America’s Licensed Child Care Deserts

“During the pandemic, we lost our child care—our provider had to shut down,” said Anna Butcher, a mom of two from Morgantown, West Virginia. “I lost my job around that same time, but then when I went back to work, we couldn’t find any care. The centers were booked out at least a year, if not more. And the price was astronomical for this area.”¹

The Butcher family’s experiences are, unfortunately, not unique. Child care in the United States—composed largely of a patchwork of small businesses often operating on thin profit margins—is increasingly inaccessible² to families across the income spectrum.³ Even now, Anna and her husband work multiple jobs—a full time and a part time each—to cover their mortgage, child care payments, and other necessary expenses, juggling hybrid work schedules to make sure they have adequate coverage at home for their young son.⁴ For decades, lawmakers have underfunded child care, eroding the value of child care assistance⁵ as program operating costs continue to soar,⁶ fueling dwindling enrollment numbers,⁷ pushing early educators out of the field, and exacerbating a nationwide supply crisis.

With nearly 70 percent of children under age 6 living in homes where all parents are employed, child care is widely essential, despite the well-known financial burden it poses for families.⁸ Leaving the workforce poses significant economic challenges for families,⁹ and many need two or more incomes to cover basic expenses such as housing, health care, and food, all of which have become more costly.¹⁰ Affordability remains a significant issue for families nationwide, but even with expanded subsidies that would bring the cost of child care within reach, low supply still fuels lengthy waitlists and leaves families with limited options. In 2016, the Center for American Progress defined the licensed supply shortage known as “child care deserts” as census tracts with at least 30 children age 5 or younger and either no licensed child care providers or a ratio of more than three children under age 5 for every licensed slot.¹¹ This definition has since evolved, but the underlying impact of measuring deserts remains.¹² Understanding the availability of licensed child care options is a crucial step toward addressing systemic issues in the sector that keep prices high, options for families low, and providers and educators living on subsistence wages.

This report provides a new analysis of the 2025 landscape of licensed child care in the United States and offer recommendations for how both federal and state lawmakers can address the broken child care market, support the workforce, and ensure access for all families.

For this report, CAP and researchers from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Stanford University collaborated to collect data on the locations and capacities of licensed child care providers—including licensed and registered centers, homes, school-based pre-kindergartens, and Head Start programs—across all states and Washington, D.C. These data were combined with population data on families with children ages 5 and younger from the American Community Survey (2019-2023 5-Year Estimates)¹³ to measure family access to local licensed child care capacity. A family is considered to live in a child care desert if they reside in a location with more than three local young children, under age 6, per local licensed child care slot. The access measure uses continuous distances between family and provider locations, rather than area-based boundaries such as census tracts, ZIP codes, or counties that arbitrarily divide up child care markets. See the full methodology below.

Key findings:

• Total licensed supply. In 2025, eight years after CAP’s original nationwide analysis, an estimated 46 percent of America’s children under age 6 lived in a child care desert—relative to 51 percent¹⁴ in 2018.¹⁵ The prevalence of licensed child care deserts varies significantly from state to state, with even greater variation at the community level: Roughly 5 percent of young children live in a child care desert in Washington, D.C., followed by approximately 21 percent in Massachusetts, and just more than one-quarter in New Jersey and Nebraska. Licensed deserts appear most prevalent in Idaho, Hawaii, and Alaska, at 83 percent, 95 percent, and 96 percent of young children, respectively.¹⁶ An estimated 43.5 percent of children under age 6 in poverty live in a child care desert, slightly lower than the national average.
• Licensed care in predominantly Hispanic/Latino and Black, non-Hispanic communities. Majority-Hispanic/Latino communities have the highest licensed desert rate at an average of 52.2 percent. Majority-Black, non-Hispanic communities experience an average rate of approximately 35 percent of young children in deserts. Urban majority-Black, non-Hispanic areas have the lowest desert rate, but that pattern largely disappears for rural majority-Black, non-Hispanic communities, suggesting that the infrastructure serving Black, non-Hispanic communities is heavily concentrated in cities and essentially absent in rural areas. The Hispanic/Latino desert rates are high, meaning the equity gap for Hispanic/Latino communities exists regardless of geography. This points to a more systemic supply shortfall rather than one that varies depending on urbanization.
• Licensed supply in rural communities. In 2025, families continue to face a rural penalty characterized by extreme licensed supply challenges. The share of young children living in licensed child care deserts rose to 70 percent in remote rural areas in 2025, up from an estimated two-thirds of families in 2018.¹⁷ While the overall prevalence of licensed deserts has decreased slightly, the trend moved in the opposite direction in the most remote rural communities.
• The role of Head Start in child care access. Head Start supply nationwide is so scarce that using the three-to-one benchmark—as defines licensed child care deserts—among young children who qualify based on the federal poverty rate, Head Start deserts are nearly universal, with rural areas slightly better off (96.7 percent) than urban ones (99.7 percent). However, the distribution of Head Start access is more uneven: Nearly half of rural communities have no Head Start programs at all, compared with just more than 20 percent in urban areas, and while nearly 80 percent of qualifying urban households have some access, only 48 percent of rural ones do.

