013 and 2023 two cities in the county, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, experienced a ninety-three-per-cent increase in the number of millionaire residents, and an estimated sixty-five billionaires now have homes in Palm Beach County. President Trump’s ties to Florida, especially his seventeen-acre oceanfront social club, Mar-a-Lago, have cemented South Florida as a center of financial and political power, and there’s heavy overlap between the list of his boosters and the newcomers to Palm Beach, including Sylvester Stallone, the financier John Paulson, and the technology mogul Larry Ellison.
“Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Boca, and Miami—it’s where the big players are,” Capric said. She wore a summery halter dress, and was on a day off from a job she’d had for a year and a half, working as one of two nannies for an affluent family who relocated to Palm Beach in the aftermath of 2020. (Like every household staff member I spoke with, she had signed a nondisclosure agreement, so could not share specific details about her employers.) At the time we met, she was earning a hundred and forty-five thousand dollars a year. She was also getting a housing stipend that covered half her rent, and could expect a year-end bonus. All in all, she told me, her compensation package added up to at least a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year. She has, at times, outearned her husband, who has a master’s degree in engineering.
Capric was working as what is called a rotational nanny, doing shifts of two weeks on and two weeks off, swapping with another nanny, although she said that her workload averaged out to about forty hours a week even with the time off. In very wealthy households, “rota nannies” have become the norm, and the family that Capric was with expected full availability when she was on. “This week, I can tell you how much I worked,” she said, looking at an app on her phone that tracks her hours. “Seventy-six hours.” When school is out in the summers, she might work as many as a hundred hours a week. Though the household was fully staffed, with a chef, a personal assistant, and housekeepers, she told me that she has to be prepared for the unforeseen: to do light cleaning if a housekeeper gets sick, to fly to another state on a moment’s notice. “That’s also why I get paid a lot, because my dedication to this family is my life, pretty much,” Capric said. She and her husband do not have children. “There’s no way I could have my own family and do this job.”
After we drank our coffees, we did a lap around the beach club at the Breakers, whose initiation fees for membership reportedly skyrocketed after the pandemic, from three hundred thousand dollars to more than five hundred thousand dollars. (The family Capric worked for were members.) It was a Saturday, and there was no indication at the beach club that Palm Beach was in its down season. The children’s pool was especially busy. At the restaurant, pale men in baseball caps and polo shirts lunched with their tanned wives, their kids dressed in matching terry-cloth outfits. Capric surveyed the scene, quietly pointing out families she knew and observing that they are no longer leaving town as soon as school gets out, as Palm Beach has become the place they live and work, instead of a seasonal getaway. Her employers were among those spending more of the summer in town. “This is the longest we’ve been here,” she said. “Normally, we’re here for like two weeks, and then the rest of the summer we’re gone.”
In a time of unprecedented wealth disparities, the American economy appears increasingly oriented toward the needs and desires of the richest, perhaps partly because their ranks have grown. A 2024 study by the research firm Altrata found that the number of Americans with a net worth of thirty million dollars or more swelled by thirteen per cent in 2023, to nearly a hundred and forty-eight thousand people. In recent years, income has grown fastest for the top five per cent of earners even as it has stagnated for the rest. But it’s also likely because these earners spend the most. Another study, by Moody’s Analytics, found that, in 2024, almost half of consumer spending in the United States came from the wealthiest ten per cent of households, or those earning more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
In cities of concentrated wealth such as Palm Beach, the influence of the richest on the economy takes on almost absurd proportions: on Worth Avenue, there is not only a yacht store but also a store where you can buy antique Japanese naval binoculars for said yacht. What has been called “the new gilded age” has also brought with it a demand for experienced household staff, who, in the face of increased restrictions on immigration, higher professional standards, and a presumption of round-the-clock commitment, are commanding salaries and benefits packages more typical of workers in white-collar professions.
