Introduction
In the past few years, child-care costs have risen to a nearly unaffordable level for most Americans, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Officially, affordable child care should cost 7% or less of a family’s annual household income. In reality, however, no state in the U.S. is currently able to provide such a rate for childcare costs, with some states having these costs exceed the gap between the subsidy rate afforded by the state by $400 a month.
President Joe Biden, in his Build Back Better plan, reiterated that America is committed to making child-rearing cost affordable, allocating the largest investment budget for child care in history. However, the high-level efforts to assuage working parents’ concerns about raising kids haven’t rendered a noticeable outcome as a majority of parents in 2022 are yet paying more child-care costs than they did in the previous years, and many still cannot afford to send their infant or toddler to child care.
States across the country have also taken steps to lower the cost through various measures such as granting more child care tax credits to financially struggling parents. But many families are still faced with expenses for daycare far above what they can afford, and need for one of the parents to stay at home and take care of the kids to lower childcare costs. Unsurprisingly, this predominantly affects women, as mothers are still usually the ones staying at home full-time in such situations, as a Pew Research Center study has shown.
Learn for yourself how states compare to one another in terms of child-care costs by surveying the data in the charts.
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