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 earning 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 “principles,” 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.)
