Child care was as expensive as rent for many families at the peak of inflation, according to figures released by the U.S. Labor Department.
That’s according to the newly updated National Database of Childcare Prices on Nov. 19.
In 2022, U.S. families spent between 8.9 percent and 16 percent of their median income on full-day care for one child, with annual prices ranging from $6,552 to $15,600, the report found.
To put the latest figures in perspective, on average the cost of a year’s worth of rent was $15,216 in 2022.
The numbers for part-time daycare for school-aged children were as costly. The price for before and after-school care made up 8.1 percent to 9.4 percent of median family income in 2022. That equates to between $5,943 to $9,211 for one child.
The report was sponsored by the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau.
“The fact that the median cost of center-based infant care is more than the median cost of rent should be of urgent concern,” Women’s Bureau Director Wendy Chun-Hoon said in a statement. “Families are struggling and women are disproportionately impacted. We know interventions like the American Rescue Plan have helped, but more federal investments are needed to ensure child care is accessible and affordable for all.”
The costs of child care emerged as a key topic in the 2024 presidential race.
On the campaign trail, then GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed to alleviate child care costs and said during a town hall with an all-female audience that he would do more “readjusting” in his second term.
Trump noted the child tax law he signed in 2017, with the help of his daughter Ivanka, which doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 per child for millions of Americans.
His running mate, now Vice President-elect JD Vance, proposed raising the child tax credit to $5,000 from the current $2,000 during an interview on CBS News.
President Joe Biden, in 2021, introduced the American Rescue Plan (ARP) which was an emergency legislative package aimed to address struggling families following the coronavirus pandemic. The ARP provided $24 billion in child care stabilization funding for child care providers and $15 billion in flexible funding for states to make child care more affordable.
The Labor Department said in a statement that child care in 2022 remained costly, but the ARP helped to alleviate the burden of child care costs for many families.
“While the [National Database of Childcare Prices] data clearly indicate that child care remained prohibitively expensive for many in 2022, experts estimate that prices would have been even higher were it not for the ARP. They report that prices would have otherwise increased by 10 percent between June 2021 and June 2023,” the Labor Department stated.
The report also acknowledged that child care prices can vary dramatically based on the age of the child and geographic location.
Lower-income families are more impacted by child care costs. According to a Pew Research survey conducted in 2022, 38 percent of low-income parents said that there were times when they couldn’t afford to pay for it.