How the child care price figures are made

What the database is

The National Database of Childcare Prices is published by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, which describes it as the most comprehensive federal source of childcare prices at the county level. It was built for the Bureau by a contractor, ICF. It is one file of county rows, one per county and study year, for 2008 through 2022.

The dataset is linked at the Women’s Bureau’s page. This site is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Labor and is not endorsed by it. The Department’s Women’s Bureau is the publisher of the data.

Where the prices come from

States run market rate surveys to set child care subsidy rates. The contractor extracted prices from the states’ reports, standardized them to a weekly, full-time price and filled gaps by imputation. A price here is therefore what a surveyed provider charges, as a state’s survey reported it. It is not what any family paid, and it is not a figure the Department measured itself.

The file has two care types, center-based care and family child care homes, and no price for informal, in-home or nanny care. The age groups are infant, toddler, preschool and school age, with the median and the 75th percentile for each.

What an empty cell means

The publisher marks a missing price with an empty cell and does not say why. A masked cell, an unsurveyed county, an unsurveyed age group and a state with no survey look the same in the file. This site shows every empty cell as “not published” and never says why; it does not fill a gap, estimate a county or carry a price forward to a later year.

Counties, zones and years

A price is based on the survey result for the county or the rate zone or cluster the county is assigned to, so a county page can show a zone’s or a state’s figure, and says so. The study year is the year the survey collected its data; years between surveys are the publisher’s interpolation, and a trend across years is partly interpolated. Prices are in the dollars of each study year, not adjusted for inflation. The Technical Report advises caution with state-level medians, so this hub ranks counties and does not rank states.

Why there is no state figure

The Technical Report says that the state-level metrics, “especially the median prices for childcare, should be used with significant caution.”

So the state pages print no state median and no state rank. They rank counties, and count the counties that publish a price and those that do not. The Technical Report is the publisher’s own account of the survey and the standardization.

A national median is shown only where at least 11 counties publish a price for that series, and the count it is over is printed beside it.

What this hub does not do

It does not say what a family pays or what child care should cost, call a county affordable or unaffordable, print a composite score, or say why a price is high or has changed. The data show a price in a county and a year; they do not show a cause.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, National Database of Childcare Prices (2008-2022 data file)

What this data cannot show

• A price in this database is what a surveyed provider charges, as a state’s market rate survey reported it, and is not what any family paid.
• A county with no published price is listed as not published, and no price is filled in, estimated or carried forward.
• State medians are not published here: the Women’s Bureau cautions against medians built from county medians.

Sources

• National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP), county file, 2008 to 2022 — U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau · Conditional. The Department’s site-wide schedule says federal materials are generally public domain, and that they may not be used in a manner that implies affiliation or endorsement by DOL. Ruled November 3, 2026: figures printed with attribution, no contractor prose reproduced, no implied DOL affiliation or endorsement. · Updated: Infrequent; the county file covers 2008 to 2022 and no later release was found