When I spoke to representatives at several agencies in South Florida that staff the homes of “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” as they are known in the industry, the word that I heard most frequently was “discretion.” A nanny, housekeeper, house manager, or personal chef is privy to the intimate lives of their bosses, or “principals,” and these positions’ relatively high compensation comes with an expectation of loyalty. Peter Mahler is the president and founder of Mahler Private Staffing, a firm headquartered in Milwaukee that started serving old-money families of the upper Midwest and now helps place highly trained housekeepers, nannies, butlers, drivers, gardeners, estate managers, and assistants nationwide. The Mahler group also has offices in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, and, since 2021, Palm Beach. The firm works with around fourteen hundred clients, and maintains a large network of candidates. In exchange for a fee, Mahler Private Staffing, and other agencies like it, will conduct an extensive job search, perform background checks, and help a client put together a compensation offer for a hired candidate in what can be a highly competitive market. They will help a household set up protocols that include cellphone policies, uniform requirements, and which shoes a staff member can wear in the house. When asked, the company will train a new employee on how a client prefers their clothes to be folded and packed before a trip and will sometimes put together a household manual—what British butlers used to call a “drop-dead book”—with detailed information about family allergies, pet routines, or how a client prefers their refrigerator organized.
The positions that the firm fills vary widely. A director of estates managing a family’s eight or ten houses might earn three to five hundred thousand dollars a year and oversee dozens of employees and contractors, but even housekeepers, if they possess the right qualifications, can earn more than a hundred thousand dollars a year with benefits, and paid vacation, in certain markets. (By comparison, the median weekly wage of a full-time worker in America adds up to sixty-two thousand dollars a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) Mahler, who ran a cleaning service in high school and college and later started a large janitorial company, told me that he learned how to clean from his first client. “She was from the greatest generation of women, who knew that keeping their home was an art form.” He evoked a world of refinement and order, devoid of sweatpants or fast-casual food.
As a national provider, Mahler is attuned to where his clients are moving. For the past ten years, Aspen has been one micromarket; Montana has been another; but in recent years few cities in the country have seen as much growth in demand as Palm Beach. He had already been looking to open a Florida office there before the pandemic hit. Afterward, when he resumed the search, he noticed a sudden drop in available commercial real estate. “The competition for space on the island became intense, and that was the first clear indicator that something had changed dramatically,” he said. In the years since, many of the firm’s most significant clients—“people who I would categorize as captains of industry,” he said—have left places like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York to make Palm Beach their primary residence.
Several agents observed that the new money in Palm Beach County is notably younger: couples with small children who have fled larger cities to congregate with the like-minded in a pristine place without the irritation of homelessness or, for that matter, encounters with the middle class. With the influx of people, there have been other changes, too: asking rents in Palm Beach County have risen more than fifty per cent for apartments and seventy per cent for single-family homes since May 2019; some private schools now have wait lists. In 2024, the Colony Hotel, a confectionary-pink building off Worth Avenue, paused its customary closure, in late summer—both tourists and locals were still showing up.
Once Palm Beach was no longer just a seasonal market, the nature of service there changed, too. “There have always been grand households in Palm Beach that were staffed in the traditional manner with either a majordomo or an estate manager,” Steven Stolman, a fashion designer who owned a chain of eponymous boutiques, including one in Palm Beach, told me. He had lived there for thirty years. Stolman, who now lives part time in California, reminisced about watching the heiress and Broadway producer Terry Allen Kramer serve Thanksgiving stuffing alongside her household staff and wistfully recalled the rules set out in Amy Vanderbilt’s “Complete Book of Etiquette.” “I think that that level of formality is no longer valued or relevant, with the exception of a very few households,” he said. “Now it’s more about fulfilling everyone’s wishes in a very short order.”
Wellington, Florida, fifteen miles inland from Palm Beach and home to the National Polo Club, is a mix of sprawling gated communities, golf clubs, and horse farms, and the seasonal gathering place for people who compete in jumping competitions at the Winter Equestrian Festival. “The Bloombergs are here, the Gateses are here,” April Berube, an agent at the Wellington Agency, told me. We met, this past summer, at one of the restaurants of the polo club, where the grounds were closed for the season, and only a couple of people were there, playing tennis on an outside court.
The Polo Club is attempting something of a revival, and Berube rhapsodized about the scene the previous winter, when billionaires rubbed shoulders with grooms at the bar, a live band performed at busy brunches, and the fashion label Veronica Beard held a show and luncheon. The club’s director of membership, a former Ford model named Carol Thompson who introduced herself to me as “a grandmother,” came up to say hello. The conversation, as usual, turned to the county’s growth—how bad the traffic is now, how hard it is to get a restaurant reservation even in summer. Thompson said that she had already signed up two hundred and fourteen members to the Polo Club that year. (At thirty-four thousand dollars, its initiation fee is much lower than those of Palm Beach’s Carriage House, the Breakers, or Mar-a-Lago, whose fee Trump hiked in August to a million dollars.)