High costs and low supply are well-established aspects of the child care sector in the United States, and the two are interrelated. Children face significant underinvestment because families typically have the least resources and there is a significant lack of public investment in children when they are at their youngest. This lack of investment in programs benefiting young children manifests in the child care sector as low wages among early educators, supply shortages, and high costs that reduce options for young families.¹⁸

The few federal programs related to child care have also been historically underresourced,¹⁹ and with recent cuts to health care²⁰ and family assistance²¹ programs through the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, state budgets are feeling even more of a squeeze. Some, including Indiana,²² Colorado,²³ and Maryland,²⁴ have already imposed enrollment freezes for child care assistance due to limited funding. In September 2025, for instance, Indiana officials reported a statewide waitlist of nearly 31,000 children;²⁵ by March 2026, just six months later, that number had surpassed 34,000 children.²⁶ Just one week in March 2026 saw a 60 percent increase in the number of families on a waitlist for child care assistance in Missouri.²⁷ In March 2026, West Virginia had an estimated child care gap of more than 28,000 children under age 6.²⁸ For a state with an estimated 86,000 children under age 4, this gap represents a massive shortage in much-needed care.²⁹

Nationwide, the lack of public investment drives up waitlists for assistance, reduces potential revenue for providers, and decreases options for families, perpetuating the supply crisis. Recent research conducted by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, though with a somewhat different methodological approach than CAP’s child care deserts analyses, found gaps in supply that leave an estimated 4.2 million young children with working parents in need of care nationwide.³⁰

Understanding the landscape of licensed child care options is crucial for addressing supply shortages that plague particularly affected communities. It can also inform policy recommendations, including where to focus early educator recruitment and retention investments, where to prioritize contracted slots for specific forms of hard-to-obtain care, and where to target investments that increase affordability for families.

The quantity of child care services, often measured by authorized total capacity (the maximum legal number of children a program can serve), consistently falls short of demand. However, using authorized total capacity as a proxy for available slots likely overestimates actual care availability because authorized total capacity fails to account for critical real-world limitations:³⁷

• Age constraints on care. The combination of children’s ages, particularly the need for more qualified personnel to provide hands-on care for infants and toddlers, restricts the total number of children a program can safely accommodate.
• Workforce shortages. The persistent lack of early educators due to chronically low wages and difficult working conditions can force providers to reduce enrollment and consolidate children into fewer classrooms to mitigate overall staffing burdens.
• Physical capacity as a ceiling, not a floor. Authorized capacity is typically determined by hard or legal constraints such as square footage and building codes—it represents the maximum number of children that a facility could serve under ideal conditions. This makes workforce-related limitations even more consequential, as they become the binding constraint that prevents providers from ever reaching that ceiling.

One study found that, on average, providers’ current capacity was only about 74 percent of their authorized capacity,³⁸ resulting in an overestimate of nearly 30,000 available slots within the studied state. Providers reporting difficulties with staff hiring and retention also showed larger gaps between their authorized and real capacity than those who did not report such challenges. Although the data in the present report cannot measure this discrepancy, the true prevalence of child care deserts with respect to servable children is likely higher due to a shortfall between available slots and licensed capacity.

For many important purposes, comparisons of performance indicators across states, particularly states with similar economies or labor markets, can provide helpful insights. In the case of child care deserts, such comparisons should be approached with caution. States have highly variable regulatory environments for child care, from differences in the maximum number of children a provider can care for before they must become licensed or registered with the state to whether and how some providers can become license-exempt and the amount owed for licensing fees.³⁹

Each of these things could affect whether otherwise identical providers in different states would appear in the state licensing data used in this analysis. For example, Idaho child care providers must be licensed or registered with the state if they are caring for more than seven children and receiving compensation for one or more of those children,⁴⁰ whereas Maryland child care providers must be licensed or registered with the state if they provide care to a child⁴¹ who is not related to them on a regular basis of more than 20 hours per month.⁴² When interpreting child care deserts, then, it may appear as though there are many more areas of inadequate supply in Idaho relative to Maryland because many fewer providers will have been accounted for in the corresponding licensed provider data. Comparisons across communities within a state or across states with similar licensing requirements are more reliable than comparisons across states with very different licensing requirements.

