Center-based childcare ranged from $7,696 a year in Mississippi to $26,343 in Massachusetts, a spread of roughly 3.4 times for the same service. Those 2024 figures come from Child Care Aware of America’s affordability analysis, built on a survey of state Child Care Resource and Referral networks. Where a family lives determines whether childcare is a manageable line item or a second housing payment.
The national picture, and why one number will not do
Child Care Aware of America reported a national average annual price of $13,184 for child care in 2025, up slightly from $13,128 in 2024. Child Care Aware notes that prices rose 23 percent between 2021 and 2025, roughly tracking the 24 percent rise in overall consumer prices it recorded across the same stretch.
Infant care sits well above the average. Child Care Aware publishes three separate methods rather than one headline infant figure, and center-based infant care came in at $15,636 by an average of state averages, $15,015 when weighted by available spaces, and $15,728 when weighted by program. Care for a four-year-old ran between $12,165 and $12,555 depending on the method.
The methodological caution matters. Reporting that ignores it tends to produce a confident single number that no source actually published.
The state spread
State-level detail is where the story lives. Using Child Care Aware’s 2024 tables for center-based infant care, the most expensive jurisdictions were Massachusetts at $26,343, the District of Columbia at $26,193, Maryland at $25,321, Hawaii at $24,115, and California at $22,628.
At the other end sat Mississippi at $7,696, Alabama and South Dakota tied at $8,632, Arkansas at $9,178, and Idaho at $10,608.
A family in Boston pays more than three times what a family in Jackson pays for the same category of care. Neither family chose the price. It is set by local wage floors, commercial rent, staff-to-child ratios written into state licensing rules, and how much public money flows into the system.
Why the cheap states are not the affordable ones
Low prices do not mean low burden. Mississippi’s $7,696 lands against a state median household income far below the national figure, so the share of income consumed can match or exceed a high-price state. Child Care Aware found the national average price of care took about 10 percent of median income in two-parent households and 33 percent in single-parent households.
That single-parent figure deserves a second read. A third of median income, before housing, before food, before transportation to the job that requires the childcare in the first place.
Care costs more than the things families budget for first
Child Care Aware found that in every state with available data, the price of center-based care for two children exceeded median rent. In most states it exceeded mortgage payments. Across all four census regions, care for two children cost more than in-state college tuition, transportation, food, or health care.
Households do not usually think of childcare as their largest expense, because it is temporary and because it arrives at the same life stage as everything else expensive. The data say it frequently is the largest.
What sets the price
Childcare is labor. Staffing is the dominant cost, and licensing rules cap how many children one adult may supervise, which puts a hard floor under the number of employees a program must pay. Infant ratios are the strictest, which is why infant care is consistently the most expensive category in every state.
That cost structure does not translate into high pay. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median hourly wage of $16.82 for childcare workers in May 2025, or $34,980 a year, against a median of $24.51 an hour and $50,980 a year across all occupations. Childcare workers earn about 69 percent of the all-occupation median wage.
Two facts sitting together, both true: families cannot afford the price, and the workers delivering the service are paid near the bottom of the wage distribution. The money is not going into wages, and it is not going into profit margins at most centers. It is going into a ratio requirement that cannot be relaxed without changing what the care is.
The supply side is thinning
BLS counted 1,010,300 childcare jobs in 2025 and projects a 2 percent decline through 2035, a loss of about 19,900 positions, against 3 percent growth for all occupations. Roughly 150,300 openings a year are expected, essentially all of them replacing workers who leave.
An occupation that shrinks while demand holds steady does not produce falling prices. It produces waitlists.
How to read your own state’s number
Three questions make a state price figure interpretable.
First, what age is being priced? Infant, toddler, and preschool prices differ by thousands of dollars, and reporting that omits the age is not comparable to anything.
Second, is it center-based or home-based? Licensed family childcare homes generally price below centers, and mixing the two flattens real differences.
Third, what share of local median income does it represent? A raw dollar figure ranks states by cost of living as much as by childcare policy. The share of income is the number that tracks what families actually feel.
The broader frame
Childcare rarely strains a budget by itself. It arrives alongside housing costs, health premiums, and student loan payments, in the same years, for the same households. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3), argues that this is the more accurate way to describe the problem: the crisis is affordability across housing, healthcare, childcare, food, transport, education, and retirement together, rather than any one price line considered on its own.
The state tables support that framing. There is no state where childcare is cheap in absolute terms and no state where it is a small share of a working family’s income. What varies is which other cost is competing with it hardest.
Where the data comes from
Child Care Aware of America’s price figures come from annual surveys of state Child Care Resource and Referral agencies, which collect provider-reported prices. Prices are what families are charged, not what care costs to deliver and not what providers receive after subsidy. State-level data was unavailable for a small number of states in each survey year, so national averages rest on the states that reported.
Those limits are worth carrying into any comparison. The numbers are the best available and they are still an approximation of a market that prices differently street by street.
