Child care is vital for families to live healthy and happy lives. Increasingly, however, the high cost of child care means that families are forgoing obtaining care and are instead taking time away from working and earning to manage their caregiving responsibilities.
Nowhere is this cost burden more daunting than in New York City. A year of care for an infant in New York costs $16,848 on average for family-based care and about $20,978 a year for center-based care. Historically, child care prices in the city are on average higher than prices in other counties throughout the state, pricing many parents out of care and, increasingly, out of the city itself. That is why universal child care became a centerpiece of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, as economic infrastructure: a way to let parents work, help employers retain workers, keep families from leaving the city, and reduce household debt.
Thankfully, the city is not facing this challenge alone. New York State has long treated care as public infrastructure worth investing in. It was among the first states to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, it has built one of the country’s most ambitious early childhood systems, and it consistently ranks among the top states nationally for care policy. Furthering the state’s commitment to care, Governor Kathy Hochul has teamed up with Mayor Mamdani in proposing 2-Care, which would provide free child care for two-year-olds in New York City, alongside a longstanding promise to deliver universal 3–K.
The expansion of child care in New York City will mean engaging with and expanding a workforce that typically has been under-resourced. The child care workforce is overwhelmingly female, disproportionately immigrant and women of color, groups that have been historically disenfranchised. Concerningly, while the city’s (and state’s) expansion plans are sorely needed, they are running ahead of their ability to staff these programs. New Yorkers’ access to child care and compensation for the city’s child care workers are not two problems to solve in sequence, they must be solved in tandem.
The Challenge of Ramping Up Child Care Staffing
The city’s own data show the scale of the staffing challenge. A report from the Day Care Council of New York, authored by the now executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care, Emmy Liss, estimates that fully implementing universal child care would require roughly 68,000 workers. As of December 2025, the city has approximately 40,000 child care workers. This gap will be hard to close in a workforce that chronically faces high turnover, given the low wages in the field. An entry-level child care worker in the city earns a median of about $34,000 a year, or about $17 an hour, rising to roughly $43,000 with experience, or about $21.50 an hour—just over half of the mayor’s $35 an hour cost-of-living benchmark for a single adult. Family child care providers, who run programs out of their homes and are overwhelmingly women of color, fare worse still. The Center for New York City Affairs found their median take-home pay in the city is about $6.01 an hour.
FIGURE 1
The human cost of the market-rate approach is visible in the experiences of providers like Andrea Peña, who runs a licensed family child care program out of her Bronx home. Her program is fully enrolled, mostly with children whose care is paid through state vouchers set at $350 to $400 a week, yet after mortgage, utilities, insurance, and payroll, she takes home about $9.50 an hour for her own labor, less than the $17 minimum wage she pays her own employees. When reimbursement is tied to what families can pay rather than what care costs, providers absorb the gap themselves, and the result is a workforce that cannot earn a living from full-time work.
Those wages are not enough to meet the cost of living in New York City. An experienced child care worker earning $43,000 would spend nearly half of that pre-tax income on rent alone. In 2023, the median contract rent citywide was about $1,641 a month. And they certainly would not be earning enough to have child care for their own children, as child care for infants and toddlers in the city would eat up around half of an experienced educator’s entire salary. The people paid to care for young children largely cannot afford the service they provide, let alone raise families of their own in the city where they work.
Without investments in the workforce, the city will be unable to expand supply. Adding subsidized seats alone does not create new educators. Nationally, the number of child care workers has been in decline since March 2024, and statewide, child care jobs fell nearly 20 percent in 2020, but they have since recovered in New York City. However, a 2025 survey of more than 1,250 New York providers found that more than half reported being understaffed, with closed classrooms and waitlists as a result. The city cannot enroll children in classrooms it cannot staff, and it cannot retain staff whose pay falls below what it costs to live here.
The low pay is not accidental. Care work has been systematically undervalued for as long as it has been treated as women’s work, an extension of unpaid domestic labor rather than a skilled occupation. Underpaying this workforce does not save money. It shifts the cost onto the Black and immigrant women who do the work, and onto the public programs many of them rely on to get by as a result of their low pay. Without a deliberate choice to correct these disparities, the city’s expansion will entrench them.
The city has taken some steps. Mamdani’s executive budget includes $40 million for early childhood educators, which officials describe as beginning to address the chronic underfunding of community-based providers, and the administration has increased its payments to contracted providers. But these are partial steps against a structural gap. Hochul’s $500 million over two years for 2-Care made no mention of raising worker wages or commitments to the compensation fund that advocates across the state have advocated for. Furthermore, despite the 2026 state budget increasing reimbursement rates to providers by almost 50 percent, lawmakers rejected a permanent $1.2 billion state fund earmarked for supplementing salaries. While the city is making some progress toward universal child care by funding pilot programs, meaningful support for all New York families will require substantial investments in the child care workforce.
