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To see an updated version of this report, covering all 50 states, please click here.

This report contains a correction.

For working parents with young children, the task of finding child care can be daunting. Across the country, parents report frustration when trying to find affordable, high-quality child care. While the cost of child care is certainly a barrier to child care access, less understood are the roles of supply and location. This report examines the location of child care centers across eight states, comprising 20 percent of the U.S. population younger than the age of 5, and uncovers another cause driving the child care crisis: 42 percent of children under 5 years of age live in child care deserts.

The term “child care desert” is not currently part of the American lexicon. However, lack of child care supply is a serious national problem that disproportionately impacts rural areas. The Center for American Progress is introducing a working definition of child care deserts, which borrows its terminology from the frequently studied problem of food deserts—what the government defines as communities in which residents do not live in close proximity to affordable and healthy food retailers.¹ For the purposes of this study, a child care desert is defined as a ZIP code with at least 30 children under the age of 5 and either no child care centers or so few centers that there are more than three times as many children under age 5 as there are spaces in centers. (see Figure 1)

In order to assess how location might affect a family’s child care options, this report explores the geographic characteristics of center-based early care and education programs, including child care centers, Head Start, and public and private preschool programs. This study uses state administrative data and ZIP code-level census estimates to analyze differences in the presence and cumulative capacity of child care centers across eight states: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.² This subset of states results from the fact that while the authors requested data from most states, many agencies did not respond or chose not to share administrative data.³ However, these eight states are generally illustrative of the state of child care across the country. See Appendix B for more detail.

When the working definition of a child care desert is applied to the data gathered from these eight states, the scope of the child care crisis comes into focus: 48 percent of the nearly 7,000 ZIP codes in these states are child care deserts. In some states, a substantial majority of the population lives in child care deserts, with nearly two-thirds of Minnesota ZIP codes and 60 percent of Illinois ZIP codes fitting the definition.⁴ Across the eight states, more than 27 million people live in child care deserts, including 1.8 million children under the age of 5.⁵

The vast majority of American families need high-quality child care and early education programs to support the development of young children, as well as the economic well-being of families. Yet high-quality child care is out of reach for many families, as child care is increasingly consuming more of the family budget. At nearly $18,000 per year, the average cost of center-based care for an infant and a preschooler amounts to 29 percent of the median family income.⁶ Analysis by the U.S. Bureau of the Census shows that the average weekly cost of child care for families with employed mothers is about 30 percent higher than it was 15 years ago.⁷

While the cost of child care is well-documented, affordability is only one factor that contributes to access to high-quality child care. For many parents, especially low-income parents, location is a major consideration in choosing child care and a limiting factor for many families.⁸ Recent economic research has found that children are more likely to attend centers close to home when such centers are available.⁹ Of course, geographic proximity to a child care center does not always mean that families are able to enroll. Factors such as cost, child care subsidies, work schedules, waiting lists, and many others impact access to child care. However, location is an important consideration for many families, and more information about families’ proximity to child care programs can inform efforts to increase access to high-quality early childhood programs.

The results of this study show that a majority of rural ZIP codes are child care deserts, meaning that 55 percent of children under the age of 5 in rural areas live in child care deserts. In terms of total population, there are many more children under age 5 living in suburban child care deserts: Nearly 1 million young children in suburban areas across the eight states live in child care deserts. By and large, about one-third of urban neighborhoods are child care deserts, with one major exception. This study finds that in Chicago, 5 out of 6 children under the age of 5 live in child care deserts—more than 150,000 children—which is nearly half of the urban child care desert population across all eight states.¹⁰

Child care deserts differ from areas with greater child care supply in several interesting ways. While child care deserts have roughly the same rates of poverty as nondeserts, the labor force participation rate for mothers with children under the age of 6 is about 1.1 percentage points lower in child care deserts. Child care desert communities tend to have higher proportions of Hispanic residents and lower proportions of African American residents. As one might expect, child care deserts average only 1.5 child care centers, whereas other ZIP codes comprise an average of 4.9 centers.¹¹

This study also examines the presence of center-based programs rated by a state’s quality rating and improvement system, or QRIS. While many systems are still under development, the data show that fewer than half of all centers participated in their state’s QRIS, and only about 16 percent of all centers across the eight states were in the top tiers of quality.¹²

Together, these findings show the child care marketplace in a state of crisis. In many parts of this country, working families face a deep shortage of child care options, which are often of inconsistent quality and at a financial cost that is out of reach. The Center for American Progress has proposed a High-Quality Child Care Tax Credit that would make high-quality care much more affordable for low-income and middle-class families. However, the ubiquity of these child care deserts means that it is crucial that the nation also invests substantially greater public resources in child care infrastructure and supply.