Persistently limited public supports contribute to the high cost of child care and the undersupply of options to meet families’ needs as well as perpetuate the existence of child care deserts. For instance, the public annually invests three times less per child per year in care and education during the first five years of children’s lives than in their next 13 years.⁴³ Consequently, families can easily access free care and education for their children during ages 5 to 17 at a local K-12 school district, but families cannot easily find nor afford care when their children are younger. This public investment shortage creates significant consequences for families, communities, and the broader economy.

Child care prices persistently exceed the commonly used affordability threshold of 7 percent of annual household income.⁴⁴ The national average annual price of child care in 2024 exceeded $13,000⁴⁵—consuming 10 percent of a two-earner household’s median income and more than one-third that of a single-earner household—and center-based care for two children surpassed the average cost of housing in nearly every state and Washington, D.C.⁴⁶

These high costs have severe economic ramifications, pushing an estimated 134,000 families into poverty and relegating nearly half a million more to a lower income bracket every single year.⁴⁷ More recent research suggests that even families with higher-than-average incomes struggle with burdensome child care costs: One study found that in order to meet the 7 percent affordability threshold, a household with two children would need to earn more than $400,000 each year⁴⁸—176.5 percent more than the current average income in a two-child household.⁴⁹ The affordability gap is even wider when broken down by race; for example, Black households would need to earn 310.8 percent more than their current household average in order to meet the affordability threshold for child care.⁵⁰

Despite state⁵¹ and local⁵² efforts to address the high cost of child care, these affordability measures alone will not solve the systemic issues driving the child care crisis without the implementation of targeted policies to increase the number of available slots. It is true that the relationship between demand- and supply-side investments is deeply intertwined. Research from the Upjohn Institute finds that increased subsidies can stimulate supply growth: Every 1 percent price increase driven by subsidy expansion from 2012 to 2018 corresponded to more than a 10 percent increase in total local child care capacity suggesting that the private child care market is capable of expanding to meet stimulated demand with relatively limited price effects on unsubsidized families.⁵³ This study illustrates the power of public investment to alleviate challenges faced by both families and providers.

However, the child care sector is characterized by a structural supply crisis: Providers are hesitant to raise prices⁵⁴ but are often forced to by rising operating costs,⁵⁵ including those for food, supplies, insurance, and facilities expenses such as rent or mortgage payments, and a lack of direct investment in expanding capacity or retaining qualified educators. These rising costs can lead to program closures when families cannot afford the price of care, further limiting their options.

Workforce pressures compound the problem. Low compensation drives experienced early educators out of the field, leaving programs understaffed or often unable to serve their full licensed capacity.⁵⁶ In markets where the provider base has already eroded through closures, or where workforce shortages constrain growth, demand-side tools alone may lack the infrastructure on which to act. Solving the child care crisis requires demand-side investment to activate the market and direct supply-side support to ensure the sector has the workforce, facilities, and financing to actually expand.

Providers rely on qualified early educators to provide the skilled, hands-on care young children need. However, because they are unable to pay them wages that reflect the value of their work, many educators leave the field for jobs with higher salaries and workplace benefits.⁵⁷ Among respondents to the 2026 National Association for the Education of Young Children workforce survey,⁵⁸ 61 percent reported that parents could not afford to enroll their children, and nearly half reported that they lack sufficient staff to open all authorized slots in their program. Without adequate public investment, which the sector has historically lacked, this imbalance between supply and demand will persist.⁵⁹

These widespread economic consequences ripple outward for years to come. The Council for a Strong America estimated in 2023 that the U.S. economy loses as much as $122 billion each year because of the infant-toddler child care crisis—including $78 billion annually in lost earnings; $23 billion in lost productivity; and $21 billion in lost federal, state, and local tax revenue.⁶⁰ By 2026, just three years later, those losses have amounted to approximately $172 billion annually, including $134 billion—an estimated average of $6,980 per working parent—in forgone earnings and job search expenses for families with children under age 5 and $38 billion in business losses due to reduced productivity. Taxpayers also lose an average estimated $2,000 per working parent in lower state and federal tax revenue, totaling approximately $37 billion annually.⁶¹

Unlike public education, which typically ensures children universal access beginning around age 5 or 6,⁶² the child care sector has no such guarantee, and largely consists of small-business owners operating across home, center, community-based, and faith-based settings.⁶³ There are no universal supports to help families access child care services, and only two historically underresourced federal programs—Head Start⁶⁴ and the federal child care subsidy program known as the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)⁶⁵—focus on early learning opportunities for low-income families. Because they are underfunded, both programs serve only a fraction of those eligible.⁶⁶ In 2024, for instance, just 10 percent of eligible infants and toddlers were served by Early Head Start, and slightly more than one-third of 3- and 4-year-olds could access Head Start preschool.⁶⁷ The Child Care and Development Block Grant, which provides discretionary grants to states under the CCDF, reaches just 13 percent of eligible families nationwide, with differences by state given variation in state subsidy eligibility.⁶⁸ State matching investments also vary significantly; in fiscal year 2025, they ranged from less than $500 in per-child spending in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Wisconsin, to nearly $8,500 per child in California and Massachusetts.⁶⁹