New York City and State Must Take Action Now
As New York City rapidly builds out a more robust care system, it has to think as much about the workforce as about the recipients of care. The decisions being made this budget cycle will set reimbursement rates, contract terms, and salary schedules for years. Once rates are locked and seats are filled, raising the wage floor means reopening contracts and finding new money midstream, which rarely happens. The city can build its expanded care system on a stable, fairly compensated workforce, but only if compensation is treated as part of the design, not a problem to revisit later. Through this, the city can set an example for the rest of the country, especially as child care has become a central focus of Congress’s affordability agenda. Below are three things the city and state should prioritize to ensure its care workforce can expand to fit the promise of 2-Care.
Set a sector-wide wage floor and career ladder.
The city and state should work together to establish compensation standards that guarantee similar pay for similar work across all settings—center, home, and school-based—tied to credentials and experience and, at a minimum, to a regionally assessed living wage. This is what child care experts and advocates are now asking for: the Center for New York City Affairs, the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, and the Child Care Workforce Collaborative have all converged on a sector-wide salary scale and career ladder, achievable through sectoral bargaining or a state wage board. A floor would reach the whole workforce, rather than only the credentialed teachers that a narrower fix would cover. Even the city’s existing commitments have not reached workers. A 2024 New York City Comptroller’s report found that, even after the city’s 2019 pledge to pay certified teachers in contracted organizations on par with their Department of Education counterparts, roughly a fifth to a quarter (depending on credential) of those teachers were still paid below the promised minimum, with starting salaries as low as $34,991 against a pledged $61,070 floor.
Pay providers the true cost of care.
The Department of Education, which contracts with community-based organizations and family child care providers for 3-K and Pre-K, and the Administration for Children’s Services, which sets voucher rates, both rely on a “market rate” methodology that sets public reimbursement based on what families can pay. Because families cannot actually afford the true cost of care, reimbursement rates are set too low to pay a fair wage. Because family child care providers rely more heavily on vouchers and serve a larger share of lower-income families, the market-rate approach effectively ties these providers’ pay to their clients’ inability to pay, resulting in a “penalty” of $10,000 less per child per year compared with the average center.
The city and state should move to a true-cost-of-care standard that funds wages reflecting the value of the work. An analysis found that center-based programs would need close to $12,000 more per infant and toddler each year simply to pay their staff a living wage, with family child care providers facing a similar gap. New Mexico offers a successful universal child care model through its Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD). Reimbursement rates use cost models that reflect true program costs, including both personnel and non-personnel expenses. Additionally, programs that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer ten hours of care per day, five days a week, will receive an incentive rate. New Mexico’s investments in its child care workforce between 2019 and 2024 resulted in the state’s median child care wages growing by about 65 percent, the fastest growth of any state in the country.
Fund compensation as a recurring cost, not a one-time fix.
Recent investments in care have arrived as one-time or two-year sums. Hochul’s 2-Care funding, for example, is for two years, and the state’s 2025 child care assistance increase was presented as a one-time expenditure. One-time funds are hard for providers to build supply on. For this reason, advocates are pressing for a permanent workforce compensation fund, embodied in state legislation (S.5533/A.492A) and a proposed $1.2 billion investment. The District of Columbia funded raises in payments to providers through a dedicated tax on high earners, paid directly to programs, after which child care employment grew by 7 percent. An Urban Institute study found educators preferred employment at funded centers and that the fund helped centers stabilize their workforce and offer higher wages—especially centers serving subsidized children, which retained 64 percent of their educators year-over-year. As New York City seeks to expand its child care workforce, its Office of Management and Budget should treat compensation as an ongoing operating cost of the care system, not a line item vulnerable to the next budget cycle.
Looking Ahead
New York City has successfully brought newfound energy and attention to the child care challenges that families contend with. The pilot programs advanced by Mayor Mamdani, and Governor Hochul’s commitment to funding and expanding child care are vital investments toward building universal child care. Done well, New York can show how cities and states can work collaboratively to create transformational change that improves the lives of families. However, critical to this success story is investing in the workforce first and foremost. Prioritizing compensating child care providers adequately will ensure that the workforce is able to meet the demand for child care. These investments are not only vital, they are long overdue.
