Child care cost as much as rent for many families at inflation's peak, new data shows

Many families have been effectively cutting a second rent check to send their kids to day care, according to new data from the Department of Labor.

It’s no secret that child care expenses have put a huge squeeze on households across the U.S., but the federal numbers show just how steep those costs became from one county to the next during the worst inflation in 40 years. On average, families spent anywhere from $6,552 to as much as $15,600 on full-day care per child in 2022, the latest year with available data.

That upper range is a few hundred dollars more than that year’s median annual rent, the agency noted. While incomes also range widely throughout the country, households typically funnel between about 9% and 16% of their annual income on day care per child.

These costs are just untenable for an awful lot of families.

Gretchen Livingston, U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau

“These costs are just untenable for an awful lot of families,” said Gretchen Livingston, the branch chief for quantitative research at the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, which conducted the study.

The findings offer a snapshot of one of the biggest financial pressures Americans faced in the lead-up to the 2024 election, in which a driving factor was voters’ price-fatigue hangover that even a sturdy economy can’t seem to cure. But while child care costs help explain Americans’ economic dissatisfaction, an NBC News analysis of the Labor Department and election result data also hints at the limits of the issue politically.

President-elect Donald Trump expanded his vote share since 2020 in nearly 90% of counties nationwide, with the median vote shift among counties coming in at 3.2 percentage points, NBC News found. The most forbidding child care markets in 2022 voted two years later for Trump by higher margins than the nation overall, but so did many of the areas where child care was more affordable.

Vice President Kamala Harris had outlined proposals to bring down child care costs — including expanding the child tax credit and boosting resources for child care centers and caregivers. But her rival benefited overwhelmingly from broad-based economic dissatisfaction. He made outsize gains, for instance, in some of the toughest housing markets. And in NBC News exit polls, 32% of voters cited the economy as the top issue driving their vote for president, but of those who said inflation caused them severe hardship, 74% backed Trump.

“In President Trump’s first term, he prioritized expanded access to childcare and paid family leave, and he will do it again in his second term, while also delivering on his promise to implement an economic agenda that will make America Affordable Again for working families,” Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

On the campaign trail, however, he offered few specifics to tackle the issue, telling the Economic Club of New York in September that he’d “take care of it” through revenue from tariffs — a likelihood most economists doubt. “As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” Trump said at the time.

There is reason to believe child care may have had a more direct impact on state and local races, said Anne Hedgepeth, chief of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware of America, a national advocacy group.

In Austin, Texas’ Travis County, voters approved a 2.5-cent property tax increase to support child care spots for low-income families. In Sonoma County, California, 62% of voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase, which is estimated to generate $30 million annually for child support programs. But in St. Paul, Minnesota, a proposal to increase property taxes to fund child care failed.

“Voters do show up and do vote for child care when they have the opportunity to,” Hedgepeth said, citing an election-night survey by the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s rights, in which 77% of voters said guaranteeing access to affordable child care was important to them.

“We can, by extension, say that elected officials should be thinking about child care as a priority,” she said.

Over 13 million of the nation’s roughly 63 million parents rely on paid child care providers nationwide, the Labor Department estimates. Costs tend to be higher for families with infants, those living in larger counties and those using center-based rather than home-based care.

Care work is historically undervalued, Livingston said, and disproportionately affects women. Her team found that a 10% increase in child care prices is associated with a 1% drop in women’s labor force participation.

“There may come a time where people have to make a decision: Does it really make sense for me to keep my job and pay this much for child care, or should I stay home?” she said.

Hedgepeth said her researchers found costs continued to increase in 2023, albeit at a pace slower than inflation.

“There are a lot of good reasons to invest in child care, so this isn’t a race to the bottom,” Hedgepeth said.

Indeed, the Labor Department report said that the influx of $24 billion in federal pandemic aid to child care providers, plus $14 billion more to help states tackle the issue, prevented costs from surging even higher.

“It’s much more about understanding that child care is something that takes resources,” Hedgepeth added, “and we need to find those, because right now parents are carrying such a heavy part of the load.”

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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