America’s Child Care Crisis Leaves Many Families Without Access to Licensed Care

Child care affects households in every corner of America—from the rural communities of Appalachia, where families might drive an hour to reach the nearest licensed provider, to dense urban neighborhoods where waitlists stretch months to years long. Yet as waitlists for child care assistance continue to grow at an alarming rate, the nation’s patchy and underfunded child care system remains plagued with supply shortages and high costs that leave too many families without options while undermining a fragile workforce.

Recent research from the Center for American Progress finds that nearly half of all young children in the country (ages 5 and under) live in a licensed child care desert—areas where demand for care outpaces local available licensed slots by a factor of 3-to-1. At the same time, the average annual price of child care in 2025 exceeded $13,180, consuming 10 percent of the median household income for a married couple and one-third that of a single-parent household. This paradox is driven by insufficient public investment, leaving families to foot insurmountable bills and resulting in high turnover rates among qualified educators that impair programs’ ability to scale to meet demand.

This analysis maps those supply shortages onto all 435 congressional districts, making visible the scale of the child care supply crisis as it is experienced by the constituents of each sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives.¹ In 42.2 percent of congressional districts, a majority—more than 50 percent—of young children live in a licensed child care desert. Across all congressional districts, 45.5 percent of young children, on average, live in a child care desert, with that percentage ranging from 1.2 to 100 percent. In 14 districts—3.2 percent of all congressional districts—the percentage of young children in a licensed child care desert exceeds 80 percent.²

Like the overall findings related to licensed care access, rural communities face greater shortages. In predominantly rural congressional districts, almost half—49.1 percent—of young children under the age of 6 live in licensed child care deserts, compared with 41.9 percent of young children in suburban districts and 45.7 percent in urban districts.

The connection between congressional representation and child care access is not merely geographic; it is legislative. The federal programs that undergird the child care sector, including the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five program, and Head Start, are authorized, appropriated, and shaped by Congress.

Decades of chronic underfunding of these programs has contributed directly to the supply shortages captured by licensed child care deserts: dwindling provider revenue, an exodus of early educators—and an inability to recruit and retain new ones—from a profession that cannot provide adequate wages or benefits, and a structural market failure that no amount of family-level affordability assistance can solve on its own. Understanding where child care deserts are most severe, and who represents those communities in the halls of Congress, is an essential step toward building the political will for sustained federal investment in the early learning sector and for the educators and families who depend on it.

The author would like to thank Chandler Hall, Carter Nesmith, Madeline Shepherd, and Casey Peeks for their helpful fact-checking and feedback on this analysis. The author also thanks Anh Nguyen and Bill Rapp for their development of the visuals.

Methodology

The methodology for this analysis relies on the same licensed provider and population data used in recent CAP research. However, this analysis aggregates at the congressional-district level rather than the continuous-distance measure that uses families as the starting metric for access. A child care desert is defined as any area where the number of children under age 6 exceeds available local licensed child care slots by more than a 3-to-1 ratio. The findings highlight significant variations across districts, political representation, rurality, and geography, reinforcing the fact that the child care crisis affects every type of community regardless of region or party. However, readers should interpret these results carefully, as congressional districts are population-based political boundaries that may not perfectly align with the actual child care markets families navigate. Additionally, recent redistricting efforts may influence the interpretation of these specific findings.