Tags: care workers, new york city, child care
New York City’s Expanded Child Care Should Have Adequate Dedicated Funding
Child care is vital for families to live healthy and happy lives. Increasingly, however, the high cost of child care means that families are forgoing obtaining care and are instead taking time away from working and earning to manage their caregiving responsibilities.
Nowhere is this cost burden more daunting than in New York City. A year of care for an infant in New York costs $16,848 on average for family-based care and about $20,978 a year for center-based care. Historically, child care prices in the city are on average higher than prices in other counties throughout the state, pricing many parents out of care and, increasingly, out of the city itself. That is why universal child care became a centerpiece of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, as economic infrastructure: a way to let parents work, help employers retain workers, keep families from leaving the city, and reduce household debt.
Thankfully, the city is not facing this challenge alone. New York State has long treated care as public infrastructure worth investing in. It was among the first states to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, it has built one of the country’s most ambitious early childhood systems, and it consistently ranks among the top states nationally for care policy. Furthering the state’s commitment to care, Governor Kathy Hochul has teamed up with Mayor Mamdani in proposing 2-Care, which would provide free child care for two-year-olds in New York City, alongside a longstanding promise to deliver universal 3–K.
The expansion of child care in New York City will mean engaging with and expanding a workforce that typically has been under-resourced. The child care workforce is overwhelmingly female, disproportionately immigrant and women of color, groups that have been historically disenfranchised. Concerningly, while the city’s (and state’s) expansion plans are sorely needed, they are running ahead of their ability to staff these programs. New Yorkers’ access to child care and compensation for the city’s child care workers are not two problems to solve in sequence, they must be solved in tandem.
The Challenge of Ramping Up Child Care Staffing
The city’s own data show the scale of the staffing challenge. A report from the Day Care Council of New York, authored by the now executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care, Emmy Liss, estimates that fully implementing universal child care would require roughly 68,000 workers. As of December 2025, the city has approximately 40,000 child care workers. This gap will be hard to close in a workforce that chronically faces high turnover, given the low wages in the field. An entry-level child care worker in the city earns a median of about $34,000 a year, or about $17 an hour, rising to roughly $43,000 with experience, or about $21.50 an hour—just over half of the mayor’s $35 an hour cost-of-living benchmark for a single adult. Family child care providers, who run programs out of their homes and are overwhelmingly women of color, fare worse still. The Center for New York City Affairs found their median take-home pay in the city is about $6.01 an hour.
FIGURE 1
The human cost of the market-rate approach is visible in the experiences of providers like Andrea Peña, who runs a licensed family child care program out of her Bronx home. Her program is fully enrolled, mostly with children whose care is paid through state vouchers set at $350 to $400 a week, yet after mortgage, utilities, insurance, and payroll, she takes home about $9.50 an hour for her own labor, less than the $17 minimum wage she pays her own employees. When reimbursement is tied to what families can pay rather than what care costs, providers absorb the gap themselves, and the result is a workforce that cannot earn a living from full-time work.
Those wages are not enough to meet the cost of living in New York City. An experienced child care worker earning $43,000 would spend nearly half of that pre-tax income on rent alone. In 2023, the median contract rent citywide was about $1,641 a month. And they certainly would not be earning enough to have child care for their own children, as child care for infants and toddlers in the city would eat up around half of an experienced educator’s entire salary. The people paid to care for young children largely cannot afford the service they provide, let alone raise families of their own in the city where they work.
Without investments in the workforce, the city will be unable to expand supply. Adding subsidized seats alone does not create new educators. Nationally, the number of child care workers has been in decline since March 2024, and statewide, child care jobs fell nearly 20 percent in 2020, but they have since recovered in New York City. However, a 2025 survey of more than 1,250 New York providers found that more than half reported being understaffed, with closed classrooms and waitlists as a result. The city cannot enroll children in classrooms it cannot staff, and it cannot retain staff whose pay falls below what it costs to live here.
The low pay is not accidental. Care work has been systematically undervalued for as long as it has been treated as women’s work, an extension of unpaid domestic labor rather than a skilled occupation. Underpaying this workforce does not save money. It shifts the cost onto the Black and immigrant women who do the work, and onto the public programs many of them rely on to get by as a result of their low pay. Without a deliberate choice to correct these disparities, the city’s expansion will entrench them.