Berube, whose agency placed Capric in her job, had recently been quoted in a CNBC article about the high salaries housekeepers can now earn in Palm Beach. Since then, she said, her agency had been besieged with phone calls from applicants. People have contacted her from Africa, India, and Germany. After one woman was told that she didn’t have the qualifications, her boyfriend came to the office and threatened Berube and her team. The surfeit of interested workers has not alleviated the labor shortage.
“We’re begging for housekeepers, but they don’t have the experience, even legals,” Berube told me. On the subject of Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the high-end staffing agencies I spoke with remained comfortably aloof, maintaining that they only work with staff who have authorization to work in the United States. “This can sound however it wants to sound,” Berube said of undocumented people trying to get jobs, “but they’re illegally here, they have no experience, I cannot understand them—and I’m trying to be so nice.”
Staffing agencies offer services such as vetting work documentation and conducting background checks. Mahler Private Staffing suggests that the clients perform a second background check for added peace of mind. Berube’s staff have become experts in spotting made-up references. They look at social-media feeds. In job interviews, Lisa Miller, senior search executive with Mahler Private Staffing, will test candidates. “One of the joys of what I do is getting them not to be discreet,” Miller said, of the interviewing process. “I ask them questions and see if they share too much.”
The agencies know what kind of demeanor their clients are looking for. I spoke with a former butler, Tim Edwards, who worked as a house manager to a well-known socialite in Palm Beach for sixteen years and now owns a staffing and catering business. He told me that he has recruited cater-waiters from the gym, because they have the right look: clean-cut and presentable. Very few of them make the leap to private service. “It has to be one of those people that wants to be in the back row, not the front row,” he said. It also has to be someone who is not easily provoked by a grumpy boss. “All these private homes are basically businesses,” he said. “It’s a business, but the bosses are humans, too, and if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed and you’re serving them coffee, you’re the first one to be the punching bag.”
The ideal candidates need to be tech-savvy. (Luxury homes and appliances have become so high-tech that some families even hire a personal I.T. engineer to maintain their wireless networks and cybersecurity, or a director of home technology to monitor smart systems for climate, lighting, and appliances.) Potential candidates have to know not to open the door for the wrong person or post indiscreetly on social media. They must be cheery, but remain unbothered if relegated to the background. “Who wants to hire someone who is low energy or who walks into a household and is negative?” Berube asked. “There’s a lot of people out there like that, but my clients do not want that.”
Housekeepers are expected to have specialized skills in caring for fine art, china, rugs, and designer clothes. Chauffeurs might seek out education at the Rolls-Royce White Glove Chauffeur Training Program, where they are taught to brake gently with a technique called a “champagne stop.” All prospective employees need to be hyperaware of their appearance. Berube told me about a private chef she had positioned who needed to be replaced because the family complained that he was sweating too much.
Many candidates benefit from not having families of their own, or from having grown children. “One of the reasons I did so well is I was not married and had no kids,” Edwards told me. “If your child is sick and needs to go to a hospital, that’s another choice to be made.” But household staff also see their commitment returned in kind—I spoke with a housekeeper named Claudia Guzman who had left her car behind to help the family she worked with evacuate their home during flooding in Miami Beach last year. The car was ruined by water damage, but, she said, her employers offered to cover whatever insurance didn’t.
In Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago forms the beating heart of MAGA society life, staff are expected to be either apolitical or allied with their bosses. Donald Trump’s own valet and body man, Walt Nauta, began serving Diet Cokes in the Oval Office as a Navy petty officer during Trump’s first term and was hired by the President for private service after leaving the military, amid rumors of “fraternization.” (When asked last year about this accusation by the Daily Beast, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung described it as “a blatant attempt to smear Nauta for political purposes.”) Nauta, a co-defendant in the Justice Department case that charged Trump with the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, was recently rewarded for his loyalty with an appointment to the board of the United States Naval Academy (the charges were dropped in February after the Department of Justice requested the case be dismissed).
“In the nineties, when I started out,” Berube told me, “the big thing was religion.” Now, she said, the agency checks social-media feeds for politically polarizing material. “We’ve got politicians, we have ex-Presidents, we have judges, and they’re asking us these questions.”
