Child care for one infant is more expensive than public college tuition in 38 states and Washington D.C., according to EPI’s updated fact sheets that calculate the costs of child care in every state. In addition, child care is more expensive than rent in 17 states and Washington D.C., showing that child care is one of the biggest expenses families face.
Child care costs vary widely across the country, ranging from as low as $572 per month in Mississippi to as high as $2,363 per month in Washington D.C. for a household with one infant. An accompanying blog post uses New Mexico as a case study to show the different data points offered in the fact sheets.
The fact sheets use state-level data from the Department of Labor and Child Care Aware of America on the cost of infant and 4-year-old care to determine child care costs for one- and two-child families. The fact sheets incorporate the latest available data, in most cases for 2023, and adjust everything to 2024 dollars using the appropriate indexes.
The fact sheets calculate the share of a median family’s income taken up by child care for one- and two- child families. Further, the fact sheets measure affordability against the earnings of minimum wage workers and early child care educators, finding that child care is even further out of reach for these workers. For example, a median child care worker in Illinois would have to spend 50% of their earnings to put their own child in infant care.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, child care is affordable if it costs no more than 7% of a family’s income. To emphasize the benefits of making child care affordable, the fact sheets calculate the savings to families of a 7% child care cap as well as the predicted increase in parental labor supply and resulting growth to each state’s economy.
“Child care is unaffordable for working families everywhere in the country, and it’s even more unattainable for minimum wage workers and the very workers that administer child care. This isn’t inevitable—it is a policy choice. Federal and state policymakers can and should act to make child care more affordable, and ensure that child care workers can afford the same quality of care for their own children,” said Katherine deCourcy, EPI research assistant.
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