A lack of affordable and accessible child care across the United States costs the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year, stymies women professionally, and is pushing families to the breaking point, a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds.

According to the 2023 KIDS COUNT Data Book (50 pages, PDF)—the foundation’s annual assessment of the well-being of children through national and state economic, education, health, and family and community data—in 2020-21, 13 percent of children from birth to age 5 lived in families in which someone quit, changed, or refused a job due to problems with child care. Moreover, Black (17 percent) and Latino (16 percent) children were affected more than their white counterparts (10 percent) and women were five to eight times more likely than men to experience negative employment consequences related to caregiving.

According to the report, the national average annual cost of child care for one child in 2021 ($10,600) was equivalent to a tenth of a married couple’s median income and more than one-third of a single parent’s income; in one analysis, infant child care cost more than in-state college tuition in 34 states and the District of Columbia. The report also found that the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the main federal mechanism for subsidizing care, only partially offset costs for 1.3 million of the more than 12 million children in child care, and only one in six children eligible for subsidies receives them.

While the cost of care burdens families, the report found that childcare workers are also burdened, as the median national pay for childcare workers was $13.71 per hour in 2022—less than 98 percent of all professions—and more than 60 percent of childcare workers reported difficulty in paying their own food and utility bills in the most recent month. Discrepancies also exist across racial and gender lines, as 94 percent of childcare workers are women; 14 percent identifying as Black, 4 percent as Asian, and across all races, 24 percent identifying as Hispanic or Latino. In all, the report indicates that the failings of the childcare market also affect the health of the American economy, costing $122 billion a year in lost earnings, productivity, and tax revenue.

“A good childcare system is essential for kids to thrive and our economy to prosper. But our current approach fails kids, parents, and childcare workers by every measure,” said Casey Foundation president and CEO Lisa Hamilton. “Without safe child care they can afford and get to, working parents face impossible choices, affecting not only their families but their employers as well.”

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