Child care costs have been a hot topic in the 2024 presidential race. Here are key facts about the issue, based on data from the federal government and Pew Research Center surveys.
Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to examine child care costs in the United States and how Americans view the issue.
Data on median estimated child care costs comes from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP). The most recent NDCP data is from 2018 and expressed in 2022 real dollars to account for inflation. Some widely cited private organizations and advocacy groups have released their own, much more recent estimates. But these estimates do not provide as much detail about breaks by population size, the child’s age, etc., as do the Department of Labor estimates.
For data on the inflation of day care and preschool prices since January 2020, we used the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ widely cited inflation metric, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U); this data is not seasonally adjusted.
More information about the Center surveys cited in this analysis, including the questions and methodology, can be found at the links in the text.
Child care costs vary widely in the United States. In 2018, the median annual cost of child care for one child – expressed in 2022 dollars – ranged from $5,357 to $17,171, according to the latest available estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor. But these figures differed significantly depending on several factors, including whether the program is:
- Home-based, caring for a small group of children of various ages in a residential setting;
- Or center-based, typically overseeing a larger number of children who are grouped by age in a nonresidential setting.
Center-based programs are often more expensive, especially for younger kids. And costs are higher in more heavily populated areas of the country. For example, the median annual cost of child care for infants under 2 years old in center-based programs in 2018 ranged from $8,310 in counties with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants to $17,171 in counties with populations of 1 million people or more. (These costs are again expressed in 2022 dollars.)
Many families spend a sizable share of their income on child care, according to the same Department of Labor estimates. In a given county, the median cost per child for paid care in 2018 was anywhere from 8.0% to 19.3% of the median household income in that county, depending on the age of the child, the type of child care program and the size of the county.
The most expensive form of child care in 2018 was for infants in center-based programs. The median cost per child of those programs in small counties was 12.3% of the median household income in those areas that year. The share rose to 13.9% in medium-sized counties, 15.7% in large counties and 19.3% in very large counties with 1 million people or more.
It’s important to keep in mind that these figures are expressed as a share of counties’ median family incomes. This means that lower-income families may spend even larger shares of their annual incomes on paid care per child.
Some forms of child care have become considerably more expensive since the coronavirus pandemic began. Between January 2020 and September 2024, the price of day care and preschool rose about 22%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). And it’s up 6% just since September 2023.
(In the CPI-U, the day care and preschool item covers costs for preschool-age children, including pre-K educational programs and supervision by “individuals whose occupation is to regularly care for pre-elementary school children.” It excludes expenses for occasional babysitting or nannying, kindergarten, camps or after-school programs.)
For some parents, child care costs can be a source of financial stress. Two-in-ten parents who say they need child care reported in a fall 2022 Center survey that there were times in the previous 12 months when they didn’t have enough money to pay for it. Parents with lower incomes (38%) were especially likely to report challenges paying for child care that year.
Some working parents also worry about how unexpected child care emergencies could affect their jobs. In the fall 2022 survey, 19% of employed parents said that they’d be extremely or very worried about losing pay if they had to take a day or two off work to help a sick child or because of child care issues. This share reached 45% among lower-income parents who work. And 22% of working parents in this income group said they’d be highly worried about losing their job if they had to take time off because of child care problems.
A majority of Americans say providing free child care would encourage more people to have kids. The U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, and Americans are much more likely to perceive negative than positive effects of fewer people having children in the future, according to a spring 2024 Center survey. Against this backdrop, 60% of U.S. adults say the federal government providing free child care would be extremely or very effective at encouraging more people to have kids in the future.
About half of Americans – regardless of whether they would actually support these policies – also say requiring employers to provide paid family leave (51%) and providing more tax credits for parents (49%) would be highly effective.
A separate Center survey in spring 2024 found that general affordability concerns play a role in younger Americans’ decisions about having children. Among adults under 50 who don’t have children and say they’re unlikely to ever do so, 36% say a major reason why is that they can’t afford it. Another 24% say this is a minor reason they haven’t had kids.