Over the past few decades, the dramatic increase in maternal labor force participation and dual-earner families has radically changed where and with whom young children spend much of their time. In 1970, 30 percent of mothers with a child under age 6 were employed; this number had grown to 64 percent by 2015.¹³ At the same time, the use of nonparental child care has become the norm. In 2011, more than 60 percent of children under age 5 regularly attended one or more nonparental child care arrangements. One-quarter of children under the age of 5 with employed mothers regularly attended center-based early childhood programs—including child care centers, preschools, and Head Start—while other children were cared for in their homes or caregivers’ homes by relatives, by neighbors, or in family child care.¹⁴

The first years of life are a critical period for child development. As research across neuroscience, developmental psychology, and economics demonstrates, early social-emotional, physical, and cognitive skills beget later skill acquisition, setting the groundwork for success in school and the workplace.¹⁵ However, an analysis of nationally representative data shows that 65 percent of child care centers do not serve children age 1 or younger and that 44 percent do not serve children under age 3 at all.¹⁶ Consequently, child care centers only have the capacity to serve 10 percent of all children under age 1 and 25 percent of all children under age 3.¹⁷ High-quality child care during this critical period can support children’s physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development.¹⁸ Attending a high-quality early childhood program such as preschool or Head Start is particularly important for children in poverty or from other disadvantaged backgrounds and can help reduce the large income-based disparities in achievement and development.¹⁹

In 2014, 65 percent of children under age 6 in the United States lived in families in which all parents were in the labor force,  requiring high-quality, accessible, and affordable child care to support both these children’s development and their parents’ employment.²⁰ Child care, however—particularly high-quality center care—is expensive and hard to find. In 2014, the average cost of full-time infant care ranged from $4,822 to $17,062 per year—between 7 percent and 15 percent of median income for a married-couple household and between 24 percent and 63 percent of median income for a single-mother household.²¹ The cost of center-based child care for 4-year-olds is also sizeable—between $3,972 and $10,030 per year.²²

In recent years, researchers have examined the variety of factors that influence how families make child care choices. While some aspects of child care decisions can be attributed to characteristics of the parent or child, studies have found that families often face multiple constraints such as location, work schedules, and a lack of information.²³ Low-wage workers in particular regularly cope with shifting schedules and nontraditional hours.²⁴ This points to one of the obvious challenges for low-income families: the scarcity of child care centers with nontraditional hours.

All families need developmentally supportive child care in the communities in which they live and work. But according to a recent study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, higher-income areas are geographically associated with a higher availability of center-based child care, especially in the case of infant and toddler care.²⁵ For struggling communities, a local shortage of quality center-based care can aggravate the difficulties that low-income working families already endure.

Recent technological advancements have resulted in the development of innovative location-based techniques for economic analysis. Using precise geo-referenced data, new research has shown a significant relationship between distance from child care and attendance.²⁶ Employing similar methods, economists have discovered that proximity to child care options contributes to women’s participation in the workforce.²⁷ But geographic availability, on its own, does not equal access. A number of issues play a role in determining access to child care, including cost, work schedules, cultural or linguistic factors, and availability of slots. While this report is primarily concerned with the geographic availability of child care centers, the broader question of access requires nuanced further study.

Even if parents do have access to child care, high-quality programs are out of reach for many families. The most recent available data show that only 13 percent of 2-year-olds attending child care were in settings rated as high quality.²⁸ Prior research has found that high-poverty communities and rural areas lack access to center care and that children from low-income families are less likely to attend high-quality child care.²⁹ Low-income children are also less likely to attend child care centers, as compared with other types of nonparental care.³⁰ While there is considerable variability in quality within each type of care, centers tend to average higher quality ratings, and center care attendance is associated with improved cognitive and language outcomes when compared with exclusive parental or home-based care.³¹ While home-based child care is a critical part of the early childhood landscape, families need a range of child care options, and since child care centers tend to offer higher-quality care, they are a major part of the supply equation and should be available to families that want or need this type of care.

