Many families have been effectively cutting a second rent check to send their kids to day care, according to new data from the Department of Labor.
It’s no secret that child care expenses have put a huge squeeze on households across the U.S., but the federal numbers show just how steep those costs became from one county to the next during the worst inflation in 40 years. On average, families spent anywhere from $6,552 to as much as $15,600 on full-day care per child in 2022, the latest year with available data.
That upper range is a few hundred dollars more than that year’s median annual rent, the agency noted. While incomes also range widely throughout the country, households typically funnel between about 9% and 16% of their annual income on day care per child.
These costs are just untenable for an awful lot of families.
Gretchen Livingston, U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau
“These costs are just untenable for an awful lot of families,” said Gretchen Livingston, the branch chief for quantitative research at the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, which conducted the study.
The findings offer a snapshot of one of the biggest financial pressures Americans faced in the lead-up to the 2024 election, in which a driving factor was voters’ price-fatigue hangover that even a sturdy economy can’t seem to cure. But while child care costs help explain Americans’ economic dissatisfaction, an NBC News analysis of the Labor Department and election result data also hints at the limits of the issue politically.
President-elect Donald Trump expanded his vote share since 2020 in nearly 90% of counties nationwide, with the median vote shift among counties coming in at 3.2 percentage points, NBC News found. The most forbidding child care markets in 2022 voted two years later for Trump by higher margins than the nation overall, but so did many of the areas where child care was more affordable.