The early education system primarily operates as a pay-to-play market, with the majority of child care spending coming from out-of-pocket tuition costs paid by families.⁷⁰ These substantial expenditures consume huge portions of household income and frequently push parents—typically mothers—to leave the workforce to provide care for their children.⁷¹

According to 2023 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the most recent available data, nearly 80 percent of families seeking child care reported difficulty finding or accessing their preferred child care services for their children,⁷² an increase from 50 percent in 2016.⁷³ Among those families reporting difficulty accessing care, by far the leading reasons in 2023 were related to prohibitive costs and a shortage of available child care slots. The families of more than 1 million children reported being entirely unable to access the program that they wanted for their children.

These findings are echoed by research from the RAPID Survey Project,⁷⁴ which shows families across the income spectrum reporting challenges finding and affording care for their children. Nearly three-quarters of families with children under age 6 reported trouble securing care, including 85 percent of high-income families.⁷⁵ That same survey found that 60 percent of families attributed their difficulty in finding child care to a shortage of caregivers.⁷⁶

Based on NCES data, families at opposite ends of the income spectrum share one thing in common: About 1 in 5 households earning $20,000 or less in annual household income and 1 in 5 earning $100,000 or more reported significant difficulty finding child care.⁷⁷ But the similarities end there. While only 5 percent of the highest-income households reported being unable to find a program at all, nearly 1 in 4 of the lowest-income households said the same. This suggests that lower-income families are far more likely to fall through the gaps entirely.⁷⁸

Families also report that finding care for infants and toddlers is especially difficult. This age group is the most expensive to care for because of their extensive and individual needs. In 2023, the average annual cost of infant center-based care exceeded $14,000, compared with just more than $10,000 for a 4-year-old.⁷⁹ The United States is a global outlier in its lack of universal paid leave,⁸⁰ forcing many parents to resume work quickly after a child’s birth—including an estimated 1 in 4 women who return to work within two weeks after giving birth⁸¹—leaving them in need of care for weeks-old babies.⁸² This costly infant care need often occurs when families have lower earning potential, being early in their careers.⁸³

With births rising to nearly 3.6 million in 2024,⁸⁴ demand for infant-toddler child care is high. In some states, provider waitlists are so long that a child could reach a year-and-a-half old before a slot opens.⁸⁵ West Virginia parent Sam Kinnear, for example, told Mountain State Spotlight, “When [my daughter] started kindergarten, she was still on the waiting lists for two centers that I had put her on before she was born.”⁸⁶ Challenges accessing infant and toddler care have meaningful consequences for labor force participation, household income, and maternal and child health. This all occurs during a crucial window of human development.⁸⁷

The nation’s child care shortage ultimately boils down to a lack of public investment. Providers are persistently squeezed between what families can afford and the cost of providing high-quality care and early education. Small child-to-teacher ratios, reduced group sizes,⁸⁸ and qualified early educators are key components of a high-quality program—and are crucial for ensuring children’s health and safety.⁸⁹ Easing child care regulations—such as allowing teenagers to work as classroom teachers, increasing class sizes, and cutting training requirements—has in some cases drastically worsened child safety.⁹⁰ Reports include cases of neglect, verbal abuse, unsafe classroom conditions, and even staff lacking sex-offender-registry or background checks.⁹¹ Reduced regulations, in many cases, also increase providers’ operating expenses due to higher liability insurance costs.⁹² Moreover, higher ratios and classroom sizes are associated with increased burnout⁹³ among teachers, contributing to already rampant teacher turnover.⁹⁴ Increasingly, providers must reduce their capacity, even closing classrooms or programs, because they cannot cover operating costs or retain the early educators they need to offer safe and enriching services.⁹⁵

With thin profit margins, it is impossible for providers to compensate their workers adequately or offer the types of care families may want or need for their children. This includes programs serving children with disabilities or young infants, as well as programs operating outside traditional 9-to-5 workdays.⁹⁶ This is especially true for small family child care providers, who frequently work as both business owners and early educators serving children from their homes. A recent survey of home-based providers by the National Association for Family Child Care revealed that although “71% of respondents report[ed] working 50 or more hours per week, and 48% report[ed] working 60 or more hours per week,” 35 percent reported earning take-home pay of less than $10 per hour.⁹⁷

