It's Official: Childcare Is Too Expensive For Most Families In The U.S.

The cost of living is way expensive in the Bay Area but apparently, child car is pretty much unaffordable in ALL 50 states!

Child Care Aware® of America released its 12th annual The US and the High Cost of Child Care: A Review of Prices and Proposed Solutions for a Broken System 

Unsurprisingly, it's harder for single parents, the study found that the cost of center-based care for infants exceeds the single parent's average income by 27%!

Massachusets had the least affordable costs for raising a toddler at care centers while California was named the least affordable state for families with an infant. Check out some more of the report highlights here. 

• In every state, the average cost of center-based infant care is more than 27 percent of median income for single parents, an increase of three percentage points from 2016.
• Even for families of three earning double the federal poverty threshold (or $40,320), childcare is a significant burden. Center-based infant care ranges from almost 13 percent of income for a low-income family in Mississippi to nearly 50 percent in Massachusetts.
• In our analysis of a national average cost of child care, we found that couples across the country pay more than 10 percent of their household income, for a year of childcare for one child—that’s nearly $9,000 a year, no matter how you calculate it.
  • Married couples pay 11 percent of their income toward child care. Single parents pay 37 percent of their income.
• The lifetime cost of diapers is around $2,000 about the same as a month of infant center-based child care costs in Massachusetts and D.C., the most expensive places in the U.S. to pay for infant center-based child care (Massachusetts: $1,677/month, D.C. $1,924/month).
• In 2017, the cost of center-based child care for an infant exceeded the costs of food and transportation combined in all regions of the country (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West).
• Child care workers in every state pay half their salary to cover the childcare cost for two children.

via Child Care Aware of America

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