In Massachusetts, the price of child care is running far ahead of what most working parents can reasonably cover, leaving families cobbling together care and sweating over the bills. New research finds the strain cuts across income brackets and lands hardest on Black and Hispanic households. For a typical full-time parent with an infant and a preschooler, center-based care can top $44,000 a year, a hit that eats up a huge slice of many paychecks.
The numbers come from a brief by researchers Pamela Joshi and Abigail Walters at Boston University’s Institute for Equity in Child Opportunity and Healthy Development, which stacks full-time child-care costs against the federal affordability benchmark that says families should not spend more than 7 percent of their income on care. According to The Boston Globe, about 74 percent of full-time, year-round working parents in the state do not meet that standard for center-based care. The share jumps to roughly 85 percent for Black parents and 92 percent for Hispanic parents. The brief also models real-world family budgets and estimates that center-based infant and preschool care would cost around $44,649 a year, compared with about $28,067 for a mix of licensed home-based care.
How Researchers Gauged What Families Can Really Afford
Joshi and Walters combined income data from the Current Population Survey with local child-care prices to estimate how many families blow past the 7 percent affordability line. They relied on county-level rates from the U.S. Department of Labor National Database of Childcare Prices, which reports median prices by care setting and child age. Using those figures, they modeled costs for different family setups to show what parents actually face in the marketplace instead of leaning on broad national averages that can gloss over regional sticker shock.
State Tries to Stabilize a Shaky System
State leaders have been pumping money into the early education sector in an effort to keep programs open and prices from climbing even higher. A centerpiece is the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) program, which the Healey-Driscoll administration kept at $475 million to support providers and tamp down costs for families. According to Mass.gov, C3 has backed thousands of programs, helped create additional child-care seats, and kept educators on the payroll across the state. Advocates and officials argue that steady public investment is essential to making care more affordable, even as they acknowledge that funding on its own is not reaching every family that needs help.
Thousands of Children Still Wait for Help
Despite those efforts, the study finds a large gap between who qualifies for assistance and who actually gets it. About 66,000 children in Massachusetts were receiving child-care subsidies as of May 2025, a figure the researchers say is only about 19 percent of all eligible kids. More than 31,000 children sit on waiting lists for help. According to The Boston Globe, Head Start does serve some families, with the analysis counting about 11,500 Head Start enrollees in 2025. Still, gaps in program supply and eligibility rules mean many parents wind up paying full market rates. Those shortfalls are a big reason researchers and advocates are calling for a fresh look at subsidy policies so low- and middle-income families are not left with impossible choices.
What Lawmakers Are Being Urged to Do Next
The researchers suggest several steps for policymakers: widen subsidy eligibility so more families qualify, cut or eliminate family co-payments, and maintain public investments that keep providers stable and able to serve more children. The goal is to make sure child care stops forcing parents to choose between staying in the workforce and caring for their kids. State officials, for their part, point to early progress tied to sustained funding and say continued budget support and targeted eligibility tweaks are needed to close the remaining gaps, according to the Department of Early Education and Care. “The data clearly show that the C3 is stabilizing and strengthening Massachusetts’ early education and care system,” Paul Belsito, chair of the EEC board, said in the state release.