Research finds that, across care types, child care workers frequently earn poverty-level wages—less than 97 percent of all other paid professions.⁹⁸ Even accounting for educational attainment, early educators working exclusively with infants and toddlers are paid less than those working with other age groups. This penalty increases with teacher education level.⁹⁹ Infant-toddler teachers with a bachelor’s or graduate degree have a larger earnings gap relative to equally educated prekindergarten teachers ($7.24 per hour) compared with infant-toddler and prekindergarten educators with no degree ($0.74 per hour).¹⁰⁰ In 2023, the national median hourly wage of a child care teacher was $14.60¹⁰¹—a full $10 per hour less than the estimated livable wage needed to cover basic necessities, such as housing, health care, and food.¹⁰² Nearly half of early educators rely on some form of public assistance, such as Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).¹⁰³ When the median hourly wage for a retail worker exceeds $16 per hour,¹⁰⁴ and often comes with health care coverage and other workplace benefits even for part-time workers,¹⁰⁵ it’s no wonder the early education field struggles to recruit and retain qualified workers.

These challenges are felt nationwide. Christy Renjilian, the executive director of Community Connections for Children in York County, Pennsylvania, told CAP, “Families cannot afford to pay more than they already are. The sector is resting on the backs of low-wage workers, the early childhood education educators … [and] we find that many leave the sector to work at local gas stations and convenience stores. Anywhere else they go, they can make more money.”¹⁰⁶

There are lengthy waitlists in most states, yet the lack of public funding in the early education system and, consequently, the shortage of early educators, perpetuates the supply crisis and contributes to the ongoing prevalence of child care deserts across the country.¹⁰⁷ Anne Sutton Gray, a North Carolina-based child care provider, noted in an interview with CAP that while there were some larger chain options in her community, “You need to get on the waitlist before you get pregnant so that you can get a spot before your leave runs out … People here have the money for high-quality care, it’s just that it’s not available to them because the waitlists are too long … Some people get on the waitlist and never get off.”¹⁰⁸

Staffing shortages put a strain on providers, who do their utmost to find creative solutions to continue providing care; some have even stopped taking a salary to keep their doors open,¹⁰⁹ and others ration services. Renjilian recounted the experiences of an employee at a major financial institution: “[They and their] staff were blowing through their PTO [paid time off] because their ECE [early childhood education] program was doing rolling blackouts. The ECE provider didn’t have enough teachers but didn’t want to stop serving children, so on Tuesdays, you don’t bring your 2-year-old, on Thursdays, you don’t bring your preschooler, and so on.” As more providers struggle to recruit and retain the necessary staff to keep their programs operating at full capacity, options dwindle and scarcity grows. “This family could afford care,” continued Renjilian. “This was not an affordability issue. It was an access issue. Without ECE educators, children have nowhere to go, and families can’t work.”¹¹⁰

Without robust funding to support the child care workforce and address supply shortages, some states are forced to confront a rapid loss of slots and programs.¹¹¹ In North Carolina, for instance, 45 licensed programs closed during the last quarter of 2025, the state’s largest loss since June 2023.¹¹² These reductions in supply strain remaining providers and worsen working conditions for early educators. As funding sources continue to dwindle and state legislatures face difficult budget negotiations amid broad federal cuts to social support programs, more child care programs may be forced to close.

In 2025, licensed child care deserts disproportionately affected majority-Hispanic/Latino communities, which experienced the highest child care desert rate at an average of 52.2 percent—significantly above the national average of 45.9 percent. Majority-Black, non-Hispanic communities had a lower average desert rate of 34.6 percent. However, it should be noted that this disparity is strongly influenced by geographic location. Urban majority-Black, non-Hispanic areas have the lowest desert rate of any group, likely due to a robust presence of Head Start and subsidized child care infrastructure in urban centers. This advantage largely disappears in rural majority-Black, non-Hispanic communities, suggesting that care infrastructure for these communities is concentrated in urban areas and largely absent in rural ones. By contrast, the high Hispanic/Latino desert rate indicates that the licensed child care supply shortfall for Hispanic/Latino communities is systemic and more pervasive, regardless of geography.

These findings mirror patterns from 2018, when Hispanic/Latino communities were disproportionately represented in licensed child care deserts. At the time, nearly 60 percent of Hispanic/Latino communities lived in child care deserts, compared with an estimated 50 percent of white, non-Hispanic and 44 percent of Black, non-Hispanic communities.¹¹³ Hispanic/Latino households tend to have high parental employment rates but low household incomes, making child care access necessary but frequently unaffordable.¹¹⁴ Working parents who are Hispanic/Latino or Black, non-Hispanic are more likely to have low incomes than working white parents, even with similar levels of employment, due to long-standing disparities in earnings and wealth.¹¹⁵ Consequently, these groups likely face a disproportionate burden from child care affordability issues, as well as problems accessing a licensed slot.