This study examined the presence, capacity, and quality ratings of child care centers across eight states: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. Forty-eight percent of the ZIP codes across the eight states are child care deserts. As shown in Figure 2, the proportion of ZIP codes that qualify as child care deserts varies by state, from 32 percent in Georgia to 65 percent in Minnesota.³⁴

In total, there were 22,928 child care centers in the eight states’ administrative databases.³⁵ However, these states have more than 4.3 million children under the age of 5, meaning that there is a deep undersupply of child care centers, particularly those in the top tiers of quality.³⁶ Only 16 percent of the child care centers in these eight states were in the top tier of quality, with a majority of those centers located in North Carolina. Outside of North Carolina—one of the earliest states to develop and implement a quality rating and improvement system—only 8 percent of centers were in the top tiers of their state’s quality rating system.³⁷

In just these eight states, more than 27 million people live in child care deserts. Table 1 reports estimates of the total population and the population under age 5 in each state’s child care deserts. Remarkably, nearly half of all the young children living in child care deserts are located in just two states: Illinois and Minnesota.³⁸ However, even in the states that have the fewest child care deserts, about 1 in 4 residents lives in an undersupplied child care market. Findings for each state are presented in detail in Appendix A.

What is in a ZIP code?

ZIP codes vary enormously by population, land area, density, demographics, and poverty. Since ZIP codes are a somewhat unfamiliar geographic unit, Table 2 presents summary statistics for the typical ZIP code from these eight states. Among the states in this study, the median population of a ZIP code is about 3,250 residents, with 175 being under the age of 5. The median size of these ZIP codes is 35 square miles, which is about 1 ½ times the size of Manhattan. However, some urban ZIP codes consist of only a few city blocks, and certain rural ZIP codes in Colorado cover more than 1,000 square miles, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island. In total, about 65 percent of all ZIP codes are rural, with 29 percent being suburban and 6 percent being urban.

This report analyzes differences in the prevalence of child care deserts across three dimensions: geographic, economic, and demographic. The geographic analysis is based on ZIP codes that are assigned as rural, suburban, or urban. The economic analysis uses census-estimated ZIP code poverty rates to categorize each community as displaying low, moderate, or high poverty. The demographic analysis uses racial and ethnic demographics at the ZIP code level to determine disparate proximity to child care centers based on race and ethnicity. These divisions serve to demonstrate the local characteristics that are often correlated with insufficient child care capacity.

Geographic analysis: Deserts by rural, suburban, and urban ZIP codes

Rural ZIP codes

The most severe shortage of child care centers is in America’s rural communities. Rural areas are more likely to be child care deserts than not, with 54 percent of rural ZIP codes qualifying under the definition. About two-thirds of rural child care deserts have no child care centers at all, despite that fact that the median rural ZIP code is home to about 100 young children. In fact, rural child care deserts average about the same number of children under the age of 5 as nondeserts. Thus, population size does not appear to explain the lack of centers in rural child care deserts. The proportion of rural ZIP codes that qualify as child care deserts varies by state, with Illinois, Ohio, and Minnesota having the highest rate of rural deserts, as seen in Figure 3.

About 3 out of 4 child care deserts are rural, but there are many more rural ZIP codes overall than suburban and urban ZIP codes. The median rural ZIP code is home to about 2,000 people—about 100 of them children under the age of 5—with zero child care centers. By contrast, the median number of centers in a suburban ZIP code is five, while the median number in an urban ZIP code is eight. Table 3 reports summary statistics for the median rural, suburban, and urban ZIP code.

Suburban ZIP codes

The majority of Americans live in suburban ZIP codes. While rural areas are more likely to meet the definition of child care deserts, the majority of the young children in this study are found in suburban ZIP codes. The authors designate ZIP codes as suburban based on the density of housing, meaning that some low-density areas of large cities are viewed as suburban. Although only 36 percent of suburban children under the age of 5 live in child care deserts, that totals nearly 1 million suburban children. Figure 4 shows both the share of children under age 5 in deserts, as well as the total number of children in each type of ZIP code. For more information on the methodology used to assign ZIP codes as suburban, urban, or rural, see Appendix B.

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