The soaring cost of child care in the U.S. can now exceed what families pay for housing or college.
That’s according to recently released data that outlines the heavy financial burden on the nearly 14 million American parents who rely on paid caregivers to look after their children. Families spent as much as $15,600 per year on full-day care per child in 2022 (the latest year for which data is available), although those with infants can face costs as high as $31,544 annually, according to a recently updated database compiled by the Department of Labor.
That exceeds the U.S. median rent of $15,216 that same year, while some families are spending as much as almost 30% of their annual earnings on child care, the agency noted. Overall, the cost of child care has soared more than 50% over the last decade.
“Having a young child in this country is a cause of poverty. It’s not correlated with it, it is a cause of poverty,” Elliot Haspel, the author of the nonfiction book “Crawling Behind, America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It,” told the Harvard Graduate School of Education in October.
Haspel noted that the demographic group most likely to face eviction “are Black children under the age of five. And a lot of this is a child care story. It isn’t a housing story.”
Families with infants typically pay more for child care, as well as those living in more populous counties or using center-based, instead of home-based, care, the Labor Department found.
“The fact that the median cost of center-based infant care is more than the median cost of rent should be of urgent concern,” Wendy Chun-Hoon, director of the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, said in a statement. “Families are struggling and women are disproportionately impacted.”
Counties in which center infant prices demand the highest portion of median family income include:
- Sterns County, Minnesota
- Bronx County, New York
- Piute County, Utah
- Essex County, Vermont
- Grays Harbor and Wahkiakum counties in Washington
- Guanica County, Puerto Rico
Child care can cost more than housing or college
The cost burden of paying for child care can exceed a typical family’s annual housing costs, and even cost more than in-state tuition at public universities, other research has found.
In some U.S. states, child care expenses are consuming more than a quarter of an average household’s total income, with a typical family spending $700 a month on the service, Bank of America found in a 2023 report.
In 2022, the cost of child care for two kids in a center exceeded the typical annual mortgage payment in 41 states and the District of Columbia, while infant care costs at a center surpassed in-state tuition at a public university in 32 states and D.C., according to the advocacy organization First Focus.
While consuming a large chunk of many families’ income, child care workers are generally poorly paid. As of May 2023, wages averaged $15.42 an hour, or just over $32,000 a year, according to federal data. Overall, the nation’s child care workforce is among the lowest 5% paid of all occupations, noted Haspel.
The COVID-19 pandemic worsened an existing shortage of child care workers as thousands left the industry in favor of higher-paid work. More than half of child care providers surveyed in 2024 said their programs were under-enrolled relative to their current capacity for reasons including staffing shortages, First Focus found.
The infusion of $24 billion in federal pandemic aid to child care providers, along with $14 billion more to help states address the issues, stopped costs from rising even further, the Labor Department said.
We know interventions like the American Rescue Plan have helped, but more federal investments are needed to ensure child care is accessible and affordable for all,” Chun-Hoon said, referring to the massive 2021 stimulus bill aimed at shoring up the economy during the health crisis.