As of 2024, approximately one-quarter of Americans lived in rural areas¹²⁰—ranging from just 4 percent of the population in Massachusetts to nearly 81 percent of the population in Vermont. Child care access is especially challenging for families in rural communities.¹²¹ Those living in rural communities typically spend larger shares of their income on child care and commute farther to their child care provider than families living in urban areas.¹²²

Rural communities also experience greater financial strain; the overall rate of poverty is higher in rural areas than in metropolitan areas,¹²³ with the South having the highest poverty rate gap. Nationally, 22 percent of rural children live in poverty,¹²⁴ compared with 16 percent of children living in metropolitan communities. In addition, a higher percentage of households in rural communities rely on public assistance: Nearly 30 percent of children in rural households received public assistance in the past year, compared with just under one-quarter of metropolitan households. This includes support through SNAP, cash assistance, and Supplemental Security Income.¹²⁵

In polls of rural households, families report having difficulty finding work (19 percent), “cutting back on other necessities” to pay for child care (21 percent), and even postponing having children because of the lack of accessible and affordable options (20 percent).¹²⁶ An estimated 80 percent of rural families view the child care sector as “a major problem” or “in a state of crisis” and “support funding for child care and early learning programs” (69 percent), including for Head Start (78 percent).¹²⁷ According to the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, the national child care gap among children under age 5 from working families is an estimated 28 percent. This gap is even more pronounced in rural areas, where an estimated 32 percent of children need but cannot access care.¹²⁸

In 2025, 70 percent of families in remote rural areas lived in a child care desert, with an average of 65.6 percent across all rural areas. These overall rates have not changed significantly since 2018, when nearly two-thirds of rural families were affected, despite a slight decrease in the overall prevalence of licensed child care deserts nationwide.¹²⁹ However, among families in less populated areas, care seems to have become increasingly difficult to obtain. This suggests that rural communities continue to face the least investment and necessary infrastructure to access care.

Head Start and Early Head Start—its companion program supporting infants, toddlers, and pregnant parents—play a crucial role in ensuring low-income communities have access to high-quality early education services, as well as comprehensive health and social services.¹³⁰

In 2025, Head Start supply was so scarce nationwide that nearly every community met the threshold for a child care desert. Using the three-to-one benchmark among children under age 6 who qualify based on federal poverty status, Head Start deserts are nearly universal. Rural areas are slightly better off (96.7 percent) than urban ones (99.7 percent), possibly because rural-funded slots have been prioritized in federal spending.

The median rural family has no Head Start access, suggesting that supply is concentrated, not broadly distributed, across rural communities. In other words, while rural communities overall receive a higher share of federally funded slots due to the higher costs associated with serving harder-to-reach populations, high levels of need remain.¹³¹ This means that urban areas have limited, but more evenly distributed, supply for most eligible children, while most rural families have no access and existing programs may have more available slots or may be located in specific communities to meet demand.

In 2019, family child care programs accounted for a significant share of child care options in rural areas, and Head Start played a unique role in ensuring access to licensed care.¹³² In fact, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 32 percent of rural child care slots were in Head Start programs, compared with 13 percent in metropolitan areas.¹³³ In 2024, an estimated 46 percent of all funded Head Start slots were in rural congressional districts, compared with 32 percent in suburban districts and 22 percent in urban districts. This filled a critical licensed child care supply gap in rural communities.¹³⁴

Overall, families living in rural communities are more likely to live in a child care desert and would disproportionately suffer from cuts to or closures of Head Start programs.¹³⁵ According to the 2025 Buffett Early Childhood Institute analysis, a loss of Head Start programs could push that rural gap to nearly 50 percent—an increase of 213,000 children without access to child care. In urban communities, that gap could widen by almost 15 percent with a loss of Head Start programs, amounting to more than 441,000 additional children without access to care.¹³⁶

Combined with the findings above, Head Start access is significantly limited and is disproportionately distributed across rural communities. Nevertheless, it plays an important role as perhaps one of the few, or even the only, licensed options for those communities. Program losses would be devastating for low-income families who qualify for, and depend on, Head Start services. These services include high-quality early learning and wraparound family support such as job supports, mental health consultations, and connections to pediatric care.