The city has taken some steps. Mamdani’s executive budget includes $40 million for early childhood educators, which officials describe as beginning to address the chronic underfunding of community-based providers, and the administration has increased its payments to contracted providers. But these are partial steps against a structural gap. Hochul’s $500 million over two years for 2-Care made no mention of raising worker wages or commitments to the compensation fund that advocates across the state have advocated for. Furthermore, despite the 2026 state budget increasing reimbursement rates to providers by almost 50 percent, lawmakers rejected a permanent $1.2 billion state fund earmarked for supplementing salaries. While the city is making some progress toward universal child care by funding pilot programs, meaningful support for all New York families will require substantial investments in the child care workforce.
New York City and State Must Take Action Now
As New York City rapidly builds out a more robust care system, it has to think as much about the workforce as about the recipients of care. The decisions being made this budget cycle will set reimbursement rates, contract terms, and salary schedules for years. Once rates are locked and seats are filled, raising the wage floor means reopening contracts and finding new money midstream, which rarely happens. The city can build its expanded care system on a stable, fairly compensated workforce, but only if compensation is treated as part of the design, not a problem to revisit later. Through this, the city can set an example for the rest of the country, especially as child care has become a central focus of Congress’s affordability agenda. Below are three things the city and state should prioritize to ensure its care workforce can expand to fit the promise of 2-Care.
Set a sector-wide wage floor and career ladder.
The city and state should work together to establish compensation standards that guarantee similar pay for similar work across all settings—center, home, and school-based—tied to credentials and experience and, at a minimum, to a regionally assessed living wage. This is what child care experts and advocates are now asking for: the Center for New York City Affairs, the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, and the Child Care Workforce Collaborative have all converged on a sector-wide salary scale and career ladder, achievable through sectoral bargaining or a state wage board. A floor would reach the whole workforce, rather than only the credentialed teachers that a narrower fix would cover. Even the city’s existing commitments have not reached workers. A 2024 New York City Comptroller’s report found that, even after the city’s 2019 pledge to pay certified teachers in contracted organizations on par with their Department of Education counterparts, roughly a fifth to a quarter (depending on credential) of those teachers were still paid below the promised minimum, with starting salaries as low as $34,991 against a pledged $61,070 floor.
Pay providers the true cost of care.
The Department of Education, which contracts with community-based organizations and family child care providers for 3-K and Pre-K, and the Administration for Children’s Services, which sets voucher rates, both rely on a “market rate” methodology that sets public reimbursement based on what families can pay. Because families cannot actually afford the true cost of care, reimbursement rates are set too low to pay a fair wage. Because family child care providers rely more heavily on vouchers and serve a larger share of lower-income families, the market-rate approach effectively ties these providers’ pay to their clients’ inability to pay, resulting in a “penalty” of $10,000 less per child per year compared with the average center.
The city and state should move to a true-cost-of-care standard that funds wages reflecting the value of the work. An analysis found that center-based programs would need close to $12,000 more per infant and toddler each year simply to pay their staff a living wage, with family child care providers facing a similar gap. New Mexico offers a successful universal child care model through its Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD). Reimbursement rates use cost models that reflect true program costs, including both personnel and non-personnel expenses. Additionally, programs that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer ten hours of care per day, five days a week, will receive an incentive rate. New Mexico’s investments in its child care workforce between 2019 and 2024 resulted in the state’s median child care wages growing by about 65 percent, the fastest growth of any state in the country.
Fund compensation as a recurring cost, not a one-time fix.
Recent investments in care have arrived as one-time or two-year sums. Hochul’s 2-Care funding, for example, is for two years, and the state’s 2025 child care assistance increase was presented as a one-time expenditure. One-time funds are hard for providers to build supply on. For this reason, advocates are pressing for a permanent workforce compensation fund, embodied in state legislation (S.5533/A.492A) and a proposed $1.2 billion investment. The District of Columbia funded raises in payments to providers through a dedicated tax on high earners, paid directly to programs, after which child care employment grew by 7 percent. An Urban Institute study found educators preferred employment at funded centers and that the fund helped centers stabilize their workforce and offer higher wages—especially centers serving subsidized children, which retained 64 percent of their educators year-over-year. As New York City seeks to expand its child care workforce, its Office of Management and Budget should treat compensation as an ongoing operating cost of the care system, not a line item vulnerable to the next budget cycle.
Looking Ahead
New York City has successfully brought newfound energy and attention to the child care challenges that families contend with. The pilot programs advanced by Mayor Mamdani, and Governor Hochul’s commitment to funding and expanding child care are vital investments toward building universal child care. Done well, New York can show how cities and states can work collaboratively to create transformational change that improves the lives of families. However, critical to this success story is investing in the workforce first and foremost. Prioritizing compensating child care providers adequately will ensure that the workforce is able to meet the demand for child care. These investments are not only vital, they are long overdue.
Tags: care workers, new york city, child care