Although a college degree can help land particular jobs, in many listings higher education is secondary to experience and disposition, including what one Mahler Private Staffing listing called “the Martha factor,” which it defined as “a passion for creating a beautiful, functional, and welcoming home while delivering exceptional service.” Candidates who possess those qualities have found themselves with an increasing amount of negotiating power. I recently spoke with an experienced nanny named Isabel in the middle of a national job hunt. (She asked that I not use her last name.) She is single and childless, and has not dated or had a relationship since finishing her college degree, in interdisciplinary studies with a minor early-childhood education, in 2013. As a “no-screen” nanny, she devotes significant emotional resources to the children in her care—in return, she expects paid vacation, health insurance, and at least a hundred and forty thousand dollars in salary a year. Many high-net-worth families move between multiple homes, and she estimates that at times she has been overseas for eighty per cent of the year, including most holidays, but for her the travel is part of the appeal. “I’ve been to places that I would have never gone on my own or that I never knew existed,” she said. She told me that clients in New York or Boston still seem to offer the highest pay, though Floridians expect the same level of discretion and experience. In South Florida, she continued, “there are some jobs that only pay eighty to one hundred—that’s something I would never take.” Everyone wants to work with a nanny who will teach their children to be in well-mannered conversation with adults instead of glued to an iPad. “The parents want to have the top staff, so they hire the top nannies,” she said. “They’ve been in élite people’s homes, they don’t get starstruck if they see a professional athlete or someone that’s in the White House.”
The scrutiny can go both ways. “Working with affluent families can be really tricky,” Capric said. “You, as a professional, have been formally trained on how to communicate with kids, in the sense of learning emotional-regulation strategies.” Some parents, she suggested, don’t have those strategies to teach.
“Years ago, my clients used to think they had the upper hand,” Berube told me. Now, she said, an experienced housekeeper might talk to a lawyer before signing a contract. Benefits and paid vacation have become a standard part of an offer. Counter-offers from a candidate’s current employer have become so common that Berube, in advance of putting a candidate on the market, has started checking in with families to make sure that they don’t want to give their housekeeper a raise.
The day after meeting with Berube, I visited a housekeeper from Los Angeles named Sandra Bernal, whom Berube had recently placed in a job in Wellington. I met her at her new rental apartment, in Boynton Beach. She had moved in earlier that day and was still waiting for furniture she had ordered to arrive, but the apartment was spotless, with a flat-screen television already hung on the wall. Bernal greeted me in a patterned maxidress, a little white cat nearby.
This was Bernal’s second go at life in Palm Beach County. Two years earlier, her employer had sold his house in Brentwood, California, and relocated to Wellington. Bernal had stuck it out for a year, but the job ended up being fewer hours than she wanted and she missed L.A., where she has three adult daughters.
When she went back, however, reality set in: the high gas prices, the traffic. She shared an apartment in Redondo Beach with one of her daughters. She got a job in Beverly Hills, a thirty-five-minute drive on paper, but in reality a two-hour commute one way. “I said, No, this is not for me anymore,” she told me. With Berube’s help, it took her only a month to find a new job in Florida. She was glad that she had made the move. Her current two-bedroom apartment is twenty-one hundred dollars a month; in L.A., she said, a place the same size on the West Side would easily cost five thousand dollars a month. Taxes are lower, and except for midsummer she likes the weather. It’s also only a short flight to her native country, El Salvador, which she left for L.A. at fourteen.
When she started working as a nanny and housekeeper, in 1989, she was paid in cash, “and it was two hundred dollars a week.” She had always taken pride in the work, and enjoyed it. She had not expected to one day be able to pay her bills by herself. “I’m hoping that this can be my forever job,” she told me of the new position.
Later, I spoke with a veteran nanny who had recently retired after a career of more than twenty-five years, many of them in Palm Beach.“I never thought that Florida would pay these salaries,” she said. With her retirement savings, she had bought a home in her native Mexico, and now took on part-time gigs as a newborn specialist. Being a career nanny, she said, had its drawbacks: “All the jets, all the fun, but it’s living someone else’s life, not your own.” Still, she had loved it. “In twenty-six years I worked with more than fifty children. I really put my life out there to take care of children,” she said. “I’m really happy with what I chose.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the population addressed by the Altrata study.