In recent years, state leaders have made meaningful progress toward addressing the child care crisis, yet these efforts have too often focused on isolated aspects of the problem—reducing costs for families,¹⁴⁴ expanding access to state-funded preschool programs,¹⁴⁵ or broadening eligibility for child care subsidies¹⁴⁶—without tackling the persistent and underlying challenge of inadequate supply. Without intentional policy intervention to expand the supply of care specifically, efforts to improve affordability risk increasing demand without the infrastructure to meet it. To address this, both state and federal policymakers should sequence investments that simultaneously expand supply and support quality improvement, ensuring the child care system can absorb the increased demand that comes with increased affordability:

• Federal lawmakers should consider maintaining or adopting prospective payment structures for subsidy-accepting providers¹⁴⁷ and implementing cost modeling methods that more accurately reflect the true cost of care¹⁴⁸—enabling reimbursement rates that are financially viable for providers and mirror the payment structure of private-paying families.
• Federal lawmakers should also consider the strategic use of grants and contracts to expand access to care types that the market chronically underproduces due to high costs. These include infant and toddler care, care for children with disabilities, and care during nontraditional hours for emergency service and shift workers.¹⁴⁹
• Finally, establishing and expanding facilities grant programs at the federal and state levels would help address critical infrastructure gaps—enabling providers to update building spaces, address health and safety concerns, repair and upgrade structures, and ensure that learning environments are developmentally appropriate for the children they serve.

In the absence of robust federal public investment, states should also consider methods for establishing sustained, dedicated funding streams to scale access and invest in quality. New Mexico’s recent passage of S.B. 241 offers a compelling model:¹⁵⁰ The legislation authorizes annual draws from the state’s $11 billion early childhood education trust fund, capped at $700 million per year, to preserve the fund’s long-term health, creating a durable and protected revenue source for universal child care rather than relying on year-to-year appropriations. Critically, the bill ties child care facilities’ participation to the state’s existing wage and career ladder for early childhood workers,¹⁵¹ ensuring that funding expansion is paired with meaningful workforce investment. Vermont, which like most states lacks a permanent land grant fund to support its early education financing, instead passed Act 76, which initiated a $125 million annual investment into the state’s child care system and is funded by a 0.44 percent payroll tax, known as the Child Care Contribution.¹⁵²

The child care workforce crisis is both a supply and a quality problem, and it cannot be separated from the chronic undercompensation that has long characterized the profession. Early educators are among the lowest-paid professions, with no early childhood educator earning a living wage in any state.¹⁵⁴ The median hourly pay for a child care worker in the United States is $15.41.¹⁵⁵ Nearly one-third of family child care providers earn between $7 and $10 per hour, with half earning below $15 per hour,¹⁵⁶ a rate that is well below what it costs to live in most communities in the United States. For example, in West Virginia,¹⁵⁷ where the living wage for a single adult is roughly $20 per hour, the median hourly wage for a child care worker is just $11.48.¹⁵⁸ In addition, child care providers and educators too often lack basic workplace benefits such as health insurance, paid time off, and retirement savings, which are essential to one’s well-being and to sustaining the workforce.

State and federal policymakers should:

• Invest in creating new, durable pathways into the profession, including stackable credentials, apprenticeship models, and earn-while-you-learn programs.
• Establish grant programs that support early educators’ access to credentialing and postsecondary education in the field.
• Pair those investments with meaningful compensation floors and workplace benefits that enable early educators to earn competitive wages and sustain their families, such that they can remain in the early education workforce long term.
• Leverage efforts within the early childhood sector to unionize, supporting worker protections secured through collective bargaining.

Several states have demonstrated what is possible:

• Illinois invested $90 million in Smart Start Workforce Grants, providing quarterly payments to compensate early educators at or above minimum established wages.¹⁵⁹
• Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) proposed a new $25 million recurring investment for early childhood workforce recruitment and retention payments in his FY 2025–2026 budget proposal.¹⁶⁰
• Arkansas passed legislation making all early childhood educators eligible to participate in the state teacher retirement system.¹⁶¹

As policymakers look for solutions to the child care crisis, some proposals, such as those in Idaho and Kansas,¹⁶² will inevitably call for deregulatory actions,¹⁶³ including reducing educator qualifications, lowering standards for staff-to-child ratios, or increasing group sizes. However, these strategies undermine the stability of child care, contributing to higher staff turnover and more stressed caregivers, and can even endanger the health and safety of children. Instead, state leaders should review their existing licensing standards to expand policies that ease burdens on providers and improve access—without endangering child health and safety.

Improving the nation’s child care system first and foremost requires more robust public investment, but it also demands a clearer, more accurate picture of what care families need and where gaps in supply exist. Child care deserts are a useful tool for showcasing child care supply and access. However, because available data are specific to licensed or registered providers and are very difficult, costly, and time consuming to collect, they provide a limited view of the totality of the child care market. Currently, most states lack the granular, real-time data necessary to understand the true contours of local child care markets. And while many states have moved to consolidate their early childhood programs into a more streamlined governance structure,¹⁶⁴ data sharing across state agencies, even those serving the same population, is sometimes slow or burdensome.

• State and federal policymakers should make investments in robust, standardized data collection systems that show the number and availability of licensed and license-exempt slots (as opposed to just authorized capacity).
• Relatedly, state and federal policymakers should track who child care slots serve. Doing so would help states identify shortages in infant and toddler care; gaps among providers who accept child care subsidies; unmet demand among families with nonstandard work hours; or inadequate support for children with disabilities, children of immigrants, or English-language learners.
• State policymakers should consolidate their early childhood programs under an agency or department structured around child care and early learning to make it easier to share data and resources across programs serving families with young children, including child care provider licensing, subsidy enrollment and administration, Head Start-child care coordination offices, and child care quality and oversight.
• State policymakers should consider expanding their means of data collection through improved community communication and coordination—both to gain better insights into families’ and providers’ specific needs and to ensure that families can access the programs and services for which they are eligible.
• To better coordinate across state and federal early childhood programs, federal lawmakers should consider establishing a federal data collection system, appropriating the necessary funding to support state data collection and reporting efforts.

Collecting accurate, locally specific data is the essential first step toward designing interventions that are responsive to the full diversity of families who rely on the child care sector. Communities cannot solve a problem they cannot see, and families cannot access a system they cannot navigate.

As of 2021, the year for which the most recent data are available, the United States is a global outlier in terms of the share of public resources it invests in families, including through child-related cash transfers to families with children, public spending on services for families, and financial support for families provided through the tax system.¹⁶⁵ This is not a gap that can be explained away by national wealth or competing priorities; it is a policy choice, and it is one the country can reverse. The earliest years of a child’s life represent a prime opportunity to set them up for better health, educational outcomes, financial stability, and well-being in adulthood, and high-quality early care and education¹⁶⁶ during this window produces lasting benefits for children and meaningful returns for society.¹⁶⁷

Forcing families to wait until kindergarten to access free and public education is contrary both to what is understood about child brain development and the economic realities that young families face. Ultimately, the United States should move toward a universal, free model of care that allows families to access high-quality providers through a mixed-delivery system that meets their individual needs and preferences.

• State and federal policymakers should increase investments in a mixed-delivery system that funds and supports a diverse range of high-quality providers, including community-based centers, family child care homes, Head Start programs, and faith-based providers.
• Lawmakers should increase federal and state appropriations for child care assistance, including funding for CCDBG and Head Start, to reduce family cost burdens and expand access to high-quality care.
• State and federal policymakers should strengthen and make permanently refundable tax credits—including the child tax credit¹⁶⁸ and the child and dependent care tax credit¹⁶⁹—to ensure families at all income levels receive meaningful financial relief.
• Federal lawmakers should incentivize state-level innovation through federal matching funds and planning grants that support states in developing universal birth-to-5 care infrastructure, with quality standards built in from the start.

In the long term, the United States must move deliberately toward a universal, publicly funded early care and education system that meets families where they are—one built on a high-quality mixed-delivery model that respects families’ individual needs, preferences, cultural contexts, and work realities and that treats early childhood not as a private burden but as a shared public investment from which the whole country benefits.

Child care is an investment not only in children’s early education and development but also in the broader economy. High-quality early learning puts children on a trajectory for greater educational attainment, higher adult earnings, and better health outcomes. It also ensures parents can work or attend school and participate in their local economies.

Unfortunately, the inadequate supply of care across the country, particularly in rural communities, hampers families’ options. Moreover, long-standing underinvestment in the child care system means it yields fewer returns than it could. New analyses of licensed child care reveal that eight years after the publication of CAP’s initial child care deserts estimate, nearly half of families nationwide still struggle to access the care they want for their children, with a rural penalty leaving families in less populated areas with even fewer options. Simply put, the child care market does not work for children, educators, or parents and limits the country’s economic potential. Lawmakers must intervene in this failing market and invest the funding necessary to increase supply, retain a qualified workforce, and address the high costs that families face.

The authors would like to thank Aaron Sojourner, Won F. Lee, Gabrielle Pepin, Katharine Sadowski, and Elizabeth Davis for their data collection, analysis, and partnership on the development of this project. The authors would also like to thank Bill Rapp, Shar Ghavami, and Anh Nguyen for their expert development of the accompanying interactive web map; Chandler Hall for his support on both analyses and fact-checking; Kennedy Andara, Paige Shoemaker DeMio, Madison Weiss, and Evan Yi for their thorough fact-checking; Jared Bass for his feedback and insight; and the storytellers who lent their experiences to this report.

These updated licensed child care desert resources are dedicated to the memory of Rasheed Malik, the late senior director of the Center for American Progress’ Early Childhood Policy team. A tireless champion for the nation’s children and families, Malik dedicated his career to improving access to and quality in early education, setting children on a path for a more promising and prosperous future. His pioneering work in spearheading CAP’s initial child care deserts research forms the foundation of these current resources and served as the basis for transformative legislative proposals aimed at establishing an equitable, universal early learning system for all children and the people who care for them. He is dearly missed.